Many thanks, Sergei. Am I right in thinking
that the primary meaning of mesyats
is the time interval, month? English, of course, also plays
figuratively exchanging month for moon: Many long moons have passed and
gone ... But not in the other direction. We have Eliot’s Cruel Month.
But you don’t hear Pale Month, or O Month of my delight
that knowst no wain. Well, now you have. Sorry.
I see Full Moon translated ‘literally’ as Polnolunyie. New
Moon, its opposite syzygy-wise (a Nabokovian-type term one seldom gets
the chance to show off) is blessed with two Russian forms: molodoi
mesyats [young moon] or novoluniye. Is there anything
deeper going on here, beyond the pleasant alliteration of molodoi
mesyats?
PS: “ ... even for a Russian intelligent reader.” (p 324, L’Envoi,
Lectures on Russian Literature, Harvest/Harcourt, 1981)
Have others noticed a rather arcane aspect of English grammar here?
Without knowing why, most native Anglophobes sense an incorrect
adjectival inversion, preferring “an intelligent Russian reader.” In
his “The Native Speaker Dead,” Tom Paikeday argues that there’s no
satisfactory definition of Native Speaker, although the concept plays a
key role in Chomsky’s theories. Tom objected to adverts for teachers
that demanded Native Speakers in a specified language. How does this
requirement compare with highly-fluent competence? Are there
oral/written tests to distinguish Native Speakers from highly-fluent
ones. Both classes are likely to make mistakes in tests, yet competent
languages users were being turned for not having the right parents.
Whence the interest in obscure grammatical rules, possibly nowhere
documented, and known only to Native Speakers via some innate and
unique capacity. Here we might be catching Nabokov making a
rare non-Native slip?
http://www.paikeday.net/speaker.pdf
Stan Kelly-Bootle
****************
EdNote--Without double-checking things, I'd bet that this "intelligent"
should have been printed "intelligent", as in Russian
интеллигент--a member of the Russian intelligentsia--a complex concept
that refers much more to progressive politics than to "intelligence" in
the Anglo-American sense. I'm pretty sure that elsewhere he discusses
the Russian intelligent in detail. ~SB