Another interesting point is related to the nature of the "Aleph," as detailed by Borges in a post-script to his story, arises while he mentions Sir Richard Burton, The Arabian Nights and ancient magic mirrors  It brings out a new angle to consider Gradus=Death in Pale Fire, because of the existing link bt. Jakob Gradus and the Zemblan expert mirror-maker, whose name is a mirror-image of Gradus's, when we keep in mind that Zemblan, according to Conmal, is "the tongue of the mirror." 

Zembla is a name like the one that indicates the narrator's native land in "The Word" - refracted by an angel's single & all-encompassing pronouncement, and by an individual's crude attempt to render it in human language.  Zembla is related to the magic power of mirrors and other luminous points, such as the Aleph, and to the infinite succession of Arabian stories and oriental mysticism. Zembla, as I understand it, serves not only as an emblem of homeland and death but of  an intuited "hereafter" in Nabokov..

 

Sudarg of Bokay's mirror is of "cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay. She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young — little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing." 
It's also worth recollecting Kinbote's comments, on Shade's variations when he returns to Pale Fire's first verses:: "The exquisite melody of the two lines opening the poem is picked up here. The repetition of that long-drawn note is saved from monotony by the subtle variation in line 132 where the assonance between its second word and the rhyme gives the ear a kind of languorous pleasure as would the echo of some half-remembered sorrowful song whose strain is more meaningful than its words. Today, when the "feigned remoteness" has indeed performed its dreadful duty, and the poem we have is the only "shadow" that remains, we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. We feel doom, in the image of Gradus, eating away the miles and miles of "feigned remoteness" between him and poor Shade. He, too, is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will shatter him."

.

 

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* - The year before Nabokov wrote this story was marked by his father's murder in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall

 

**- A poet makes comments about his poem, as told by the narrator in a story by JLBorges: "And what do you tell me of thad find of mine: white-celeste? This picturesque neologism insinuates the sky, which is a very important factor in the Australian landscape. Without this evocation, the colors of the sketch would be much too somber [...] he read me four or five pages of his poem. He had made corrections in accordance with a depraved principle of verbal ostentation: where he had formerly written azurish, he now put azuritic, azuritish , and even azury. The word lacteous proved not ungly enough for him: in the course of an impetuous description of a wool washer, he preferred lactary, lactinous, lactescent, lactiferous..."  I couldn't avoid thinking about Stan Kelly-Bootle's comments on neologisms and adjectivations in English, referred to Nabokov's viatic, mollitude, "dulcitude" and other argute inventions [Cf. Nab-L postings in October 2011, with the subject "Antidulcinist"].

 

# - Matthew 25:30 – Jorge Luis Borges
And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The first bridge on Constitution. At my feet
the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths.
Steam hisses up and up into the night
which becomes, at a stroke, the Night of the Last Judgment.
From the unseen horizon,
and from the very center of my being,
an infinite voice pronounced these things–
things, not words. This is my feeble translation,
time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word:
"Stars, bread, libraries of East and West,
playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars,
a human body to walk with on the earth,
fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death,
shadows for forgetting, mirrors which endlessly multiply,
falls in music, gentlest of all time's shapes,
borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and morning,
a bronze weight, a copy of Grettir Saga,
algebra and fire, the charge at Junin in your blood,
days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle,
love, and the imminence of love, and intolerable remembering,
dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,
and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy–
all this was given to you and, with it,
the ancient nourishment of heroes–
treachery, defeat, humiliation.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain
the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem."
Art of Poetry, The
 
To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

(copied from a blog in the internet)

 

## - The Aleph: "O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space." Hamlet, II, 2
"But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place." Leviathan, IV, 46