C.Kunin: Interesting
that in Pale Fire the insect is a cicada - in English the usual translation of
the fable is "the Grasshopper and the Ant." Can anyone tell the difference
between cicada and grasshopper? They don't resemble each other, I know that
much. I purchased some cloth napkins recently with a design made up of what I
took to be bees (a la Napoleon), but the owner of the shop said no, they are
cicadas. as it Nabokov or La Fontaine who changed grasshopper to cicada? and
what was it originally in Aesop's Greek.
Jansy Mello: Hi, Carolyn.
I suggest we let Charles Kinbote do the explaining. In his words
to Line 238: empty emerald case
"This, I
understand, is the semitransparent envelope left on a tree trunk by an adult
cicada that has crawled up the trunk and emerged. Shade said that he had once
questioned a class of three hundred students and only three knew what a cicada looked like.
Ignorant settlers had dubbed it "locust," which is, of course, a grasshopper,
and the same absurd mistake has been made by generations of translators of
Lafontaine’s La
Cigale et
la Fourmi
(see lines 243-244). The cigale’s companion piece, the ant, is about
to be embalmed in amber."
Matt Roth: “Mandible” chimes with “Mandevil,” the
surname of the Zemblan cousins Mirador (good) and Radomir (bad). So there may be
some connection to Kinbote’s tale. But I have never been able to shake a
supplementary echo from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (IV.2), which ends with a
song by the clown, Feste (who has been engaged in trying to convince a sane man,
Malvolio, that he is mad) [ ] Vice
was the devil’s fool in the old morality plays, wherein he tried to pare the
devil’s long nails with his wooden sword. If we look back at the passage in
“PF,” we see that the next line after the “mandible” line reads: “And so I pare
my nails . . . .” In my fever dream, then, Shade is the mad lad (“in my
demented youth”), the man-devil, paring his nails. And if “man devil” =
“mandible,” we can then can read the passage as “Shade is dead, but his poem
will live on by way of Kinbote.” As I said, highly speculative, but one of those
private associations that nonetheless vibrates a little in my upper
spine.
Carolyn Kunin: Not ready to join you on your
twig (though as usual I can find no argument against it), but as it happens I
recently found my old high school book on Shakespeare's songs (from my time in
high school, I mean). I thought I knew most if not all of the hundred songs by
heart, but did not recognize the one you quoted.Well, it'
not in the book, but Tom Kines, the collator, says that the New York Library
alone has some 200 songs that were sung in the plays. As more of a poprigunya
(grasshopper) than an ant, I salute your
efforts. ..
Jansy Mello: Interesting connection between morality
play's Vice, the man-devil paring his nails and Shade's lines about his
nail paring after a reference to mandible. Such a pleasure to learn about
it! Nabokov must have been familiar, then, with the song and with the
devil's fool wooden sword.
I cannot follow you on "Shade is dead,but his poem will live on by way of
Kinbote" (it's not as metaphoric as, say, the cicada's song lives in
spirit and the thrifty ant is merely embalmed in
'amber')