Lolita / Лолита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

The wings of the driver’s Marlenesque[76 - Marlenesque – подобный Марлен (Дитрих)] nose shone, having shed or burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue about the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile, while I prayed we would never get to that store, but we did.

I have nothing else to report, save, primo[77 - primo– (лат.) во-первых]: that big Haze had little Haze sit behind on our way home, and secundo[78 - secundo– (лат.

Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People’s Encyclopaedia, I found a map of the States that a child’s pencil had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school.

A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this �Haze, Dolores’ (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses – a fairy princess between her two maids of honour. I am trying to analyse the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those others. What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil (�Dolores’) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask? Is �mask’ the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semi-translucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colourful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry.