Hello, Jerry
Thank you for calling my attention to my inadequate use
of prepositions. I often make similar mistakes when using other
prepositions and this is very vexing because it's a recurring error.
You also corrected my arithmetic without rejecting to comment on the
point I was trying to make. I'll read your PF chronology. We were just
informed by Ole Nyergaard that Dr. Pekka Tammi's "text is NOT in
Russian: The essay is called “Nabokov’s Poetics of Dates” and can be
found in the book Russian Subtexts in Nabokov’s Fiction: Four Essays.
Tampere: Tampere UP, 1999 pp. 91-113".
Yes, the word "fonte" in Portuguese can be translated as
"fountain". Usually the sprouting "Old Faithful" tall and white kind
are designated "chafariz", but the dictionary includes
the fountain/fonte option. Actually there is a slight imprecision in
the choice of "monte" ( instead of "montanha") since it suggests
something closer to a hill.
Kinbote's annotations apparently were not written following the
chronological succession of Shade's poem. Your suggestion that there's
a hint that we are seeing Kinbote's unpublished manuscript makes a lot
of sense to me, as most of your comments too.
Pnin's fat dog was not sitting at his feet, but he lay across a
circular-shaped room ( was there a hint at "let sleeping dogs
lie"?),ie, some kind of turret more fitting to a castle full of steps (
"degré" ) that impatient Gradus has to mount or descend.
( I am sometimes misled by faint sounds or blurry images arising from a
VN text. Perhaps because of Gradus frequent choice of airplanes, I
usually, mistakenly thought of him as somehow "ascending", in contrast
with Kinbote's ideal "fall" (as a form of suicide). It took me a lot of
effort to remember to associate Gradus with the word "degrading" and
"degradation".)
Pnin's metamorphosis in Pale Fire reminded me of a children's
movie, Shrek... I'll consider your new arguments since I prefer to
imagine Kinbote's wounded ego prompting him to describe Pnin...
Jansy