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Should the English reader synesthetically read
"racemosa" and feel it in Russian?
Jansy:
The
English reader should (for a full-scale experience):
--
go to Wikipedia, identify Cerasus racemosa (earlier, Padus racemosa)
as a Russian ‘cheremuha’) species, also known in
Europe as
bird cherry;
ciliegio selvatico (Ital.);
cerezo aliso, palo de San Gregorio, árbol de la rabia
(Span.);
Faulbeerbaum, Faulbeere (Germ.) ;
merisier à grappes, putiet, putier (Fr.).
--
then go to a Botanical Garden of their choice (Kew recommended in the UK; St. Louis in the US), and smell the
flowers.
They
are amazing.
One
cannot feel Russian literature in full (Turgenev especially) without seeing and
smelling racemosa.
Picture
attached.
(cannot
attach the smell but one can buy a perfume).
Maybe
soon we will have olfactory files for downloads, extension .olf ?
The
plant is also highly medicinal and antiseptic.
The
berries are somewhat edible, too, they go into pastries.
This
is your full synestethic experience. J
This
refers also to the famous VN’s image of a ravine where Communists
shot people, a ravine overgrown with racemosa that survived through Communist
regime:
Rossiya,
zvezdy, noch' rasstrela
i
ves' v cheremuhe ovrag.
Some
nights, as soon as I'm asleep,
To
Russian shores my bed would run;
And
now — to the ravine's rip —
Be
executed with a gun.
………
But
you, my heart, would go further…
This
you with passion would assume:
Still
Russia, stars, the night of murder,
The
ravine — the bird-cherry bloom.
(Transl.
by Boris Leivi)
http://spintongues.msk.ru/nabokov2.html
Victor
Fet
From: Vladimir Nabokov
Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of jansymello
Sent: Thursday, March 05, 2009 9:30 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] [QUERY] Padus racemosa
SKB: "Meanwhile,
I admit to being thrilled [...] when I find Nabokov extolling "The Russian word [for the Padus racemosa] with its
fluffy and dreamy syllables, admirably suits this beautiful tree ..."
JM: On VN's
72 birthday, i.e in April 23/1971, Alden Whitman (The New
York Times) mentioned that: "As
a writer, Mr. Nabokov travels with a dictionary, and his companion on a recent
holiday in the south of Portugal was the 1970 edition of "Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary." About it, he has some complaints. Although it
includes the word "quassia" as derived from "Quassi," an
18th-century Surinam slave who discovered that the bitter drug made from the
shrub was a remedy for fever, "none of my own
coinages or reapplication appears in this lexicon—neither 'iridule' (a
mother-of-pearl cloudlet in "Pale Fire," nor 'nymphet' (a 'perverse
young girl,' according to another edition), nor 'racemosa' (a kind of bird
cherry), nor several other prosodic terms such as 'scud' and 'tilt.'"
In the above
reference we find VN's reivindication for having coined, or
reapplied, the word "racemosa". There's something
unclear in it: could VN be comparing the coinage
of "nymphet", "iridule" and "racemosa", or
should I pay more heed to his
"reapplication", mentioned right after "coinages"?
The
same happened with SKB's chosen quote, when one doesn't
speak Russian to feel how the word for the "Padus
racemosa" sounds, smells and shines in Russian:. are we to be
thrilled exactly by what, the unimaginable "fluffy and dreamy sillables"?
Should the
English reader synesthetically read "racemosa" and feel
it in Russian?
.................................................................
A translation
into Portuguese of "Mythistorima" and other
poems, by Nobel prize-winner Greek poet Giórgios
Seféris, unpretentiously employs the word "racemoso" (J.P.Paes)
for one of his striking lines. Internet dics inform: adj. racemose,
arranged in clusters around a common stem; having stalked flowers along an
elongated stem that continue to open in succession from below as the stem
continues to grow ; "lilies of the valley are racemose"; the
specific name ‘racemosa’ means ‘having racemes’; a
raceme being a string-like arrangement of stalked flowers.
All
private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
co-editors.