The Title
A "bend sinister" is a heraldic device: a bar drawn from the upper left to the lower right on a coat of arms (from the point of view of the person wearing the shield). A "bend," the standard stripe on a coat of arms, is the opposite, from the right shoulder of the wearer diagonally down to lower left. A bend can be referred to as a "bend dexter" to distinguish it from the bend sinister. In an edition in 1963, Nabokov explains, "This choice of a title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life."
There is a great deal of wordplay in the novel, concerning leftward (or sinister) movements.
Read more about this topic: Bend Sinister (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word title:
“Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)