Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017490, Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:02:14 -0500

Subject
QUERY: Bend Sinister poem?
From
Date
Body
That's it! It was right here in front of me in Pale Fire after all!
Right thread (Shakespeare translation), wrong woof entirely. Woof,
woof, woof. Thanks, Stan...
Tim Henderson
.

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 1:59 PM, Stan Kelly-Bootle <skb@bootle.biz>
wrote:
> Tim: I don't have Bend Sinister handy, but the following, possibly
relevant
> quotes appear in Priscilla Meyer's Find What the Sailor Has Hidden (p
82)
>
> The original Timon of Athens Act IV sc iii:
> The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
> Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
> And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
> The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
> The moon into salt tears.
>
> Priscilla then adds: "Kinbote's translation back into English from
Uncle
> Conmal's 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: "We may conclude that in Zemblan, as in
Anglo-Saxon and
> modern German, the sun is feminine, and the moon is masculine."
>
> Priscilla doesn't mention that Kinbote's 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
>

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