JM: I tried to read the automatic translation, but it was a torture. One word stood out, at first, related to chess.  “Rook”. I had just asked the list about “raven” (apparently, a translation from the Czech ”kafka”). Ravens and rooks are both “corvus” Can anyone inform me if “kafka” indicates the raven or the rook in czech? ( still trusting novelist Murakami’s information). A second question ( related to the original in Russian in the translation provided by Google/Norquist): what does “elephant” mean in the poem?
Jerome Katsell: I don't believe "kafka" means raven in Czech. The usual for raven is "hravan," and "vrána" is used for crow. There's also "hravan polní," which means rook, the bird. The other rook, the chess rook/castle is "vĕž". 
D.M (off-list): As you must know, 'elephant' may mean 'ivory' (elephantine: made of ivory; oliphant / olifant = ivory horn), hence: white piece
As for Philidor, he was a well-known French chess player of the 18th c., named (and esteemed) by Diderot (in Jacques le fataliste) and acquainted with Voltaire, Rousseau and others.
Steve Norquist: Shatranj, the ancient Persian predecessor  of chess, had elephants instead of rooks, in the 7th century, and the queens were far less powerful than in the modern leader of the attack in a chess game, which google usually translates as "party" from the Russian. The game did not evolve into its current "Western" form until the 16th century.

JM: I’ll enlist the company of Nabokov to make a confession. In “Strong Opinions” (pb/177,1971) we find: “I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively – though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous (and on the whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved.” In my case, right now, related to ravens, elephants and …Oedipus.

Last Sunday I unearthed a card which once accompanied a birthday present (a small ebony elephant), on which it was written:”it’s not a white elephant” (indicating that it wasn’t an awkward gift). On Monday, quite independently, a friend presented me with a white elephant, a delicate ivory miniature. On this same day I rode with a friend from Thailand, who told me the story of a couple of albino elephants once owned by their royals. We were on our way to photograph a road sign with a spelling mistake (the Czech embassy here had been designated as “Rep.Theca”). She remembered Murakami’s book “Umibe na Kafuka” (an unconscious link to the Czech?) and encouraged me to read it. The novel contains a convoluted allusion to an oedipian prophecy which befell a boy named “Raven” (Kafka) - everything  vaguely linked to a sentence by W.B.Yeats (“responsability starts in dreams”), a poet who translated Sophocles’s King Oedipus” (cf. manuscript edited and commented by  David R.Clark and Jams B.MacGuire’s ,The American Philosophical Society, 1989).
Rooks and elephants, from the Nab-List redirected me to Nabokov’s “enigmas, incapable of being stated.”  Nothing remotely literary, I fear, but rather embarrassingly fabulous.

In relation to Lolita, Nabokov wrote (SO,pb/16): “I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.” And SO (p.20) “I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle – its composition and solution t the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.”

Related to Jim Twiggs inquiry (off-mark as I now see ), I had finally separated, from SO:
1. “ When I remember afterwards the force tht made me jot down the correct names of things, or the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure.” (31)
2.“I am perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters of structure, but what can I do if ear and brain refuse to cooperate? I have found a queer substitute for music in chess – more exactly, in the composition of chess problems.”  On p.78: “imagination is a form of memory…an image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory…memory and imagination are a negation of time.” (p.35)
3. A bergsonian “Time is but memory in the making.” (p.143);
4. “I tend more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination.”(p.154).