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