Jerry Friedman: (a) On Toothworth
and Catskin: The paragraph Jansy quoted illustrates Shades'
knowledge of scientific names, as well as his use of the academic "obtain" and
technical terms for the local ecology...This sense of "obtain" appears in the
New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as "Be prevalent, customary, or
established; subsist, hold good; be in force or in vogue"...I can easily imagine
it in the stuffier kind of academic paper. I interpret Kinbote's quotation
marks as meaning that Shade said it but Kinbote never would;
(b)
On Kinbote's teaching: One
striking fact is that Kinbote tells us nothing at all ... As Zembla doesn't
exist, I think we can disregard Sylvia's comment...Brian Boyd sums up the
evidence that Kinbote teaches Scandinavian Studies (...) He adds that
Kinbote probably did arrive (not by parachute) in the previous
October... Was Kinbote a professor of Russian when he knew Shade?A thousand
times no, but a few times yes.
Thank you for the clarification on "that
obtained" and that it also demonstrates Shade's famimliarity with
scientific jargon. And yet the sentence still sounds clumsy to my foreign
ears:
CK holds: "He
never tired of illustrating ...the extraordinary blend of Canadian Zone and
Austral Zone that "obtained," as he put it, in that
particular spot (... a long sentence...).northern species of birds,
etc"
Shade must have also studied insects from very close:A
dark Vanessa with a crimson band is not a description anyone
unfamiliar with butterflies could have written looking at the garden
from his porch, and I imagine that Shade might have also worked
on the "toothworths" long before he used them in his
poem.
When Shade wrote: "I’m reasonably
sure that we survive/ And that
my darling somewhere is alive" (978/9) and a few lines
afterwards he added: "... the year I married
you./ Where are you? In the garden.
I can see.." Wouldn't it be more natural if,
should "my darling" mean Hazel, to have
written "our
darling"?
(b) Is the expression "to arrive, to drop by
parachute" also used figuratively in English ( i.e, to
attain a covetted post not by merit but through someone else's powerful
intervention)?