Stan Kelly-Bootle:"I now see that you did recognize that
‘slight’ was a ‘marvellous typo.’ Do we both agree that it’s really VN’s
deliberate PUN, rather than a typo that happens to work as a pun?"
JM: "Slight" was not Nabokov's typo nor pun. We
find, in Brian Boyd's annotations to Ada, a reference to a different kind of
wordplay: (18.01:[...]. "A pun, of course, on
'ha-ha' as laughter, stressing the absurdity of
transferring Russia across the ocean. The "ha" lost in the transformation of "sleight of
hand" into "sleight of land" has been doubly
repaid.") **
The original sentence from which I extracted the
typo came in a text written by Matthew Walker in "A Note on the
Translation of Nabokov's 'Slava'." It is:: "an early 'I,' the author of his
youth, chasing and missing a butterfly..., and a later 'I' who returns from
a spatial and temporal exile to observe his previous self, incognito, by a
linguistic slight-of-hand: a 'curve' of the word that seems to return the
'I' to its origin.*
...........................................................
* M.Walker comments on these lines by Nabokov (1942) "It is far to the meadows where I sobbed in my childhood/h aving
missed an Apollo [... ]// But my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct,/spans
the world, and across in a strobe-effect spin/of spokes I keep endlessly passing
incognito/ into the flame-licked night of my native land." The
author observes that "there are indications that the translator of 'Slava' is
not quite the same person its author was. Late Nabokov leaves his
traces." The Nabokovian, 2008, n.61.
** The sentence, in
Ada, is: "Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting
to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the
American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the
United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if
by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the
opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland
to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the
Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water
and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and
‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in
regard to time..."