Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books-- An Upsilamba to You Too!

Currently, Iran is a topic on many minds, and Reading Lolita in Tehran offers an interesting peek into life in Iran during the revolution.  I'm sure that this book is especially interesting to those who wish to understand the confluence of Islam, politics, and gender.  Certainly, it's treatment of the subject of the veil is much more insightful than one would get from the most recent Sex and the City film.  However, to me anyways, Reading Lolita is primarily a book for book lovers and literature for literature lovers.  It appeals not only to the bibliophile in me (it after all encouraged me to ACTUALLY READ Lolita, rather than just say I should do it "someday"), but also to the lexophile.

"I step into the dining room with eight slim-waisted glasses whose honey-colored liquid trembles seductively.  At this point, I hear Yassi shout triumphantly, "Upsilamba!"  She throws the word at me like a ball, and I take a mental leap to catch it.

Upsilamba!--the word carries me back to the spring of 1994, when four of my girls and Nima were auditing a class I was teaching on the twentieth-century novel.  The class's favorite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.  In this novel, Nabokov 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 an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences."

No one in class had bothered to ask what that word meant.  No one, that is, who was properly taking the class--for many of my old student just stayed on and sat in on my classes long after their graduation.  Often, they were more interested and worked harder than my regular students, who were taking the class for credit.  Thus it was that those who audited the class--including Nassrin, Manna, Nima, Mahshid and Yassi--had one day gathered in my office to discuss this and a number of other questions.

I decided to play a little game with the class, to test their curiosity.  On the midterm exam, one of the questions was "Explain the significance of the word upsilamba in the context of Invitation to a Beheading  What does the word mean, and how does it relate to the main theme of the novel?"  Except for four or five students, no one had any idea what I could possibly mean, a point I did not forget to remind them of every once in a while throughout the rest of that term

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.  So that first day in our private class, we let our minds play again and invented new meanings of our own.

I said I associated upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap.  Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be the name of a dance--you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me."  I proposed that for the next time, they each write a sentence or two explaining what the word meant to them.

Manna suggested that upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake.  Nima added in parentheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from you class: an upsilamba to you too!  For Azin it was a sound, a melody.  Mahshid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting "Upsilamba!" with each leap.  For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name.  Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh.  And to Nassrin it was the magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasure."

I love this kind of word-play!  To me the word upsilamba evokes sweaty summers in the gymnastics gym.  It's the sound you make as you leap for the high bar at the end of an exhausting workout, and you realize half-way up that your hands will hit the bar, but you will not be able to grasp it.  It's a half grunt half exhausted sigh-- Upsilamba!

What image/sound/etc. does upsilamba evoke for you?