A simple image in today's news prompted me to return to another item
from Kinbote's commentaries which I still find it hard to understand.
"The short (166) Canto One, with all those amusing
birds and parhelia, occupies thirteen cards"
Here is the solar halo that colored the sky of Glória de Dourados, in
the southeast of Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil), divulged at the www.terra.com news site.
http://p2.trrsf.com.br/image/get?src=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.terra.com%2F2013%2F01%2F26%2Fvcreporterhalosolarmatogrossorafaelhenrique.jpg&o=cf&w=195&h=146
http://p2.trrsf.com.br/image/get?src=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.terra.com%2F2013%2F01%2F26%2Fvcreporterhalosolarmatogrossorafaelhenrique.jpg&o=cf&w=195&h=146
The first equivocation, this year, is related to the meaning of an "underside of the weave" with its "main threads"* The use of "weaving" is fairly common in English but, here, I'm interested in Nabokov's acknowledged precision and attention to detail.
As far as I'm able to apprehend a rainbow-halo around the sun is not a
"parhelia"** The reference to a rainbow appears in connection to an "iridule"
and this isn't a "parhelia", either.
Could Kinbote be referring to his "main thread", to his own "pale fire"
under the term ""parhelia" once we admit that Nabokov could be intending a
wordplay or a neologism to indicate that Kinbote was "a dog sun", a second
sun parallel to the actual star?
........................
* - :"Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to
comprehend that one’s attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming,
especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the
beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the
innocent author."[ ]the magnificent Zemblan theme with which I kept
furnishing him and which, without knowing much about the growing work, I fondly
believed would become the main rich thread in its weave [
] "Oh, there you are," rude Alfred would say to the gentle Norwegian who
had come to weave a subtly different variant of some old Norse
myth // (sent by A.Stadlen) Nabokov explains his purpose in "The Vane
Sisters", culminating in the acrostic of the last two
paragraphs: "Most of the stories I am
contemplating (and some I have written in the past -- you actually published one
with such an 'inside' -- the one about the old Jewish couple and their sick boy)
will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second
(main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent
one
** Text/html - LISTSERV 16.0 - NABOKV-L Archives
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/.../wa?... " Now what did Kinbote mean by: 'The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and parhelia'? "
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/.../wa?... " Now what did Kinbote mean by: 'The short (166 lines) Canto One, with all those amusing birds and parhelia'? "
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https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3... I don't think that's what Shackleton saw on a daily basis, though ice-crystal optical phenomena (parhelia, halos, arcs, etc.) are apparently common in the ...
Jerry Friedman: "The Merriam-Webster Collegiate and the American Heritage dictionaries both say a parhelion is only a bright spot level with the sun ("on the parhelic circle"). This is actually relevant to a tiny detail in /Pale Fire/. If the dictionaries I used are right, then Kinbote makes one of his mistakes in natural history in subsuming Shade's "iridule" under "parhelia"--or Shade is wrong and Kinbote is right, as I don't think a cloud can
reflect an image of anything. But if you're right, then both Shade and Kinbote can be right."
https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3... I don't think that's what Shackleton saw on a daily basis, though ice-crystal optical phenomena (parhelia, halos, arcs, etc.) are apparently common in the ...
Jerry Friedman: "The Merriam-Webster Collegiate and the American Heritage dictionaries both say a parhelion is only a bright spot level with the sun ("on the parhelic circle"). This is actually relevant to a tiny detail in /Pale Fire/. If the dictionaries I used are right, then Kinbote makes one of his mistakes in natural history in subsuming Shade's "iridule" under "parhelia"--or Shade is wrong and Kinbote is right, as I don't think a cloud can
reflect an image of anything. But if you're right, then both Shade and Kinbote can be right."