Thomas Karshan’s Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (OUP) gets a mixed review by Stephen Abell (TLS: Play for play’s sake, Sep 2, 2011). I’ll buy it, nonetheless, in spite of a most Unplayful price (£55; $99)!
Jansy’s analysis of Ramsdale relies on over-literal readings (ram -> animal -> rape), confirming my conviction that VN’s wordplay is a trivial and often misleading diversion, diluting his true, inimitable genius.
England is full of Ram- hamlets, villages, towns and derived surnames. None has a ram=animal etymology. Not even RAMSBOTTOM.
Check
http://www.ramsdale.org/ramsdale.htm
Where
The English surname RAMSDALE is locative (both toponymic and topographical) in origin (1) belonging to that group of surnames derived from the place where the original bearer once dwelt or where he once held land, and (2) likely also derived from Ramsons, being a widespread colloquial name for wild garlic (Allium ursinum) the derivation of which is the Anglo Saxon word Hramsa meaning rank - the butter and milk of cows which have eaten Ramsons is said to be bitter (rank)
Old English hramsa dael meaning wild garlic valley. The surname RAMSDALE is related etymologically to the surnames RAMSDEN, RAMSDELL, RAMSGILL and RAMSBOTTOM, all of which derive from the same hramsa, and tend to be associated with Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Compare Ramsgate, a Kent, UK resort of great renown:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsgate
Ramsgate began as a fishing and farming hamlet. Ramsgate as a name has its earliest reference as "Hraefn's gate", or "raven's cliff gap", later to be rendered 'Ramisgate' or 'Remmesgate' around 1225 and 'Ramesgate' from 1357.
Can you see how word-misplay, merely matching surface letters, such as r-a-m, can lead one astray?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 07/09/2011 15:50, "Jansy" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Robert H. Boyle: Re Lolita, USA. [ Absently staring at the Nicki-channel for "Sponge Bob" and "Fairly Good Parents," I had the impression I saw "Ramsdale" and a road-sign indicating "Nabokovia."] Climax is not imaginary. It is in Greene County, New York.
JM: Thanks for the information RHB. It seems to be almost impossible to create a totally new name for a city (rock-band names are there first, or computer-game agents) but it happens. The oft remembered "Ramsdale" sounds very common and, perhaps, it doesn't exist only as a town in New Hampshire, but it can be also found somewhere else and, if it's not the case, it becomes an investigable verbal coinage (with rape indicated by 'rams'?) I'm afraid I invented the "Nabokovia" (which I'll now people with hockey and soccer players, various goalkeepers and even Babe Ruth, from the terribly vulgar book by Leslie Daniels on Nabokov's house).
Being vaguely interested in random events in literature and life, I've been trying to read Leonard Mlodinov's "The Drunkard's Walk (How randomness rules our lives)" for ages. Its first lines in the foreword are so promising that, mysteriously, I never proceed forward into the book! Giving it a new try today I was reminded, as it happens so often with me, of Nabokov and, now, his "liens dedaliens" (links-and-bobolinks) in Pale Fire.
Mlodinov's book starts with a story about a Spanish guy who explained why he won a big lottery prize by betting on n.48 (he said he dreamed seven times seven with it and, "since 7 x7=48," he decided to choose this number...). The saying "God moves in a mysterious way" in my country becomes "God writes straight with crooked lines," and there might be a French or a Russian equivalent to the suggested image in the Portuguese version for Nabokov's emphasis on tortuous individual mazes set straight by the motion of a printless thumb bears an interesting secondary,perhaps critical resonance to it.*
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* Cf.: Pale Fire's Shade: "...topsy-turvical coincidence,/ Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense./ Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find/ Some kind of link-and-bobolink...
and Charles Kinbote on line 810 (A Web of Sense):"...fragment written by Lane on May 17, 1921, on the eve of his death...: "And if I had passed into that other land, whom would I have sought? ...Aristotle! — Ah, there would be a man to talk with! What satisfaction to see him take, like reins from between his fingers, the long ribbon of man’s life and trace it through the mystifying maze of all the wonderful adventure.... The crooked made straight. The Daedalian plan simplified by a look from above — smeared out as it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful straight line."