EDNote: I wrote to MC with the information that the poet he mentions is
in fact John Suckling, whose Wikipedia entry makes quite interesting
reading. A quick follow-up has shown that VN could have read about
Suckling in John Aubrey's Brief Lives (written betw. 1669 and
1696), which by amazing coincidence was republished in 1957
with an introduction by none other than Edmund Wilson. ~SB
-------- Original Message --------
Dear List,
I am in the process of completing my annotations of "Lolita" for the
Pléiade
edition. Could you give me some help?
In a MS card at the Library of Congress, there is, in a note about
Lepington:
"good name for town (poet 1600-1682 Sir John Scumling [name hardly
readable]
addressed a poem to Lord Lepington) and I shall be dumped when the wild
wood
sways/……when the leaf decays". I have identified Lord Lepington, but
does anyone
know who that poet could be?
There are also two poetic passages in French which sound like
quotations, but
are they? "ces matins gris si doux", "enfant charmante et fourbe"? I
have asked
countless colleagues, mais to no avail. Usually, when Nabokov quotes
someone in
the novel, he provides some clues. I haven't found any yet.
Maybe I am blind. Or perhaps someone has already solved all these
problems
before me.
My annotations, abundant as they will be (270 pages in my MS), won't
solve all
the problems obviously, though I have had wonderful help from my eminent
predecessors,Proffer, Appel, Zimmer, Boyd, Dolinin and others. You may
remember
that the topic of my 2006 Nice conference on Nabokov was "Annotation vs.
Interpretation"; I hadn't realized before that Appel's notes were
becoming more
interpretation than annotation towards the end; Ellen Pifer had made a
strong
argument about that in her paper. In conformity with Gallimard's
editorial
guidelines, I do my best to avoid interpreting.
Best wishes to you all
Maurice Couturier