[PW] "speechless multilinguist" in Nabakov's ADA

[Michael Hart]

Daniel Defoe comes to mind at first glance. . . .

mh

On Fri, 23 Mar 2007, Dennis Lien wrote:

>
> The following passage appears in Nabakov's ADA, OR ARDOR:
>
> http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
>
> (part one, chapter 36)
>
>  	By July the ten A's had dwindled to nine, and the four D's to
> 	three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned
> 	Armchair, but the D was lost—faking the fate of its apostro-
> 	phizable double as imagined by a Walter C. Keyway, Esq., just
> 224.10 	before the latter landed, with a couple of unstamped postcards,
> 	in the arms of a speechless multilinguist in a frock coat with
> 	brass buttons. The wit of the Veens (says Ada in a marginal
> 	note) knows no bounds.
>
> **********
>
> The context is a scrabble game;  "Walter C. Keyway, Esq." is apparently
> a pun for  "Walter seek a way, ask."  But a colleague is trying to
> puzzle out what the rest of this passage means -- especially if there
> is some famous (or obscure) "speechless multilinguist in a frock
> coat with brass buttons" whose initials are D D in history or literature
> or whatever that he should be recognizing.  (The annotations in the version
> of ADA above haven't gotten to this point yet.)  Does anyone have a suggestion?
>
> Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
> Project Wombat
> list at project-wombat.org
> http://www.project-wombat.org/
>