Subject
Windex (fwd)
Date
Body
From: David R. Slavitt <slavitt@MSCF.MED.UPENN.EDU>
A few days ago, I sent the following message:
>>The Epistulae Ex Ponto are Ovid's heartbreaking poems of exile. The joke,
>>of course, is the combination of words to make Windex, which is what you
>>clean windows with.
>> Cheese Louise!
>> David Slavitt, translator of Ovid's Poetry Of Exile
>>
>>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 11:56:00 -0500 (CDT)
>>>From: Brian D. Walter <bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu>
>>>
>>>Can anyone offer a specific explanation of the verse at the end of
>>>Nabokov's foreword to the revised SPEAK, MEMORY?
>>>
>>> Through the window of that index
>>> Climbs a rose
>>> And sometimes a gentle wind _ex
>>> Ponto_ blows.
>>>
>>
It strikes me that the pun here is not dissimilar to the joke VN told me at
the Old Dominion Foundation party for the publication of his translation of
Eugene Onegin. He had been working on this project for years, and, as he
told me, he had managed to ruin it for himself, to trivialize it entirely,
with a dopey joke he'd dreamed up.
"Oh?" I asked. He smiled mischievously and said, "A man goes into
an American bar in Europe, and the bartender, who knows him, asks, 'You
gin?' To which the customer replies, 'One gin.'"
If he could look back such a monumental labor with such a gesture
of elegant modesty, the windex joke is not altogether improbable or out of
character.
**********************************
David R. Slavitt
TEL:(215) 382-3994
A few days ago, I sent the following message:
>>The Epistulae Ex Ponto are Ovid's heartbreaking poems of exile. The joke,
>>of course, is the combination of words to make Windex, which is what you
>>clean windows with.
>> Cheese Louise!
>> David Slavitt, translator of Ovid's Poetry Of Exile
>>
>>>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 11:56:00 -0500 (CDT)
>>>From: Brian D. Walter <bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu>
>>>
>>>Can anyone offer a specific explanation of the verse at the end of
>>>Nabokov's foreword to the revised SPEAK, MEMORY?
>>>
>>> Through the window of that index
>>> Climbs a rose
>>> And sometimes a gentle wind _ex
>>> Ponto_ blows.
>>>
>>
It strikes me that the pun here is not dissimilar to the joke VN told me at
the Old Dominion Foundation party for the publication of his translation of
Eugene Onegin. He had been working on this project for years, and, as he
told me, he had managed to ruin it for himself, to trivialize it entirely,
with a dopey joke he'd dreamed up.
"Oh?" I asked. He smiled mischievously and said, "A man goes into
an American bar in Europe, and the bartender, who knows him, asks, 'You
gin?' To which the customer replies, 'One gin.'"
If he could look back such a monumental labor with such a gesture
of elegant modesty, the windex joke is not altogether improbable or out of
character.
**********************************
David R. Slavitt
TEL:(215) 382-3994