Hello, Don
In Portuguese, a cough is "tosse" and "per" is the
prefix that indicates how per-vasive it must sound in a crowd of
children....(It's a privilege to be a foreigner sometimes, while reading another
foreigner use a language that is almost as strange to him).
The "tinkling muscovy glass" must pertain to
something I first saw only this year while my grandchildren ecstatically
jumped on dirty sidewalk puddles, covered with a thin gray sheet of ice in
a redundancy of "verglass" - just like Perrault's invention of
Cinderella's crystal shoe (vair-verre-glass, as explained by VN in "Pnin").
I still have to do to consult a dictionary, though,
for the term "muscovy" which I had originally absorbed as suggesting
"Moscow" now, misteriously, gives me a taste of foxy green
grapes...
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 7:21
PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire's
"Backdracht"
From
Commentary to Line 12: that crystal land"
"Medical
care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his
tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the
puddles tinkled with Muscovy
glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal
"backdraucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren"
----------------------------------------------------
"Pertussal"
simply pertains to "cough".
"Backdraucht"
is a Scottish term glossed as in (2).
--------------------------------------------------
BACKDRAUCHT, n.
[ˈbɑkˈdrɑxt]
(1) The drawing
in of the breath.
*Ags.(D) 1922 J. B. Salmond Bawbee
Bowden xii.:
Wi’ the backdraucht
[he] sent a moofu’ o’ tea up throo his nose.
*Fif.
1825 Jam.2:
We was whaslin
like a blastit stirk i’ the backdraucht.
(2) The gasp of
one with whooping-cough.
Search the Nabokv-L archive at
UCSB
Contact the
Editors
All private editorial communications, without exception,
are read by both co-editors.
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies