Dear List,
Iīve recently read the poem "Anthology" by
Brazilian Manuel Bandeira to which a short note, extracted from a
letter he wrote to a friend, was added. In it Bandeira described his
"Anthology" as a "cento".
Quoting the extract, in Jean R.Longlandīs
translation:
"The word cento has nothing to do with
'hundred' but it comes from the Latin cento, centonis, which means a
patchwork quilt... I had the idea of constructing a poem out of nothing but
lines or parts of lines of mine, the best known or most marked by my
sensibility, which at the same time would function as a poem for a person who
knew nothing of my poetry".
Quite often I have a nagging sensation that Nabokov
used this same "quilt" device for special paragraphs in his novels, with a wink
to those who actually "knew something" about his writings.
After getting acquainted with the word "cento" I
started to wonder if VN would have been familiar with this classic term for
"patchwork quilt" and if he might have played with it in "Lolita" or hinted
at his probable novelistic "hybridations" by
using a subtle play with this Latin
expression.
Jansy Mello