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AFTERTHOUGHTS: Plato in Pale Fire
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from Alexey Sklyarenko:
Aristophanes' speech (in Plato's Symposium): "Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth..."
The moon, progenitor of the fabulous man-woman race, is also important in Pale Fire - if only because it figures in Shakespeare's lines that provide Shade with the title for his poem: "The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun". The quotation is from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Note that the scene of Plato's Symposium is the house of the poet Agathon at Athens.
Also, I think that students of Pale Fire (including this one) should read Rozanov's Lyudi lunnogo sveta: metafizika khristianstva ("People of the Moonlight:* Metaphysics of Christianity", 1911).
Btw., I notice that Kinbote (in his note to ll. 39-40) changes the moon's gender to masculine when he mistranslates those lines by Shakespeare back from Zemblan: "The moon is a thief: / he steals his silvery light from the sun". Curious that German Mond (to be sure, made in Hamburg) and Zemblan what-do-you-call-it are masculine, while French lune is feminine. As to the Russian, we have the feminine luna and the masculine mesyats (the latter being also Russian for "month").
*as Rozanov called homosexuals
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Aristophanes' speech (in Plato's Symposium): "Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth..."
The moon, progenitor of the fabulous man-woman race, is also important in Pale Fire - if only because it figures in Shakespeare's lines that provide Shade with the title for his poem: "The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun". The quotation is from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Note that the scene of Plato's Symposium is the house of the poet Agathon at Athens.
Also, I think that students of Pale Fire (including this one) should read Rozanov's Lyudi lunnogo sveta: metafizika khristianstva ("People of the Moonlight:* Metaphysics of Christianity", 1911).
Btw., I notice that Kinbote (in his note to ll. 39-40) changes the moon's gender to masculine when he mistranslates those lines by Shakespeare back from Zemblan: "The moon is a thief: / he steals his silvery light from the sun". Curious that German Mond (to be sure, made in Hamburg) and Zemblan what-do-you-call-it are masculine, while French lune is feminine. As to the Russian, we have the feminine luna and the masculine mesyats (the latter being also Russian for "month").
*as Rozanov called homosexuals
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/