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
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
>