In "ADA" there are different elms, linden,
teils and oaks, sometimes interchangeable and sometimes
not. The curious mingled terms seem
to have, at their origin, the biblical text and its translations. I wonder if Nabokov was familiar with the facts as
they are described in the "Nature Bulletin No. 676-A April 21,
1962" Cf. www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/600.../nb676.htm
#
Names of trees, and poems related to
them, in this "biblical" context are already present in "Pale Fire,"
probably serving under another set of allusions - or
to indicate a similar kind of "botanic incest theory"?
(various scientific classifications and hybridizations morphed into
human mixed affiliations).
In my initial readings of "Ada", for
example, I only considered the clever indication of her discovery
that, unlike Lucette, she was not Dan's daughter, as we see in her reply about
"it's an elm,"* a point emphasized by Van's terrible pun (Toulouse/Two-Lice). The
confusion bt. elm and oak is explained, and recreated, beforehand but,
later, a linden tree and its "father" the oak, add to the mix.**
In "Ada" there's also a question linked to the
"maidenhair tree" in a train station (confused with a ginkgo tree, if I'm not
mistaken, and carried over to the novel's very beginning, in the album of
dried plants found in the attic.) John
Shade wrote a poem about the ginkgo and in PF there is an extensive wordplay
about "L'if", the willow and the yew
***.
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# - The King James Version of the Bible mentions
seven flowers, seven vegetables, several spices, and thirty-seven
differently named trees. Some -- such as cypress, shittah, ash, and teil --
appear only once. Others -- notably the palm, olive, fig, and cedar --
occur many times. This version was completed in 1611, long before botany became
an exact science.
Like several others, it was a translation by scholars
who were not botanists, had never visited the Holy Land, did not realize
that the native plants in that region were far different from plants in
northern Europe, and made the mistake of identifying some of those
mentioned in the Scriptures with familiar plants in England.
Consequently, the terebinth was called an elm or a teil, aspens
were called mulberries, a mulberry was called "sycamine, " a species of
fig was called "sycomore, " the Oriental planetree -- related to
our sycamore -- was called a chestnut, the apricot became an apple, and
the native Aleppo pine was called a fir or even, in Isaiah 44:14, an ash.
The words "fir, " "pine, " "cypress, " "juniper, " and sometimes "cedar, "
are used so loosely that it is almost impossible to determine what trees
are referred to in certain passages.
In the Douay Version, Isaiah 6:13 contains the phrase: "as a
turpentine tree, and as an oak. " In the King James Version this phrase
became: "as a teil tree, and as an oak. " Teil is an obsolete English name
for the linden or lime tree, related to our basswood, which is not native
in Palestine. Undoubtedly, this passage refers to the Terebinth,
a good-sized deciduous tree that is common on the dry lower slopes
of hills in the Holy Land, All parts of it contain a fragrant resinous
juice and turpentine is obtained from slashes made on the trunk and
branches.
In the Douay Version, Genesis 6:14, God commands Noah: "Make thee an ark of
timber planks. " In the King James Version this is written: "Make thee an
ark of gopher wood. " Modern scholars believe it means the extremely
durable wood of the tall massive evergreen cypresses that, together with
towering cedars and oaks, clothed the slopes of the Lebanon and other
mountain ranges in Biblical times. "Gopher" is very similar to the Hebrew
and Greek words for cypress. In the King James Version the Lord commanded Moses
to build a tabernacle, an altar, an ark of testimony and a table for it,
using "shittim wood." Shittim is the plural of shittah, the Hebrew
name (Isaiah 41:19) for an acacia that grows on Mount Sinai and is the
most common tree in the Arabian desert where the Israelites wandered for 40
years. Like the mesquite in our outhwest, it is a legume, its branches are
armed with spines, and the fruit is a pod. Although gnarled, twisted and
shrubby in the desert, elsewhere it becomes 25 feet tall and its hard,
close-grained, orange-brown wood is valuable for cabinetwork. Another
legume, very common in the Holy Land, is the evergreen carob or "locust-tree."
Its seed pods, from 6 to 10 inches long, full of a sticky pulp and
honey-like syrup when ripe, are used as food for livestock as well as
people. Those were the "husks" eaten by the prodigal son (Luke 15:16) and
probably the "locusts" eaten by John the Baptist (Matthew 3:4). A third
legume, native to Palestine and similar to our redbud, is the famous
"Judas-tree, " upon which, according to legends, Judas Iscariot hanged
himself. Palestine, 3000 years ago, was a land of palm trees, especially the
date palm that not only produces "bread, wine, and honey" but has,
the Arabs say, as many uses as there are days in the year. Outside the
walls of cities, wealthy people had "gardens" in which grew olive and
fig trees, spices, and perhaps a few trees such as apricot,
pomegranate, almond, pistachio, and Persian walnut. At the foot of the
Mount of Olives there was a garden called Gethsemane. [Cf. online link
to "Nature Bulletin" (676-A, 1962)]
* "Next day, or the
day after the next, the entire family was having high tea in the garden...Marina
remained for almost a minute wordlessly stretching across the table her
husband’s straw hat in his direction; finally he shook his head, glared at the
sun that glared back and retired with his cup and the Toulouse Enquirer to a
rustic seat on the other side of the lawn under an immense elm." [...]
‘Well,’ he said, getting up, ‘I must be going. Good-bye,
everybody. Good-bye, Ada. I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s an elm,’ said Ada. Van looked across the lawn and said as if musing —
perhaps with just a faint touch of boyish show-off: ‘I’d like to see that
Two-Lice sheet too when Uncle is through with it.’ "
** " 'Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the
weather is so fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady in your
favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great
oak.’[...] "I think we are supposed to go
and look at the grand chêne which is really an elm.’" or
"They looked around...any green imp with coppery limbs could
easily keep under surveillance from a fork of the giant elm...Lucette would come
ever nearer...start to jiggle the board of an old swing that hung from the long
and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but still healthy old oak (which
appeared — oh, I remember, Van! — in a century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter
de Rast.)" In different paragraphs we meet new
indications: "Overhead the arms of a linden stretched toward
those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father
hanging by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both understand that kind
of heavenly stuff, even then [...] "The teil
[elm] is the flying Italian lady, and the old
oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every time’ (impossible to
reproduce the right intonation while rendering the entire sense — after eight
decades! — but she did say something extravagant, something quite out of keeping
with her tender age as they looked up and then down)."
*** Pale Fire, Line
501: L’if "The
yew in French. It is curious that the Zemblan word for the weeping willow is
also "if" (the yew is tas)."
Wiki on "Taxus baccata" (yew) "The word yew is from Proto-Germanic
*īwa-, possibly originally a loanword from Gaulish ivos, compare Irish ēo, Welsh
ywen, French if (see Eihwaz for a discussion). Baccata is Latin for bearing red
berries. The word yew as it was originally used seems to refer to the colour
brown. On the other side, most romance languages kept the Latin word taxus :
Italian tasso (Corsican tassu), Occitan teis (Catalan teix, Gasconic tech),
Spanish tejo, Portuguese teixo (Galician teixu) and Roumanian tisā, same root as
toxic. In Russian, the same root (presumably, borrowed from Roumanian) is
preserved: tiss (тис).
wiki on "Salix" (willow): "Almost all willows take
root very readily from cuttings or where broken branches lie on the
ground. One famous example of such growth from cuttings involves the poet
Alexander Pope, who begged a twig from a parcel tied with twigs sent from Spain
to Lady Suffolk. This twig was planted and thrived, and legend has it that all
of England's weeping willows are descended from this first one...Willows,
sallows, and osiers form the genus Salix, around 400
species..."
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