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Re: [Fwd: Re: [NABOKV-L] An interesting interview of Nabokov in
French]
French]
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A. Bouazza [ to M.Couturier's "Yet, someone did use the word with the sense it has in "Lolita" before Nabokov, Carter, as I pointed out in my answer to Jansy."]
sends http://www.tititudorancea.com/z/nymphet.htm . In this site we read that a "nymphet is seen to be a sexually precocious, attractive girl, and the term was notably used by French author Pierre de Ronsard, and popularised by Vladimir Nabokov in the novel Lolita.... In Lolita, protagonist Humbert Humbert uses nymphet to describe the 9-14-year-old girls to whom he is attracted. In today's popular press the term is sometimes applied to women in their late teens or early twenties.The word Nymphet also appears as the title of a novel by 1920s author J L Carter, published in the UK by Sampson Low, Marston and Co. In that instance, the term appears free from any sexual connotations.The archetypal nymphet is the character Lolita of Vladimir Nabokov's novel...."
JM: A best-selling author must protect his signature, watermark and copyrights like a tyger, since they're worth a fortune. On another level, though, Nabokov might have been aiming at being dictionarized, or at the bliss of placing a label on a freshly discovered specimen. After all, the foundations of any civilization lies on well-established names and relics [pity that I hadn't heard of John Shade the day in which I unearthed a small self-sealing plastic-bag containing ten brownish nail-parings and the feather from a waxwing, belabeled: "Relics fromJFS, July 1959" for, in my ignorance, I threw it away! It must've been worth a fortune...] John Shade's commentator, in his turn, must have not only subtracted Sybil's rightful possession of the poem "Pale Fire," but he also plagiarized Nabokov himself. *
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* "Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,/I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns,/soft participles coming down the steps,/treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns,/and liquid verbs in ahla and in ili,/Aonian grottoes, nights in the Altai,/black pools of sound with "I"s for water lilies./ ...My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger./False shadows turn to track me as I pass/and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents,/creep in to blot the freshly written page/and read the blotter in the looking glass." (Vladimir Nabokov: An Evening of Russian Poetry)
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