When Kinbote mentions that Swift "in search of a
fond name" made an invevitable allusion to 'Vanhomrigh,
Esther!'" he seems to be illustrating how
certain words could be construed by omissions and inversions. Jerry Friedmann suggested Swift, besides the more common
"lambdacism" and "rotacism", also switched "g and."
Shade mainly describes how Hazel "twisted words:
pot, top,/Spider,redips". Still, it is Kinbote, himself, that informs
us that Hazel's "mirror words" included T.S.Eliot s "toilest." before
adding: "but then it is also true that Hazel Shade resembled me in
certain respects" ( note to lines 347-348).
Putting together the references that I collected I
also note that Kinbote wrote comments on
the "game of worlds" ( line 819) but informs us that this was
just something favored by Shade ( "a childish predilection") and he
recorded:" hate-love in three, lass-male in four, and live-dead in five
( with "lend" in the middle)".
Kinbote also played with the
"mountain/fountain" switch and its rendering in different languages
calling attention to a Russian newspaper misprint that revealed "an
artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian
korona-vorona-korova series... the odds against the double coincidence
defy computation." (note to line 803). At the
same time we cannot forget the games played in the Index (who wrote
it?) when we are sent from Lass to Mass, from there to Mars,Mare and
Male and then,from Male, we must see "World Golf", where we find his
description of Shade's predilection for it and are referred back to
Lass.
The four-fold division of "Contents" - and this excludes the quotation
from Boswell yield: Foreword/Pale Fire/Commentary/Index. has apparently
been completely "folded" in VN's magic carpet in ADA but here, in the
novel Pale Fire, it seems to be part of the "World Golf" and,
unfortunately, I'm completely incapable of joining this kind of
sophisticated game. And I hope someone answers
J.Friedmann's: Is "little talk" the mirror image
of Southey's "Lingo-Grande",and is that real?...
(Thanks, JF)
Jansy