Stan Kelly-Bootle: CK: give
Jansy a break! ...I read the 1949 Red Wop as a derogatory dig at the
Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), clearly a plausible
target for VN’s contempt[...] Incidentally, partizan/nazi-trap is quite
staggeringly realistic compared with the mundane powder/redwop...I could, if
bribed, suggest Hey Gramsci, Lasciami in pace! Take a powder![...] As CK
suggests, powder/redwop could just be one of the many wordplays in VN’s vast,
volatile repertoire that sprang to his mind. But, contra Jansy, we can
never be sure that VN was consciously referring back to his previous uage in a
1949 letter.
JM: In the first place, I'd like to correct items
which were sent in a previous posting but came in too late: to
correct the spelling of "camouflage", for example, and the incorrect signs when
transcribing Zimmer's "Fahles Feuer"* I had
also added that Hazel's "untwisted" ideas suggested something in the line of
what Carolyn Kunin had brought up (the hidden meaning behind her words). Pot/top
are simple enough, but for someone familiar with the German, a popular
saying might pop up ("Auf Jeden
Topf Passt Ein Deckel") with "top"
operating as the "lid" (on every pot there is a top to fit).
I
never considered "redips." Translators, Zimmer and Dauster, didn't see any
reason to strictly adhere to the meaning or to their occurrence. Zimmer
was faithful to the "twisting" spirit and presented very clever
substitutes.
Stan, I doubt it that Nabokov would not be consciously
referring back to Wilson's usage in 1949. Opposing my vision
there are Carolyn and you (Matt Roth was only mildly sceptic).
Needless to say I won't try to count dancing angels atop a needle, nor
argue about the (negligible?) "quotation marks." I know that Carolyn
has ready arguments against my implication that, if "powder/redwop" is
an allusion to Wilson, then, certainly, Kinbote's commentaries have been
preferrably fashioned after Wilson's, instead of any other
scholar/critics's. Perhaps her Stevenson three-in-one theory is the main factor?
I'll certainly hear from her about that!
Kinbote is lean, a vegetarian, a homosexual so,
probably, physically and realistically, he is the opposite of Wilson -
and this makes a greater challenge in a search after other
significant allusions and inversions, Conmal's translations and
Wilson's, if there's any connection between Kinbote's idealized Zembla and
Wilson's idealization of Lenin and the URSS...
In the tardy posting I'd also included a
quote from VN, with which I'll end this long and futile answer to Stan
and CK: "...deception in chess, as in art, is only
part of the game; it's part of the combination, part of the
delightful possibilities, illusions, vistas of thought,
which can be false vistas, perhaps. I think a good combination should
always contain a certain element of deception."(Interview, BBC,
1962).
...............................................................
* Dieter Zimmer's "Fahles
Feuer" (p.53;p444) "...Sie verdrehte Wörter:,<
Rebe> -[<Eber>. / Und <Ton> zu <Not>. Aus <lese>
wurde <Esel>,/ Sie nannte dich didaktische - was? -
Catydide."