Matt Roth: Do you think that Zembla's etymology via
"Semblerland" (land of reflections) reinforces or satirizes Eliot's translation?
JM: No, as I see it, it's not
associated to Eliot. "Semberland" makes me think about Nature (mimicry and
nature's deceits) .
Matt Roth: The holograph ms. of PF (now public domain) in
the Library of Congress contains an interesting variant related to this
Eliot-via-Baudelaire line. Kinbote's note to line 376 concludes, "I deplore my
friend's vicious thrusts at the most distinguished poets of his day." Following
this in the ms., VN tried out several sentences, but canceled them all with one
wavy, looping line. They read:
My reader must help me
^ Here I sit in my bookless mountain cave; but thou, my
mirror twin, toilest.
and
idle
I know
Here I sit bookless ^ in my mountain cave but ^ thou toilest, my reader, my mirror
twin.
If nothing else, this further confirms VN's interest in Eliot's line and
its original.
JM: Great find, once
again!
I'll check how Nabokov employs Baudelaire's
dedication in "Lolita" (if I correctly remember its occurrence also in
it).
There's another word in French which
Nabokov must have rejected to be able to write, as he did, the
variants you just quoted from Kinbote's note: "le prochain" (Nebenmensch)
for "semblable." He seems to be working over a pun
(toilest, "toiling") but, to make it work, he needs to
explicitate and invoke a reader-commentator (which I don't think
would be part of his plans, not at this
juncture)
M.Roth: On a related topic..."Wind under the
door" (pastiched by Shade in Canto Three) in Webster's The Devil's Law
Case. The line ("Is the wind in that door still") is uttered by one of the
two surgeons examining the presumed-dead Contarino...My immediate reaction is
that this scene, in which Contarino revives as if from the dead, deepens the
pathos of Shade's lines, as he and Sybil long for some sign of Hazel's return
from death... This connection is probably enough for us, but it may be even
more entertaining if we consider the larger context of Webster's line. Contarino
is thought to be dead because he has been stabbed not once but twice... So
Contarino is twice slain, the second time by a bodkin-like stiletto, only to
survive after all. John Shade also "dies" twice...Could this support the theory
that Shade too is not dead after all? Also note that bodkin-as-hairpin should
make us think of the "The Rape of the Lock," where bodkins are likewise used as
weapons.
JM: Brian Boyd
explores Pope's works and satires ( he connects The Rape of the Lock to the
scene with pirouetting nymphs, soaps and perfumes, an altar, also
associated to the wind under the door and the rapping against the
windowpane) Lock: hair and keeping
under key - is there no hint of "Lochanhead" in it?
Carolyn Kunin, if I'm not mistaken, would
endorse your hypothesis about "Shade is not dead" and also, that his
disjointed lines in the last canto show him growing mad (Jerry's, or
Lipon's, recent observations).
btw: While studying biology
with grandson, I learned about "monera" "protista" and "fungi," ( or the
eucarya and procaryotes?), constituting categories which are as
important as the familiar Plantae and Animalia (I was still
stuck with ancient classificatory systems and Aristotelic "souls" found in
plants, animals, humans). In Pale Fire, when
Shade imagines the transmigration of souls, he only
mentions flowerlets and frogs: are there no eligible virus
nor bacteria? How would spiritualists include those microscopic
"entities" in their system? Would the soul require pluricellular
"beings" to "re-incarnate"? (idle chat, I know - but I do wonder
about it).