Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017486, Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:59:24 +0000

Subject
Re: QUERY: Bend Sinister poem?
Date
Body
Tim: I don¹t have Bend Sinister handy, but the following, possibly relevant
quotes appear in Priscilla Meyer¹s Find What the Sailor Has Hidden (p 82)

The original Timon of Athens Act IV sc iii:
The sun¹s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon¹s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
The sea¹s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.

Priscilla then adds: ³Kinbote¹s translation back into English from Uncle
Conmal¹s Zemblan translation of Timon reads:

The sun is a thief, she lures the sea
And robs it. The moon is a thief:
He steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon. (Note to lines 39-40)

Priscilla continues: ³We may conclude that in Zemblan, as in Anglo-Saxon and
modern German, the sun is feminine, and the moon is masculine.²

Priscilla doesn¹t mention that Kinbote¹s sea is now overtly neuter (it).
Worth noting the relevance of these gender shifts to the debate with JA/JM
re-translational hurdles. Many LitCritters go all GIDDY over genders,
reading irrelevant sex-genders into grammatical-genders! Compare the Russian
choices of Motherland and Fatherland! I studied Prouvencau in Mouns (Mons),
Var, and was AMAZED that ­o was generally a Feminine ending; -a was usually
Masculine. SO MUCH FOR INHERENT INTUITIVE PHONOLOGY.

From a quick browse, all her refs to Bend Sinister concern the translations
of [G/H]amlet, not Timon.

Hope this helps.

PS: Good news for iPod Touch and iPhone users. A FREE application from the
ap.store called SHAKESPEARE, gives you searchable online-text access to ALL
the plays. And thus on my small hand-held SCREEN, scrolling Act IV of Timon
of Athens, I meet another ref to moonlight reflections, but this time he
speaks of the moon as a BORROWER not a THIEF:

ALCBiades: How came the noble Timon to this change?

TIMon: As the moon does, by wanting light to give;
But then renew I could not, like the moon;
There were no suns to borrow of.

This is HiTech serendipity at its highest!

skb



On 16/12/2008 03:43, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:

> Anybody have a copy of Bend Sinister handy? There's a poem I wanted to
> quote -- I remember it as some version of the Shakespeare Timon of
> Athens passage from which the title of Pale Fire is drawn -- "The moon
> is an arrant thief" -- but different. Can someone help me? Thanks!
> --Tim Henderson
>


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