CK: Could zesty skaters
be an anagram in Russian (Alexey)?
I don't think it is an anagram. In her (unrhymed) translation of the poem
Vera Nabokov renders zesty skaters as azartnye
kon'kobezhtsy.
Not everybody may realize that Lochan is a pun not only on
loch ("lake" in Scottish) but also on lokhan' ("bath-tub" in
Russian), the word VN used (misspelling it as lokhan and giving it a
wrong gender*) in his translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
(the Mock Turtle's song about Beautiful Soup):
Skazochnyi sup - ty zelen i pryan.
Toboy napolnen goryachiy lokhan!
Lokhan' is usually kidney-shaped (cf. similarly shaped Hourglass
Lake** in Lolita). The distance between the lake's shores
must be the shortest at Lochan Neck. Nevertheless, Hazel gets off at
Lochanhead.
"Special frost" clearly corresponds to "(one oozy footstep) Frost." In her
translation Vera Nabokov makes a footnote explaining that "Frost" is both the
name of an American famous poet and English for moroz.
*Actually lokhan' is feminine and rhymes with ran'
(early hour), dryan' (trash), or, say, glukhoman'
(backwoods).
**Ochkovoe ozero in the Russian version. Ochki is
Russian for "reading glasses". Perhaps also a play on ochkovaya zmeya,
cobra.
Alexey Sklyarenko