Stan Kelly-Bootle:"yes, we are indeed blessed (and often confused!) by now-archaic words found in the earliest English Bible translations. Quick (from OE cwic) originally meant ‘alive, alert.’ It reached the Apostles’ Creed and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer ...Less widely appreciated is that the King James ...Version translators deliberately retained words that were already near-archaic by 1611. VN, the poet, would pick ‘quick’ spirit fully aware of these nuances. There’s a majesty lurking behind the ancient usages. We do find this taken to extremes: the KJV-Only cult claim it as THE sole valid version. God’s 1611 English cannot be faulted.
VN’s Exile-hungry remains pleasantly ambiguous. It can mean Hungry-for-Exile or Hungry-because-of-Exile...Joyce’s play, The Exiles, also comes to mind! [..]

 

JM: I just realized that my favorite readings on "English Literature" tend to favor non-native speakers (Nabokov's and Borges's lectures, for instance), perhaps because of their different perspective and independent critical views.Ancient Anglo-Saxon texts, at some point - or so it seems to me - unlike the Russian "Slovo"(?), were influenced by the Roman conquests and by Christian monks but my superficial readings were inspired by one or two problematic points in Nabokov. For example,  Kinbote had me reading (but I didn't go very far into it) Christopher Hill's 1993 "The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution.".

I remember that Brian Boyd also discusses VN and the King James bible in some of his Ada Online annotations, but I don't remember any conclusion related to the choices made by Kinbote (Prof. Hurley's words on Shade's poem sound so arrogant and 'godly" that I think it was also Kinbote who invented them...) *.

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* - two samples:

1."Another pronouncement publicly made by Prof. Hurley and his clique refers to a structural matter. I quote from the same interview: 'None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly'."
2."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."