Le poème de Nabokov

Voilà un extrait de Lolita, 1955. Le poème qui suit devrait être enseigné à tous les petits enfants, à l'école primaire. Qui s'en offenserait? On m'a bien appris les Voyelles érotiques d'Arthur au CP.

Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People's Encyclopedia, 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. It is a poem I know already by heart.

      Angel, Grace 
      Austin, Floyd 
      Beale, Jack 
      Beale, Mary 
      Buck, Daniel 
      Byron, Marguerite 
      Campbell, Alice 
      Carmine, Rose 
      Chatfield, Phyllis 
      Clarke, Gordon 
      Cowan, John 
      Cowan, Marion 
      Duncan, Walter 
      Falter, Ted 
      Fantasia, Stella 
      Flashman, Irving 
      Fox, George 
      Glave, Mabel 
      Goodale, Donald 
      Green, Lucinda 
      Hamilton, Mary Rose 
      Haze, Dolores 
      Honeck, Rosaline 
      Knight, Kenneth 
      McCoo, Virginia 
      McCrystal, Vivian 
      McFate, Aubrey 
      Miranda, Anthony 
      Miranda, Viola 
      Rosato, Emil 
      Schlenker, Lena 
      Scott, Donald 
      Sheridan, Agnes 
      Sherva, Oleg 
      Smith, Hazel 
      Talbot, Edgar 
      Talbot, Edwin 
      Wain, Lull 
      Williams, Ralph 
      Windmuller, Louise

     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 honor. I am trying to analyze 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 semitranslucent 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 colorful 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. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov