Jerry Friedman: "Doctor" is used for people who have a doctorate[...]Shade calls Kinbote "Professor Kinbote" in the note to line 894--for whatever that's worth. In an index I wouldn't expect "Dr.", though things may have changed since 1959. Kinbote's application of it to himself may be his usual vainglory.

Today's mails were quite a treat: one could hear Nabokov's voice ( also those of Conan Doyle, Fitzgerald, V.Woolf...) and share his personal recipee for boiled eggs. I wonder if he wrote it down, himself... The cloud of white stuff like an ectoplasmatic vision reads Nabokovian, but he seemed unlike himself, almost too impatient instead of funny.

This afternoon I was comparing the original of La Veneziana and a translation. It's curious how we notice things differently by following the translator's choices, or his happy and clumsy solutions. Most of the time the translation falls into an (literally unavoidable!) pompous baroque stuffiness, something which I don't feel while reading the English text. At the same time, the artificial or anacronic tone that results from the translation is very close to VN's accent in the BBC recording I just heard. What called my attention now was VN's emphasis on "fiery", "blazes" and shades of red against green. The story opens with a "red-hued castle" in a "ripe sunshine" and the feeling one has, in the first chapters, is kind of a hallucinatorily "painted"text exuding infra-red and ultraviolet rays.

The narrator observes that (p.90,Knopf) "a person's motions while playing, like his handwriting in quieter moments, tell a good deal about him". And yet, almost independently, he adds in the next paragraph:"If McGore[...] had been the kind of curious and impartial spectator it is sometimes so expedient to attract, he might have concluded that tall, dark-haired, cheerful Maurren lived with the same carefree manner with which she played [...] but, just as handwriting can often fool a fortune-teller by its superficial simplicity, the game...in truth revealed nothing more than..." . He employs McGore's hypothetical, but inexistent observational talents, to mockingly add snippets of psychological traits to the characters. The narrator asserts his power over the story ( as in "spectator it is sometimes so expedient to attract") to insufflate, and next break down the reader's illusion of a "reality" other than his writing. We are kept in a mood that oscillates into unreality, with bright flashes that blind us into ocular after-images, some of these being actually experienced by one of the characters ( the crazed Simpson) while he reminisces by glancing "back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us..."

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