A. Sklyarenko:[...] once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist, a
certain Walter C. Keyway, Esq., into the porter’s lodge for his jokingly
remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one’s name in order to
use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa (1.36). In the canonical Russian translation of the New Testament “Son of
David” is rendered Syn Davidov. SYN DAVIDOV [...]
JM: I thought until now
that Baron Klim Avidov had flavitaed and
reshuffled Vivian Darkbloom and his other relatives. Now I find
it catapults us into biblical King David in an Antiterran
language, its forbidding lore and fascinating culture. Thank
you Sklyarenko for sharing your very informative and amazing
achievement.
J.Aisenberg picked up S
K-B's antigravitational joke on me [ she ponders setting off in an "imaginary" space-ship in order
to test the Einstein "rejuvenation" formula] to puzzle about astronauts getting younger and VN.'s
notion of time.
For
JA, in Speak Memory and Ada, Nabokov "was saying that he
literally did not believe in time, was suggesting a notion of Chronological
relativity" whereas for him "it doesn't seem
like time exists." I cannot even
suggest we might depart from Henri Bergson's philosophy about
time to better read Nabokov, since Bergson's trick mustache is as
mysterious as Einstein's real one.
Perhaps, following Swift's irrefutable hints, we'd
better restrict ourselves to an Aurea
Mediocritas when we restrap
our knapsacks ( "Non videmus id manticae quod in tergo
est" quoth JS - and I mean J.Swift, not J.Shade even though the IPH
chapter must have been written in a swift vein).
How serious should we keep while reading
VN? I've already swallowed tongue and cheeks.
Last Sunday, in Rio, I attended mass in an early
Seventeenth Century chapel. Above the altar there was a curious,
almost Oedipal, Holy Trinity ( the Godhead in the center, at the left an
angel bearing a golden sun and, at the right, another angel
holding a half-moon). The priest mentioned the "pale fire of the
moon" and applied "Revelations" to refer to this carving!
I checked the internet to what seemed to
me his alusion ( Rev 12:1), but I found no "pale fire"
indicating the Virgin.
I learned that "just as the moon reflects the
light of the sun, so Mary, with the moon under her feet, reflects the glory of
the Sun of Justice, Jesus Christ*." The
artisan's poetic rendering had been followed by another and
then another, carrying us away from the naive artistic
vision to a prietly and a philosopher's interpretations and from there
onto higher ecclesiastical authorities... before looping into
a retranslation in another simple
language.
I think that we may also read
VN "negatively" as, for example, when we point out what authors, wisdom,
theories that VN definitely did not conjure up. As it is I'm now quite
certain that VN's title "Pale Fire" has no relation to
the Virgin Mary standing in the place of a ghostly dove and
representing the transitory body of a Church as it is sustained by a
transcendent light...
....................................
* - different interpretations: Pope St. Gregory
posited, "The sun stands for the light of truth, and the moon for the
transitoriness of temporal things; the holy Church is clothed like the sun
because she is protected by the splendor of supernatural truth, and she has the
moon under her feet because she is above all earthly things" (Moralia,
34, 12). Or St. Bernard: "The sun contains permanent color and splendor;
whereas the moon’s brightness is unpredictable and changeable, for it never
stays the same. It is quite right, then, for Mary to be depicted as clothed with
the sun, for she entered the profundity of divine wisdom much, much further than
one can possibly conceive" (De B. Virgine, 2).