Line 803:  a misprint

 

Translators of Shade’s poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of “mountain” into “fountain”:  it cannot be rendered in French or German, or Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue’s galleries of words.  However!  There exists to my knowledge one absolutely extraordinary, unbelievably elegant case, where not only two, but three words are involved.  The story itself is trivial enough (and probably apocryphal).  A newspaper account of a Russian tsar’s coronation had, instead of korona (crown), the misprint vorona (crow), and when next day this was apologetically “corrected,” it got misprinted a second time as korova (cow).  The artistic correlation between the crown-crow-cow series and the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet.  I have seen nothing like it on lexical playfields and the odds against the double coincidence defy computation.

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