Mrs. Wilsons True Tales Retold

(corresponding to “The Bird-Headed Woman”) Aq!asXe’nasXena, the name of the one whom I call the Bird-headed Woman in my rendition, is an untranslated name, now untranslatable name. To what it refers was not known by Boas or his confidant, Charles Cultee. So too, the name of the boy in the story is an untranslated, untranslatable name, Itcixia’ne, which name was given to him at the end of the story. It is suggested by Boas parenthetically that this name pertains to the strange celestial phenomenon, called sundogs or (in Greek) parhelion, which is the meteorological appearance of a frost-ringed sun, or if the sun is setting, the appearance of a sun with paired orbiculate ghosts beside it, equidistant on either side, at the span of the horizon.... and that rare phenomenon
The iridule--when beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range….(From Vladimir Nabokov's introduction to his 1962 novel Pale Fire)Like frenetic hallucination, the tale is disjointed, nervous and bizarre; it lurches sickly, ar