Stan K-B: the prolific & weird mathematician Paul
Erdo:s [...] was fond of word-games. He pointed out that “old/cold” was a rare,
sad rhyming pair that also rhymed in German: “alt/kalt.”[...] Question remains:
the reason for VN’s aversion to Finnegans Wake? Did Joyce go TOO FAR,
OVER-teeming with allusions, puns, spoonerisms,
anagrams[...]
Kinbote:"There exists to my knowledge one absolutely
extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case, where not only
two[
mountain-fountain], but three words are involved[...] A newspaper
account of a Russian tsar’s coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the
misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically "corrected,"
it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow). The artistic correlation
between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is
something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet. I have seen nothing
like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy
computation [...] Goethe’s two lines opening the poem
[
Wind-Kind] come out most exactly and beautifully, with the bonus
of an unexpected rhyme (also in French:
vent-enfant), in my own
language [
vett-dett]."
JM: VN, like Shade, was
enraptured by hidden resonances and linguistic aerobics but it is my
impression that he harbored a sense of "sacred mystery"
towards words and coincidences. From this perspective Joyce's
wake would come very close to heresy.
Perhaps this opinion would echo
only Kinbote's for, concerning Shade's play with "The Great
Potato" (Rabelais' "le grand peut-ętre), Kinbote noted that it was an
"execrable pun, deliberately placed in this epigraphic position to stress lack
of respect for Death." In connection to "If"
(yew in French, weeping willow in Zemblan,
perhaps in IPH) he added: "I am also obliged to observe that I
strongly disapprove of the flippancy with which our poet treats, in this canto,
certain aspects of spiritual hope which religion alone can
fulfill."