In her unrhymed translation of Shade's poem Vera Nabokov makes
a footnote to "je nourris / Les pauvres cigales" (241-42):
"I feed the poor cicadas" (Krylov translated
"strekoza"* instead of "tsikada"**).
From VN's story Lik (1939) set in the French
Riviera:
In the dark garden, everything was in bloom and
smelled of candy, and there was a continuous trilling of crickets, which he
mistook (as all Russians do) for cicadas.
In the Russian original crickets are kuznechiki
(grasshoppers). Russian for "cricket" is sverchok.
Kuznechiki ("little smiths") kuyut ("forge")
with their feet, while cicadas "sing" with their wings (Victor Fet will correct
me, if I am wrong).
Feminine of poprygun (fidget), poprygun'ya
does not mean "grasshopper" (what a perfect nonsense!). As a title of
Chekhov's story, Poprygun'ya means "changeable
woman."
*dragon-fly; btw., Krylov's fable "Strekoza i
muravey" begins:
Poprygun'ya strekoza
leto krasnoe propela...
(The restless dragon-fly
sang through the fair summer...)
Where did Krylov see singing (or jumping,*** for that
matter) dragon-flies? In the fable's punch line muravey (the
ant) tells strekoza (the dragon-fly) that she should now dance (tak
podi-ka poplyashi).
**cicada
***poprygun and poprygun'ya come from
prygat' (to jump)
Alexey Sklyarenko