Sandy Klein sends news on VN and synaesthesia "Inside the Mind of a Synaesthete - Diverse Perspectives on Science and Medicine" by Steve Silberman
http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2012/02/06/inside-the-mind-of-a-synaesthete/*

 

JM: The enthusiastic article on Nabokov's "virtuoso synaesthetic reverie," invited me to wonder about how the author's color hearing would have influenced Kinbote's Zemblan rendition of Charles: would it subliminally sound like a light brown "k," as in Karl,, or as a light blue "c" when he writes in English? 

 

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* For Nabokov,."V is a kind of pale, transparent pink...And the N, on the other hand, is  a greyish-yellowish oatmeal color" In Speak, Memory: ”The long a of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand-mirror of o take care of the white… Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z and huckleberry h. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”For the essayist, "One of the ravishing pleasures of reading Nabokov is sensing a deep rightness in his word choices (even in English, which was his second language) that goes beyond having a knack for finding le mot juste to make his prose cohere at every level: phonetic, orthographic, and semiotic."