"Pale Fire", CK's notes
on "Old barn":
"...The
jumble of broken words and meaningless syllables which she managed at last to
collect came out in her dutiful notes as a short line of simple letter-groups. I
transcribe:
pada ata lane pad not ogo
old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal
told
In her Remarks, the recorder states she had to
recite the alphabet, or at least begin to recite it (there is a merciful
preponderance of a’s) eighty times, but of these, seventeen yielded no results.
Divisions based on such variable intervals cannot be but rather arbitrary; some
of the balderdash may be recombined into other lexical units making no better
sense (e.g., "war," "talant," "her," "arrant," etc.). The barn ghost seems to
have expressed himself with the empasted difficulty of apoplexy or of a
half-awakening from a half-dream slashed by a sword of light on the ceiling, a
military disaster with cosmic consequences that cannot be phrased distinctly by
the thick unwilling tongue. And in this case we too might wish to cut short a
reader’s or bedfellow’s questions by sinking back into oblivion’s bliss — had
not a diabolical force urged us to seek a secret design in the
abracadabra."
"Feu Pâle": ...Je
transcris:
" perperi perpira perpa
alleral gelgal vortvirt pal feur farrant".
Dans ses Remarques, la transcriptrice déclare qu'il lui
fallut reciter l'alphabet...(par ex. "aller", "gel", "or", "arrant", etc)
JM: A simple
initial comparison (I wish I remembered, also, the article that explained the
choice of words for the translation into French, it's in the
Nab-L archives but I couldn't locate it).
No Vanessa Atalanta in the French, but
there is "father" (père), "don't go" (pas aller), pale fire (pal feur?), perhaps
many more.
The predominant meaning indicates there's
a warning against father going somewhere while carrying with
him "Pale Fire."
I must search more to see if there's any
butterfly embedded in the jumble of words. Right now, the insistence
on "arrant" (...thief) points to...Kinbote!
Any
suggestions?