
Melting with Tenderness: Vladimir Nabokov on “Apostrophes” - tintinnabula
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/melting-with-tenderness/
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barrkel
This is Nabokov's written responses for a TV interview.

The language is sumptuous. Reading Nabokov is to me the linguistic equivalent
of eating ice-cream.

> People of settled professions, calm oysters firmly attached to their native
> mother-of-pearl

> A very strong bedside light, the lighthouse of my insomnias

> the fluted and sonorous song of the blackbirds

> Sometimes it’s a digression that turns into a drama in a corner of the
> narrative, or the metaphors of an extended essay that join up to form a new
> story.

> I remember with what a shiver of delight, envy, and anguish I watched on the
> television screen man’s first floating steps on the talcum powder of our
> satellite and how I despised all those who maintained it wasn’t worth the
> expense of billions of dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world.

> One must draw everything one can from words, because it’s the one real
> treasure a true writer has. Big general ideas are in yesterday’s newspaper.
> If I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or
> dull or adorned with motley hues absent on its upperside, it’s not at all
> out of idle curiosity, one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the
> underside of a word – unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between
> them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word.
> Serious wordplay, as I have in mind, is neither a game of chance nor a mere
> embellishment of style. It’s a new verbal species that the marvelling author
> offers to the poor reader, who doesn’t want to look; to the good reader, who
> suddenly sees a completely new facet of an iridescent sentence.

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wazoox
Visible (at least in part) on Youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpjTgHMUbAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpjTgHMUbAk)

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REDDitMen
"Apostrophes" being a French TV show. A-post-troff.

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dang
We've put some quotes up there. What does "A-post-troff" mean?

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Freak_NL
Presumably the French pronunciation of _apostrophes_.

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dang
Ahh bien sûr!

