Dear List -
thanks for all your remarks on my posting re MacDiarmid,
Southey etc. To answer just two of the questions that have come up:
No, I am not at all certain that Fittis' book on 'Sports
and Pastimes in Scotland' was Nabokov's source. I only think it a very likely
source, compared to Angus MacDiarmid's book itself which is so exceedingly
rare that I believe nobody can come across it by chance. Fittis' book
has what the source needs: a convincing sample of MacDiarmid's prose, a
mention of Southey and the "men of incoherent transactions", all on two pages.
Indeed I found it on the Internet, about three or four years ago, before the
times of Google Books. I don't remember the pages all too clearly. As I was
googling and trying out some of the pertinent keywords, I stumbled upon a
mailing list of sorts where somebody happened to quote that very passage from
Fittis' book. It looked most promising, and it turned out to be much easier to
get hold of than I had anticipated. There is a reprint from 1975, and through
one of the used books portals I had it within a week.
No again, the appendix to the new German edition of 'Pale
Fire' is about two hundred pages long, and unfortunately I will not have the
time to translate it myself, nor would my alien English be up to
it.
Happy New Year!
Dieter Zimmer, Berlin