B.Boyd: Obviously "Osberg" is an anagram of "Borges,"
but since there are 720 ways of rearranging the letters in "Borges" it seems
legitimate to ask why Nabokov chose this particular anagram. My suggestions may
be facile but they are not "rather
prejudiced" and do not reflect my attitude to Borges (hardly relevant to
explicating ADA) but, as my sentence makes clear, only Nabokov's attitude:
"Since Nabokov found
Borges rather limited . . . perhaps “Osberg” suggests cold (iceberg)
or aridity (a mountain, German Berg, of bones, Latin
os).
JM: Before this comment ( on a
"rather limited" Borges) we find, in fact, in the same note by
B.Boyd:
77.02-05:
her lolita ( . . . little Andalusian gipsy . . . in Osberg’s
novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish “t,” not a thick English
one): Darkbloom: “Osberg: another good-natured anagram,
scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been
rather comically compared.
I thought that B.Boyd's
assumption about what was on VN's mind tended to favor negative
aspects which VN expressed elsewhere: here, in VN's own words, I
understood it would have been "another good-natured
anagram".
Brazilian writer Machado de Assis is certainly familiar
to some VN scholars ( various novels of his have been translated into
English), but he is not often mentioned in connection to
VN. A note
to "The Nabokovian", 55 ( Fall
2005) with the title "TIME BEFORE AND TIME AFTER IN
NABOKOV´S NOVELS" begins with a direct quote from M.Assis' marvelously
ironical “Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas” (Ch 1, 1881).: "I hesitated for a while if I should start these memoirs from the
beginning or from the end, if I should first describe my birth or my demise
(…)Properly speaking, I am not a deceased author (…) my tomb was my second
cradle. Moses, who also wrote about his death, did not commence with it (…): a
radical distinction between this book and the Pentateuch. "