love in a dead language
There are tons of VN references in this terrific, funny, relentlessly inventive novel. I'm sure I missed a few. Or more than a few. Way more.Leopold Roth, Indologist antihero and principal narrator, falls for Lalita, a second-generation Indian-American student. So there are some literal Lolita/Lalita overlaps1:
"Folded over and inserted in the manuscript of this first notebook of Roth's Kamasutra were several sheets of lined legal-size yellow paper on which Roth had hand written a thousand cognomina, presumably sobriquets for his beloved Lalita: some phonic (Lolita, Lilata, Lulita, Lewd-Lee-ta, Kalita, Nalita, Jolly-ta, Polly-ta, Bali-ta, Call-ita, Wall-ita, All-eat-a, Tall-ita, Dolly-ta, Moll-ita, Volley-ta, Hall-ita, Pall-ita, GAll-ita, Folly-ta, Fall-ita, Qualita); some anagrammatic (Atilla, Illata, La Tail)."
"'Normally two years of Sanskrit is a prerequisite, but, well, I suppose if you are really interested in having your daughter, Lolita...'
"He corrected me: 'No, not Lo-lita, La-lita, Lalita!'"
More striking (and funnier) are the Pale Fire parallels. Anang Saighal, a graduate student of Roth's and commentator of the professor's manuscript, is sane and agreeable but nonetheless undeniably Kinbotian ("I protested that I do not drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or eat meat," he even says at one point). Roth, like John Shade, has lost a daughter -- I'm not sure if that's a deliberate reference, but both dead daughters are evoked in more or less the same beautiful, poignant manner.
Also, Zembla, Pale Fire's distant northern land, makes several appearances:
"The text has been translated into English by Sir Richard Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883) and S.C. Upadhyaya (1961), French by E. Lamairesse (1891) and Alain Daiélou (1992), German by Richard Schmidt (1907), Russian by Nikolay Stavorogin (1918), Hindi by Pandit Madhavacharya (1934) and Bipinchandra Bandhu (1943), Panjavi by Kashinath Saighal (1922), Persian by Pralayananga Lilaraja (1661), Oriya by Vasishtha Mohanti (1939), Zemblan by Romulus Arnor (1956), and Japanese by Henry Kamisato (1996)."
"My heart lubdubbed itself into a gyroscopic spin. Oh, her use of the precious present participle, 'fucking,' from the Indo-European peik, cognate with the Latin pungere, related to the Germanic ficken, purloined from the Middle Dutch fokken, associated with the Zemblan fogun, universalized in the Esperanto fuga."
"I think is is imperative (and legitimating) that we provide the Sanskrit text in Devanagari script and in transliteration into a variety of other scripts including, of course, Roman (and both Braille for the blind and sign language for the hearing impaired); and then there should be a choice of translations, English of course, but also French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi, and indeed as many as possible (including Yiddish, Lepcha, Zemblan, and Esperanto)."
[Note Screen 5 in page 159 of the hardback]
"The Kamasutra was translated into Zemblan verse by the poet Romulus Armor (1914-58), who had retired to an ashram in Rishikesh during World War II. He also translated the Bhagavadgita from Sanskrit (1943), as well as Ovid's Ars amatoria from Latin (1925). The graphic images on screen five represent on of the semantic curiosities and wonders of Zemblan. When a woman says 'I love you' in that language, the mouth replicates the actions of the vagina in orgasm from the excitement phase (I/jo) through the plateu phase (love/leva) to the resolution phase (you/zua); so too, when a man says 'I love you' in Zemblan, his tongue imitates the movement of the penis from flaccid (I/ya) to the erect stage (love/lev) and back down again (you/vi). The breath is different too. This is in part a result of the fact that, in Zemblan, all personal pronouns (not simply the third-person singular as in English, nor only the third-person singular and plural ones as in French and Sanskrit) are gendered. The word for 'I' or 'me' is different for a man than for a woman; so too the gender of 'you' is always indicated, whether male, female, or both. Zemblan is an intensely carnal language, giving verbal expression to anatomical, physiological, and glandular activity. It is ejaculatory parlance. To say 'I love you' is to make love. To hold those words back, restraining premature articulation, intensifies the final release. In Zembla, being unable to speak of love is considered a kind of linguistic impotence or frigidity. 'I (jo/ja)' brings a drop of mucous to the lips; 'you (zua/vi)' causes contractions of the larynx; and 'love (leva/lev)' requires a high level of cortical activity. Zemblan, like many Sanskritic languages, is well suited to charades, hence Roth's interest. The great Conmal termed Zemblan 'the forked tongue of tongues.'"
"Bhagavanlal Indraji was commissioned by Foster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot to do a Hindustani gloss of the Kamasutra with a rough English translation, which was then reworked by Edward Rehatsek, the Austro-Hungarian Sanskrit scholar who had gone to Inidia in 1847 to teach German, French, Zemblan, and Latin (as well as comparative philology and systematic phonology). Retiring in 1871, Rehatsek began to wear Indian clothes and to cohabit with a 'native girl in a house of reeds.' ...There is a great leap from Pandit Bhagavanlal Indraji's rough rendering to Sir Richard Burton's witty re-re-re-rendition. In a manuscript in the Burton collection at the Huntington Library, Roth had discovered remains of the first stab, among them the good pandit's translation of the passage in question: 'Veranda going for moon orb watching, Sahib and Mensahib are talking, talking, most talkatively. Sab is saying this star and that star are this and that.'"
"Since the dawn of time travelers have gone to India in search of majesty and mystery, for spices and romance, for adventure and spiritual enlightenment. They've come in groups like the Greeks and the Persians, the Portuguese and the Zemblans, the Dutch and the French and of course, the British, whose legacy will astound you. Or they have come questing as individuals like Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Thomas Lovely, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Burton, and the Beatles."
[The motto for Part A. (Failure and Success) of Chapter VII (Esoterica Erotica), comes from Charles Kinbote's foreword to Pale Fire: "For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word."]
In the bibliography:
"McCarthy, Mary. 'Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.' Encounter 19 (October 1962): 76.
"...
"Proffer, Carl R. Keys to Nabokov's Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.
"...
"Shade, John. 'Pale Fire.' Edited by Charles Kinbote. New Wye: Wordsmith College Press, 1966.
"...
"Zernovon, Remus Radomir. Zemblan-English Dictionary. Bokay: Queen Blenda Press, 1908."
- Some choice links: Salon excerpts from the novel, a (totally justifiable) rave review by Salon, a Hawaii student newspaper article on the novel, the Complete Review's review, and an interview with Mr. Siegel.
- Many thanks to John Glick for bringing Lee Siegel's wonderful novel to my attention.
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1. Other than the obvious (metaphoric) one, paraphrased from the critic paraphrased by VN in his "On a Book Entitled Lolita", the one about Old Europe debauching Young America; only in this case it's the New (Western) World debauching -- well, actually Roth also debauches Young America, but he thinks of it or her -- of what Lalita means or is -- as something or someone else (which could also be said of Humbert Humbert). Back