"Dear Jansy,
The Monkey (Eupithecia Nabokovi, a 'good monkey' in your quotation below) and the nearby reference to the poets and their conceits recall my favorite poem of Nabokov's 'On Translating Eugene Onegin' (if that' s not the exact title, it is the subject of the poem). There are both a monkey and the poet's head, like the prophet's, on a plate (ostensibly to be served up to heathens who do not take the trouble to learn the Russian language so as to be able to read EO in its original glory).
But who wrote "Nor marble, nor the gilded
monuments ...."? Not Shakespeare. Could it refer to ASP's Exegii Monumentum (at least he knew some Latin!). I love the story about Jakobson and a Salisbury steak eaten on a Friday, and the reference to an elephant (slon, rhyming almost with stone) named V Nabokov.
A friend and I wrote a song to Roman Jakobson (after Kurt Weill's Poor Jenny) - a few lines of which are:
Roman made his mind up at 75
That he would live to be the oldest Slavist alive;
But analyzing grammar can play awfully mean tricks
And poor Roman gave up Russian at 76.
Actually I do not know, without googling, how old RJ was when he did kick the old vedro, but I'd bet he survived a few decades beyond ... Well, he made it to 85 - not bad considering that we wrote the pastiche in, what, 1963!
Carolyn
p.s. Interesting tidbit re RJ (from Wikipedia of course) - he was saved by Franz Boas (the anthropologist, teacher of M. Mead, influenced Claude Levi-Strauss)
In New York, he began teaching at The New School, still closely associated with the Czech emigre community during that
period. At the École libre des hautes études, a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met and collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would also become a key exponent of structuralism. He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, Benjamin Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield. When the American authorities considered "repatriating" him to Europe, it was Franz Boas who actually saved his life. After the war, he became a consultant to the International
Auxiliary Language Association, which would present Interlingua in 1951.
Jansy wrote:
I equally learned why a "red label" is mentioned in VN's poem "On Discovering a Butterfly".
Also that "The butterfly in question, incidentally, was a pug moth named 'Eupithecia nabokovi' ... Be that as it may, on solving a couple more Nabokov charades, one is tempted to ask the otherworldly VN whether he himself has noticed that hiding in the scholarly name of his Eupithecia Nabokovi is a 'good monkey'."
and "Of course poets have long espoused the conceit that words are the surest form of immortality - "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme" quoth the Bard - but Nabokov trumps even that with his "thus became [...] its first describer -- and I want no other fame." And although he says "it will transcend its dust", the temptation is irresistible to read, uperposed on the "it", a triumphant 'I'.".
and one related to Jakobson and a Salisbury steak eaten on a Friday: "When Roman Jakobson—great linguist, Harvard professor—was approached some years ago with the suggestion that Vladimir Nabokov might be appointed professor of Slavic, Jakobson was skeptical; he had nothing against elephants, he said, but he would not appoint one professor of zoology...The analogy compares the elegant and stylish Nabokov—novelist in various languages, lepidopterist, lecturer, and critic—to the great, gray, hulking pachyderm, intellectually noted only for memory. . . . By jokes and analogies we reveal ourselves. Jakobson condescends
to Nabokov—just as Plato patted little Ion on his head, just as Sartre makes charitable exception for poets in What Is Literature?..." Classics | Narrative Magazine www.narrativemagazine.com/taxonomy/term/19/0?...
and... a lot more!