Alexey: But who is paying
vira (the Russian equivalent of "kinboot") for the murdered Shade?
Carolyn: Hodge,
perhaps?
Carolyn, I thought at first that you
were joking but then looked at the matter closer and realized that your
idea might be not as absurd as it seemed. The phrase KOT
OR means "what is the time" in Zemblan (see Kinbote's note to line
149). Kot seems to be Zemblan for "which" (or "how much") but it is
Russian for "tom-cat." Or seems to be Zemblan for
"hour," but it is French for "gold." The phrase kot or can
thus be read in Franco-Zemblan as "how much gold" and in Russo-Zemblan as
"cat hour" (an allusion to the learned tom-cat that day and night
walks on the golden chain around the great oak in the wonderful
preambule to Pushkin's "Ruslan and Liudmila"?). Hodge was also a learned
tom-cat, wasn't he?
On a different plane, kot
or looks like the truncated Russian phrase kotoryi chas
("what is the time," literally: "which hour [is it]?"). The other
possibility to translate the question "what is the time" to Russian would
be to say skol'ko vremeni (literally: "how much time [is
it]?"). One remembers
a philological anecdote from one's student days:
A person on a New York street asks a
stranger:
"How much watch?"
"Two watch."
"Such much!"
"Oh, I see that you, too, studied
English at the Leningrad University."*
This story can be also told as if the
characters were two spies of the Gradus type. The question will be
then a password and the answer a reply to that password.
Alexey
*Also, I shall never forget my
orchestra-seat neighbor in a Leningrad theatre, a German, who
explained to me in the interval between the two acts of Goethe's "Egmont" (it
was performed, with a "synchronous" translation for the non-German part of the
audience, by a German company) that to ask time in German one must say "Wie
spaet ist es" and not "Wieviel Zeit ist es." He repeated the correct phrase
twice, the second time very slowly. I was twelve or, may be, thirteen and it was
my first conversation with a foreigner.