tempi passati = pastime + pisatel' -
el' = temptation + passion + b - bon ton
bon ton - Fr., good manners
Russian noun pisatel' (writer) comes
from pisat' (to write). This verb happens to be a homograph of
писать (to piss). But unlike писАть (to write), пИсать (to piss) is
accented on the first syllable. If Percy used the neutral verb (nowadays it
almost exclusively belongs to the nursery, alas), he would have
said: nado popisat'. But he is drunk and uses a vulgar
Slang word. Incidentally, the same word is used by Pushkin in the
closing lines of his poem <To Anna N. Vulf> ("Uvy, naprasno deve
gordoy..." 1825):
Она на щепочку нассыт,
Но и понюхать не позволит.
She will piss on a little chip,
But won't even let me smell it.
In his EO Commentary, VN mentions the fact that
Pushkin has cynically debauched Anna Vulf during his stay in
Mikhailovskoe (where he had been banished by the government) and says that
AV's letters to the poet from Malinniki* (the Osipov-Vulf estate in the province
of Tver) are heartrending to read.
As to the noun el' (fir tree;
note possible connection to Ada's L disaster), it is among the
words Tatiana looks up in Martin Zadeck in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin
(Canto Five: XXIV: 5-9):
Татьяна в оглавленье кратком
Находит азбучным порядком
Слова: бор, буря, ведьма, ель,
Еж, мрак, мосток, медведь, метель
И прочая.
Tatiana in the brief index
looks up in alphabetic order
the words: forest, storm, raven, fir,
hedgehog, gloom, footbridge, bear,
snowstorm,
et cetera.
I notice that in his translation of Pushkin's
novel VN renders ведьма (witch) as "raven". Btw., both ведьма and медведь
(bear) have ведь in them. This little word occurs in Ada (1.3): "Ved' ('it is, isn't it') sidesplitting to imagine
that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty..."
(see my previous post).
The purpose of my (or are they
Nabokov's?) anagrams is to demonstrate how words can copulate giving birth
to new words and their combinations (e.g., Pipa
passes = papa pisses in PF). This copulation followed by instant delivery (pregnancy is skipped) takes place in
one's brain and gives one tremendous intellectual pleasure. It is of a different
order than sexual (anagrams can be erotic, though)
pleasure and is perhaps not as poignant, but it can be
greatly enhanced if one loves one's words and knows their past
history. Like writing, playing anagrams is a pleasant pastime (cf. Ada
and Grace Erminin playing anagrams at the picnic in Ardis the First: 1.13). I
suspect that Ada is not only a triple, but
also anagramatic dream (cf. "Ben Sirine, the expounder of anagrammatic
dreams" mentioned in Ada: 2.2) and this only adds to the
pleasure.
While we are here:
ворон [норов, Ровно] + еж
= Воронеж = вор [ров] + он же [жено]
ворон -
raven
норов - obs., temper;
Norov - A. S. Norov, a writer (1795-1869), Pushkin's pal
Ровно - Rovno, a city in
W Ukraine; it is renamed Knyazh'ye Veno in Korolenko's story "In a Bad
Company" (1885)
еж** -
hedgehog
Воронеж - Voronezh, city
in Russia; the native city of Koltsov, Nikitin and Bunin; Mandelstam was
banished to Voronezh in the 1930s
вор - thief;
criminal
ров - ditch
он же -
alias
жено - obs.,
woman
*The name comes from malina, raspberry. In
his poem "We live not feeling the land beneath us..." Mandelshtam says that
"each execution is a raspberry to him" (i. e. Stalin: что ни казнь у него то
малина). Cf. in the performance with Marina's participation watched
by Demon: "several young gardeners wearing for some
reason the garb of Georgian tribesmen were popping raspberries into their
mouths" (1.2).
**The standard spelling is ёж. But the letter
ё (yo) is often ignored in books (where "e" stands for it) and
is absent from most editions of EO.
Deadline June 31 (in Marie Bouchet's call for
papers) is great!
Prairial 5, 2010
Alexey Sklyarenko