upsilamba

Upsilamba!

In Azar Nafisi’s own words, from her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran…

Upsilamba! - the word carries me back to the spring of 1994, when four of my class girls and Numa were auditing a class I was teaching on the twentieth-century novel. The class’s favorite novel Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel Nobokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. Even as a child, Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the freshness and beauty of language, while other children “understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in a unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with some wondrous consequences.”

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokov’s fanciful creations, possibly a word he invented out of upsilon, the twentieth letter in the Greek alphabet, and lambda, the eleventh.

Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret language of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his readers to feel in the act of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones. It also became the code word that opened the secret cave of remembrance.

From Nabakov’s Invitation to a Beheading

They had no words that would end in an unexpected way, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences.

…more

• the magical name of a small boy in Africa
• the image of small silver fish leaping in a out of a moonlit lake
• the paradox of a blissful sigh
• a dance
• a sound or a melody