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Re: Fw: Traveling to Pinsk thru Minsk and a shagbark tree
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Fw: Traveling to Pinsk thru Minsk and a shagbark treeS K-B wrote: I was brought up with a FUNNIER version of Freud's ancient joke - note the added NOT which makes ALL the difference... BUT, like VN's version of the wonderful Chapman's Homer joke, you either GET IT and giggle, or you start quibbling about the exact baseball SCORE (which is totally IRRELEVANT) and then hunt the newspaper archives.
I agree that the added "not" makes a big difference, although it probably was not absent in Freud's original ( which unfortunately I didn't check in the original).
But I don't agree that a propos Chapman's homer, as employed by Shade, that you "either get it or you must quibble".
You demonstrated it yourself by correcting the missing "not". Although we got the joke, its correct reproduction with the included "not", made it even better: were you also quibbling, irrelevantly? If such a baseball player existed and has achieved a homer in a specific game, if VN altered the scores it would make the joke even better.
Recent exchanges about "Pale Fire" showed that I am still like a blind person wandering throu New Wye, achieving only one or two small glimpses of backyard, castle, cloud or lake. Most of the time houses, slopes and trees remain as mere words or names, even if Zembla I picture satisfactorily...
It seems to me that "Pale Fire" 's author demands, deliberately so, an extra effort from his readers. Simply to juxtapose personal past recollections on to the scene being described is not enough. One must become like a movie-producer intent on reproducing an exact historical scene.
Nabokov, himself, recommended this procedure if we wanted to understand Anna Karenin or amble along a path in Mansfield Park. This is not a procedure we habitually follow even while we are simply going through our daily routine. In Gregory's "Eye and Brain" (or perhaps in "The intelligent eye") this scientist demonstrates that most of the time we react to a hypothetical environment.
We cannot always check if Berkeley's tree lies in a quad and therefore we make a bet that it is still in place.
Nabokov's New Wye scenery challenges this habitual creed all the time: there are displaced "fold and furrows" ( line56/57) that keep altering space and unsettling the view.
There are words Nabokov uses that are very familiar to me ( a foreigner to English) - and it takes me some time to realize that they might not be also as clear to a lot of readers, although they look like regular words in English.
As in Lines 35/36: a message "espied on a pine's bark" - how many English-natives distinguish the difference bt "espial" ( VN's "to espy"?) and "to spy"? And yet, in Portuguese, "espiar" doesn't necessarily implicate in "espionage" and "eavesdrop". It also means a mild "peek", a mere "looking at".
"Travelogue" sounds like a familiar coinage, but... is it really so?
Jansy
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I agree that the added "not" makes a big difference, although it probably was not absent in Freud's original ( which unfortunately I didn't check in the original).
But I don't agree that a propos Chapman's homer, as employed by Shade, that you "either get it or you must quibble".
You demonstrated it yourself by correcting the missing "not". Although we got the joke, its correct reproduction with the included "not", made it even better: were you also quibbling, irrelevantly? If such a baseball player existed and has achieved a homer in a specific game, if VN altered the scores it would make the joke even better.
Recent exchanges about "Pale Fire" showed that I am still like a blind person wandering throu New Wye, achieving only one or two small glimpses of backyard, castle, cloud or lake. Most of the time houses, slopes and trees remain as mere words or names, even if Zembla I picture satisfactorily...
It seems to me that "Pale Fire" 's author demands, deliberately so, an extra effort from his readers. Simply to juxtapose personal past recollections on to the scene being described is not enough. One must become like a movie-producer intent on reproducing an exact historical scene.
Nabokov, himself, recommended this procedure if we wanted to understand Anna Karenin or amble along a path in Mansfield Park. This is not a procedure we habitually follow even while we are simply going through our daily routine. In Gregory's "Eye and Brain" (or perhaps in "The intelligent eye") this scientist demonstrates that most of the time we react to a hypothetical environment.
We cannot always check if Berkeley's tree lies in a quad and therefore we make a bet that it is still in place.
Nabokov's New Wye scenery challenges this habitual creed all the time: there are displaced "fold and furrows" ( line56/57) that keep altering space and unsettling the view.
There are words Nabokov uses that are very familiar to me ( a foreigner to English) - and it takes me some time to realize that they might not be also as clear to a lot of readers, although they look like regular words in English.
As in Lines 35/36: a message "espied on a pine's bark" - how many English-natives distinguish the difference bt "espial" ( VN's "to espy"?) and "to spy"? And yet, in Portuguese, "espiar" doesn't necessarily implicate in "espionage" and "eavesdrop". It also means a mild "peek", a mere "looking at".
"Travelogue" sounds like a familiar coinage, but... is it really so?
Jansy
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm