Subject
TR : Re: Meaning of "Enchanter" and a new question about
"Rast"
"Rast"
From
Date
Body
----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 09:35:37 -0300
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Reply-To: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>
Subject: Re: Fwd: TR : Re: Meaning of "Enchanter" and a new question
about "Rast"
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
MessageDear DN and List,
DN, thank you for the help with the translation of rast( " scale in Turkish
music" ).
I was also told by Alex that "Baldy" was totally unrelated to any apparition
of Nabokov . I had pictured him there like an oak like in the Hitchcock
movies, where Hitch shows himself in the scenery holding a viola, as a
passenger in a bus, leaving a taxi but A. told me that
"Baldy" as the name of an oak is an allusion to Pushkin. The name of his family
estate (where he wrote some of his best works) was Boldino, and one of his
most famous line (the first of his long poem "Ruslan and Liudmila") is "U
lukomoria dub zelionyi" ("There is a green oak at the sea shore"). "Peter de
Rast" is an obvious joke that plays on "pederast."
Sometimes it is really not enough to know a language without being familiar with
its cultural environment ( such as recognizing Pushkin´s estate "Boldino") or
with its pronunciation ( such as grasping an " obvious joke on "pederast" -
which I still cannot "hear"). There was also a message by Sergey Re "British
and Brazilian":
The link might be aural and graphic rather than semantic: "Br. - Br..." I think
this was one of VN's (or Humbert's) favorite usages.
The "brink of the brook" kind of sounds in Ada reinforce Sergey´s answer for the
"aural" instead of "semantic" aspect. Being a foreigner to English usage and
spoken language "brit" and "braz" sound not similar to me and their coupling
seems to follow a kind of clue that is different from the "brink/brook" kind of
creations.
David Powelstock posting confirms Alexey´s opinion stating that "given the
passage's mixing of sex and childhood, doesn't Peter de Rast (alias Pieter
Rast, for democratic Netherlanders) suggest "pederast"? "
But he had to switch to the democratic nethelander to pronounce it. Besides, he
added: "recall the marked emphasis in HH's pederasty in Lolita ".
Am I totally confused now or there is no mention to pederasty in Lolita?
I thought Lolita´s Humbert Humbert was a pedophile, not a pederast.
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: Donald B. Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 8:41 AM
Subject: Fwd: TR : Re: Meaning of "Enchanter" and a new question about "Rast"
"the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but still healthy old oak
(which appeared - oh, I remember,Van!
- in a century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast...)
In my regular dictionary I found a reference to the latin rastrum "rake" from
"radere ras" that means " to scrape". Google took me to Van Veen´s Holland and
their paintings with pastoral
scenes. In it there was Rast as : Koerdisch voor geluk of een rechte lijn, een
toonladder (makam) in de Turkse muziek, Perzisch voor waarheid.
I don´t speak Dutch but I understood there were references to the Curds, to the
Turks [IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN, IT'S A SCALE IN TURKISH MUSIC -- DN]
and to the Persian. Rast, in Persian, would mean " Truth".
----- End forwarded message -----