I
think I like this anagram better than its earlier version, with G
and gagara:
ARAGVA
+ KURA
+ TARTAR + BERLIN
+ MOISEY +
KVAS = ARARAT + KURVA + GIBRALTAR*
+ ENISEY +
MOSKVA (Moisey is the Russian name of Moses, the Hebrew
prophet who led the Israelites out of Egypt and who is mentioned in
Ada: 1.14; kvas is a Russian non-alcoholic
drink; cf. kvasnoy patriotizm, "jingoism;" Ararat
is a mountain in E Turkey, a landing place of Noah's ark; Enisey
is a Siberian river mentioned in Mandelshtam's poem "Za gremuchuyu doblest'
gryadushchikh vekov...";** Moskva is the Russian name of Moscow; cf.
Mandelshtam's kurva Moskva, "Moscow the whore," translated by
Lowell as "the curved streets of Moscow")
*GIBRALTAR
= GRIB ("mushroom;" cf. about Price: "old retainer whom Marina (and G. A.
Vronsky, during their brief romance) had dubbed... 'grib'" 1.38) + ALTAR (on
Antiterra, a place name apparently corresponding to our Gibraltar; cf. "a small
map of the European part of the British Commonwealth - say, from
Scoto-Scandinavia to the Riviera, Altar and Palermontovia..."). By the way, GRIB
+ VOEVODA (commander of an army in medieval Russia; the title of Pushkin's
1833 translation of Mickiewicz's poem Czaty, "The Ambush")
+ DIANA = GRIBOEDOV + VANIADA (Van-and-Ada; cf. "the Vaniada divan,"
2.5, "Vaniada's Adventures," 2.7).
**"For
the sake of the resonant valor of ages to come..." (the poem's line 13 reads:
Uvedi menya v noch', gde techyot Enisey, "Lead me into the night where
the Enisey flows;" Nabokov's translation of the poem that was also
mistranslated by Lowell can be found in his article "On Adaptation"
(1969), SO, pp. 280-81)
Alexey
Sklyarenko