Serge
Soloviev: remarked that: ... the part of the poem describing
the love of Shade to Sybil seems to me the weakest, less poetic of all... Do
anybode else see it under this angle? Could this be the intention of VN?
"four thousand times your pillow has been creased/ By our two heads"...
Jansy Mello: I had observed that in my
opinion John Shade's poem was not in any way erotic. Andrew Brown
contradicted me pointing to Shade's dedication to Sybil and I argued back,etc.
So,
apparently Serge and I both see Shade's "love for Sybil" with a grain
of salt. After I picked up the "two creased pillows" I tried
to suggest Shade was hinting at other lillicit love affairs, but my
argument is not very strong. The Vogelweide "Unter dem Linden" is too old
to be meaningful at that point. It doesn't really match the the intention in
"shared pillow" and, probably... the wench is dead..
D.
Zimmer observed that: "It probably is futile to ask whether the date
palm really belongs in that Appalachian Shakespeare Alley, potted or not, for
whether Kinbote "invented" it outright or based it on his "memories" or on some
"notes" in his pocket diary, it certainly comes straight out of
Shakespeare,
without any detour to the Wordsmith campus."
Jansy
Mello: If we consider Serge Soloviev's remark
about "the version proposed by Ada is not about trees...Oka is a river near
Moscow (well known to Russians), and Baie is Bay/Golf ... that
followed the query on Ada's palm, in Marvell: "To win the palm, the oak,
...", couldn't the entire exchange ( external to Kinbote and Shade's
Wordsmith...) be also an added playful transversion similar to "la
Baie du Palmier" ( SS's Palm Beach) - without stopping
its straight from Shakespeare origin?
See, in an article
posted today by Sandy Klein ( extracted from Ron
Rosenbaum) on "reader's envy" we
find:
"Claudia
proceded to describe a way of seeing into Ada, seeing through its crytpograms to
some essence in a dimension slightly beyond, behind, beneath, the
text."
VN himself confirms that "stelar" ( add *,
ie, "aster-isks" ) view when he describes:
Gogol’s style as “ it gives one the sensation of something
ludicrous and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the corner”
(NG,142) and considered that
“the prose of Pushkin is
three-dimensional; that of Gogol is four-dimensional , at least”
(NG,145).
I
also chose to understand that VN´s own prose
is "four-dimensional" and therefore, I can picture Shakespearean's trees,
Wordsmith's and Marvell's Garden in Pale Fire and, perhaps, also
"nowhere".