SES: I have always believed
that many of the parallel themes and motifs in Borges's and Nabokov's work
reflect the fact that both grew up in Anglophile families, reading the same
tales of doubles and detectives by writers in English[...]
JM: VN once said that he "didn't think in words but in images.", a philosophical
positioning abandoned by post-modern theorists, but possibly shared by the
two anglophile visionaries. The Dutch-conjuring
engraver Escher once stated something similar ( like R.'s phrase in TT) -
and mathematitians have been confirming his non-verbal,
insights.
Jerry Friedman: Since no one who actually speaks
Spanish has translated the little poem Alexey quoted, I'll give it a shot, and
continue on momentum to Jansy's quotation from a review of VNAY. Alexey
wrote: De palabra/ Nace razón/ De luz el son. Looks to me more like, "From word,
reason is born. From light, sound. From JM's quotation: [...]Nabokov warns
the friend that he is perfectly useless in regard to managing individual
(?) heating systems [...] Boyd considers the text of the novel's
epilogue[...] The reader should notice the three lines (authorship, heating,
circle of familiar gratitude) that flow together and fertilize each other in the
image, as well as the way that Boyd uses the text to point out the way
imagination fertilizes contact with an object to create an image.' My
choices with the wrong nuance (should "encouraging" be
"inspiring"?)...
JM: I don't have to follow VN's
strictures on translation ( almost
like Schopenhauer's) - so I particularly enjoyed the
poetry of Alexey's rendering. "Fiat Lux" results from "in the
beginning was the word" and when "from light sound is born"... it's because
there's a split of phenomenic "lightning and thunder."
Did VN and Borges "see The Light"? Are their
words, acts? Signifiers?
JF's translation of the Spanish seems to be
faithful enough: good for you Jerry!.
Stan K-B observed
in-off [ in relation to "what does "mollittude" mean in VN 's sentence
"the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus"] -
"that ALL four nouns are consistent with how English words are (and have been
for centuries) formed from agglutinated roots[...]We can never answer for sure
the general question "What does this word mean?" We can list possible meanings
[...] there are contextual clues. It's a "quality" or "essence" or
"state"[...]based on the rich root "moll-" (found in most Indo-European
languages via the Proto-IE mil/mel/mol [to grind, whence milling flour etc]. So
it's the state or quality associated with or encouraging being
soft/gentle/complying/coaxing ..." SK-B disagrees concerning VN's
inclusion of luxury ( it "has long lost its original Latin cognates. Had VN
intended the Roman lascivious/sybaritic, he had many ways of saying
so.)
JM: Every reader has the
choice of "possible meanings" but sensitivity to sound and
light of words, plus the context in the sentence, may add to to
its enjoyment. For me, mollittude is a spiky word whereas mollittious is round
and, perhaps, the "m" color is similar to the one VN's
alphabet. Nobody can know, to interpret something is to appropriate it for
oneself (but it often remains as a
culturally-enforced secret).
....