Taking a sickle to the balls

(Lord Sumption on Boris's 'hammer and sickle' attitude)

In the UK, on the eve of the Supreme Court hearings on two challenges to Boris Johnson's decision to prorogate (suspend) the Parliament, a prominent lawyer Jonathan Sumption QC used a loaded metaphor to describe the situation. 

On BBC television's Newsnight programme he said: 

"If you behave outrageously and defy the political culture on which our constitution depends, a lot of judges are going to be tempted to push the limits out.

"Boris Johnson has taken a hammer and sickle to our political culture in a way that is highly provocative to people who believe that there ought to be solutions consistent with our traditions."

Now, hammer and sickle, of course is a well-known communist emblem. It originated early in the Russian Revolution, roughly at the same time as swastika was being adopted by the nazis in Germany. Today, it is still in wide circulation in Russia and remains in use in the remaining communist countries but banned in many others as the symbol of brutal totalitarian oppression.

Which makes Lord Sumption's application beautifully apposite. He says, in effect, that Johnson is disregarding the delicate constitutional setup of Britain. Disregarding it to the point of destruction in a bolshevist manner, applying the 'hammer and sickle'.

While this meaning is widely known in the West, few would know, I think, another Russian idiomatic expression with the sickle — пройтись серпом по яйцам, take a sickle to the balls. It may not be for a polite company, but basically means the same as in the above quotation by the Right Honourable Lord Sumption, to harm someone, to damage, to assault brutally, literally — to castrate.

Which, to finish this, may be added to the notebooks of those who see the hammer and sickle as a Dan Brownesque sexual symbol, hammer for man, sickle for woman.

Here is a clip from Newsnight's Twitter with Lord Sumption's quote. (Watch a longer, more detailed 2 min video of the interview is on The New European site) 

“If you... defy the political culture on which our constitution depends, a lot of judges are going to be tempted to push the limits out."

Lord Sumption says “Boris Johnson is taking a hammer and sickle to our political culture in a way that is highly provocative.”#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/96ac9vA3Cy

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) September 16, 2019

Roman Numerals for Months Avoid Ambiguity.

In most countries of the world the day-month-year date format is used. On various official forms it is represented as DD/MM/YY for double digit representation.

The US tradition of putting the month before the day sometimes is confusing, even to professionals. One translator cited an example of a colleague mistakenly translating 9/11 as the ninth of November!

I was teaching English students about days, dates, months and years in Russian and mentioned in passing that Roman numerals are traditionally used to represent months, i.e. American 9/11 (September the eleventh) would be IX/11 with Roman numerals for months, while in Russian/European format it would be 11/IX (the eleventh of September). Some were quite impressed (the group of adult professionals included Brits, Americans, Italians and Chinese) with how easy it makes to avoid confusion between American and non-American dates.

Arabic numerals are commonly used these days for months alongside Roman. When pronounced the month can also be referred to by its number, одиннадцатого девятого. Even though 9/11 is recognised in Russia for what it represents, the awkwardness of quickly switching from one format to the other is still preventing 9/11 from being widely used. Instead the phrase "attack on the Twin Towers" — "атака на Башни-близнецы" is used.

A map of date formats used in the world (graphic by Typhoon2013). Cyan for DD/MM, magenta for MM/DD —

Baba Yaga.

Baba Yaga
by Viktor Vasnetsov, o/c, 1917.
One of the better known images in Russia.

The Guardian has a lovely piece about the witch Baba Yaga (Баба Яга, in Russian the stress in the last 'a' - yaGA) in Russian folk tales and a new illustrated edition of folk tales in English.

Here's an excerpt:

"Baba Yaga appears in many other Russian fairy tales. In The Magic Swan Geese, Baba Yaga sends her magic birds to steal a boy away from his sister. The proud sister scoffs at the river and the trees when they offer to help her find him, but when she finds out the evil fate that Baba Yaga plans for her brother, she might just change her mind…

But Baba Yaga is not always the villain in Russian folklore. In Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What, a wonderfully weird tale involving a bird princess, a magic ring, merchants, servants and quick trip to the Underworld, she transforms from Wicked Witch to Wise Woman, lending the hero a helping hand."

Read 'Baba Yaga, and the howlings of Russian pseudo-patriots.' (In Russian, but includes a charming Australian vlogger talking about her fascination with Baba Yaga and Russian folklore.)

Baba Yaga's theme from Mussorgsky's 'Pictures from an Exhibition' suite -

Comp.

(New Russian)

Computer, in English usually contracted to PC or a Mac, if you are a mac fan, in Russian has become a comp — комп. It is a contraction from компьютер.

The o sound is distinct while the p struggles and appears distinctively pronounced when the word is declined and a vowel appears after the p, i.e. genitive - компа.

A search in the National Corpus of Russian Language shows a puzzling appearance of the word since 1820, probably in a different sense, but the current usage takes off in the naughties (see the diagramme here and examples here). My explanation is that in that decade the coinage, originally childspeak, had been increasingly adopted first by parents, who started using it themselves, and then, as the children of the 90s grew up, by the general public. Comp for computer became a widely used replacement for the full computer, both in spoken and written speech.

The word computer (компьютер) itself is of course from English. It has replaced the 50-60s word ЭВМ (электронно-вычислительная машина - electronic computing machine). What is fascinating about comp is that it appears to be an original home-grown Russian derivative. 'Comp' in English is used for a variety purposes, compilation, comparison etc., but not for a computer. (see this Wikipedia article)

See other Tetradki articles on new Russian by clicking here or on the Pushkin icon. Pushkin graphic by A.Anichkin.

Arseny Tarkovsky Compass Awards.

Арсений Тарковский 
(1907-1989, photo mid 30s)

Cardinal Points Journal is holding their Arseny Tarkovsky translations awards ceremony and readings in New York this Saturday  (Poets House, at 4 pm.). Cardinal Points has had Russian poetry translation contests for several years now, each devoted to one particular poet. Last year's contest was dedicated to Arseny Tarkovsky, father of the film director Andrey. (wikipedia about Arseny and a portrait gallery of him.)

Winning translations will appear on the Cardinal Points website and in the 5th volume of the almanac scheduled to come out in a few months.

Cardinal Points website is here and direct link to Tarkovsky contest page is here, for additional information mail Compass (compass at StoSvet dot net) or go to their facebook page. 

This translation by Laurence Bogoslaw (USA) won the first prize. 

In autumn’s final weeks, on the decline 

Of bitter life,

Filled to the brim with wistfulness, I walked

Into a leafless, nameless wood.

It was engulfed from edge to edge in milk-

White fog like frosted glass. Its hoary branches

Dripped tears distilled like those

That only trees weep on the eve

Of winter that drains everything of color.

And then a miracle occurred: at sunset

Out of a raincloud peeked a gleam of blue,

A ray of light broke through, as bright as June,

A weightless spear of birdsong cast 

From future days back to my past.

And now the trees stood weeping on the eve

Of noble works and festive offerings

Of cheerful whirlwinds luffing in the azure;

And bluebirds started dancing in a ring

Like hands upon a keyboard, rising measures

From earth to the highest notes the air can sing.

In the first video, Arseny Tarkovsky reads First Encounters ("Первые свидания") in Andrey Tarkovsky's The Mirror. It is this poem that ends with the haunting lines: 'When fate was stalking us like madman, with razor blade in hand.' In the second video Arseny Tarkovsky reads 'Blurring Sight' ("Меркнет зрение"):

Smileyk.

The internet 'smiley' has been adopted into Russian, but with a diminutive suffix -k. It's not смайли, but смайлик — smileyk or smileek.

It's an interesting case of morphological change as it gives the word masculine gender and also allows declension. If it stayed as it is in English - смайли - it would require neutral gender and no declension. Most probably the change stems from the natural language inclination towards ease of use.

This one is by me, see it on my I Work in Pages blog.

Crimean words in English.

The Thin Red Line.

Ukrainian crisis has brought back place names and events in Crimea that gave English a number of words and phrases some of which are hardly associated now with the war between Russia and a coalition of Britain, France and Turkey (plus the Kingdom of Sardinia) in 1853-1856. 

Here is a short list of Crimean words and phrases in English.

My top three are:

Balaklava (or Balaclava) — a small port to the East of Sevastopol that served as the main British base during the war. It gave name to the type of knitted hat that covers head, neck and most of the face. Patriotic English ladies are said to have produced them en masse for the troops ill-prepared for the harsh Winter campaign. Beloved of terrorists, robbers and spetsnaz in late 20th Century its name became disconnected from its origins. What's interesting is that 'balaclava' wasn't used in the hat sense in Russian until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was imported in the English sense only recently. (choose from a selection of Balaclava articles on Wikipedia.)

Raglan — Lord Raglan was the commander of the British army in Crimea (and died there towards the end of the war.) The invention of raglan, a type of clothing that has sleeves without seams on the shoulders, is named after him. Seamless shoulders allowed freer movement and prevented rainwater from getting under coats. Raglan is still popular. (wiki article about him)

Cardigan — Lord Cardigan was the commander of British light cavalry during the Battle of Balaclava. The Charge of the Light Brigade immortalised him. Tennyson wrote the poem based on a report in The Times and when Cardigan returned to England before the end of the war he was mobbed as a national hero. Only later doubts about his role and character began to emerge. The type of knitted jacket, buttoned down the front and with thick turn-down collar is said to have been introduced by Lord Cardigan. (wiki article about him, wiki about cardigans.) 

Other Crimean words:

Crimea, Crimean War

Sevastopol (often Sebastopol) — Russian naval base and city on the Western tip of Crimea. Site of two long land sieges, during the Crimean War and during the second world war. Young Leo Tolstoy was a front-line artillery officer during the siege and wrote Sebastopol Sketches about the war. They were quickly published, were a huge success and secured Tolstoy's reputation as one of the foremost Russian writers. His method, that fully flourished in War and Peace, can already be seen in the Sketches.

Charge of the Light Brigade, see above.

The Thin Red Line — the phrase comes from the Times correspondent W.H.Russel's account the Highlanders action against the Russian cavalry charge. They formed a line only two deep. It was their gallantry that saved the day at the Battle of Balaclava. Later the phrase came to mean an overstretched defensive effort. 

Alma — is a river in Crimea, site of the first major battle between the coalition and the Russians, won by the invading army. Alma became a popular name in Britain after the battle. Crimean Alma is of Turkic origin. In Crimean Tartar it means 'apple.'

Potemkin, the battleship and the fake villages are also linked to Crimea but of an earlier period. Prince Grigory Potemkin was a favourite of Empress Catherine II. In 1780s he directed Russian military and political advances in the south against Turkey and the Tartars. He annexed Crimea for Russia in 1783. The episode with the building of fake prosperous villages, sometimes just the fronts of houses, is disputed by contemporaries and later historians. It refers to the visit of Catherine to Crimea in 1787. A German account of the trip described the massive building of fake villages on the orders of Potemkin to impress Catherine. 

The Battleship Potemkin, made famous by Eisenstein's 1925 film, was built at the end of 1890s and named after Prince Potemkin. The mutiny described in Eisenstein's film happened in 1905, during the first Russian revolution. 

There are many other references to Crimea in English. Chekhov, for example, lived in Crimea towards the end of his life. The Lady and the Dog was written there and describes Yalta, the fashionable resort city on the southern coast of Crimea. 

If you have additions to my list, they are most welcome.

Picture: The Thin Red Line, painting, o/c, by Robert Gibb, 1881, National War Museum of Scotland. Image from here.

Read this story in Russian here.

The Great Genby.

A little fun with new Russian.

Genby.
Photo: www.kremlin.ru

Digital age and and a country open to outside world created entirely new ways for language creativity.

Take this, for example. Switching from one language to another also requires, when writing, switching your keyboard settings. In the case of Russian, switching from Latin alphabet to Cyrillic. Many Russians soon discovered that typing in Russian when the keyboard is switched to English creates quite a few fun words. And vice versa.

If you type 'Dear' to start a formal letter, in Cyrillic it becomes 'Вуфк' that sounds Woofk. A nonsense word that doesn't mean anything but sounds onomatopoeic both in Russian and in English with 'oof' and 'уф' interjections as the most obvious. Russian 'oof' has the same meaning as in English. I have a friend with whom we use 'Вуфк' as a regular greeting in correspondence.

If you touch-type Putin in Russian with the standard Cyrillic фыва-олдж keyboard in mind but with the Qwerty layout switched on, the name becomes Genby. It is now becoming an internet meme in its own right.

And the most popular reverse word that sprung from the switched keyboard phenomenon is ЗЫ. ZY, pronounced z-yee with the hard Russian ы sound, is nothing but PS, a postscript. But it also has an added weight of introducing a punch line, an ironic or sarcastic conclusion to one's blog post or a social network update. Probably because it sounds similar to 'гы', a Russian interjection, expressing impish glee.

A Rabbit Called Sauna.

We have a new cat, a kitten in fact. The name is being deliberated. I put a picture of my old cat Vassily Ivanovich (Vaska - Васька) on Facebook. Unbeatable for traffic. Just as I expected, dozens of suggestions followed. One puzzled me — Banya.

Banya? Баня (Banya) is the Russian word for steam bath. Sauna if you will. But Russian-style sauna, unlike the Finnish one is full of hot steam. Banya was a pet rabbit of my Russian Facebook friends.

Why would anyone call a rabbit Sauna? I asked.

Don't you see, they replied. It's from Bunny. Bunny — Banya.
 
With an added bonus of having a resemblance to Vanya, a common diminutive of the quintessential Russian name Ivan.

Selfie in Russian.

самострел vs селфи

Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

As Obama and Cameron were taking selfies with the blonde Danish Prime-Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt while attending the Mandela memorial service I thought I should mention that selfie the word is battling with the word samostrel (самострел) in the Russian language.

Samostrél (stress on e) literally means self-shot, strel being the noun formed from the verb стрелять - to shoot. Until the recent proliferation of its self-portrait meaning samostrel meant a self-inflicted unjury (self-harming), specifically, of a soldier trying to avoid front line service, with all the negative connotations. Samostrel also means a crossbow or a child's toy — a pistol or a crossbow, or a dart shooting device made of an empty spool with a piece of rubber band attached to it.

Today samostrel competes with the English borrowing селфи or сэлфи in being the word for a digital photo of oneself that Oxford Dictionaries pronounced the word of the year 2013. Google search gives 221 thousand hits for селфи and 358 thousand for сэлфи. For самострел Google gives 483 thousand hits, but considering the overlapping of the meaning, it is safe to assume that the two words are now neck and neck, perhaps with a slight advantage to селфи. Curiously, the Russian Wikipedia has an article on селфи (with an e) which doesn't mention the word samostrel. And there is an article on self-harming that mentions samostrel.

By the way, a Danish editor, who was interviewed today on the radio, said that there was no Danish word for selfie, they just use the English one.

We will see how it works out in Russian. Early in the 20th Century two words were competing for airplane (aeroplane) — аэроплан and самолёт (samolët). Samolet won even though аэроплан is still used occasionally but has a definite archaic flavour.

Read another post on Russian selfie — Sebyashka.

Photo: Mogens Engelund, from here.

English Rules, by Andrei Ostalski.

English Rules, first published in Russian in 2006, is a great romp through the misadventures of a hapless young Russian living with his wife and in-laws in Folkstone, England, where he is desperately trying to fathom the tacit dos and don'ts of English etiquette when his life is turned upside down by a series of catastrophic events.


The opening scene sets the note of the absurd which runs through the book, a genre which has powerful antecedents in soviet literature as does the portrayal of the "little man" manipulated by Kafka-esque conspiracies.

Ostalski's observations on his adopted country – a Russian journalist, the author moved to Britain in the early 90s – are spot on but made with great warmth. On a more serious level, this is also a novel about the emigre/immigrant experience of trying to decipher and fit into a society whose rules appear both impenetrable and unpredictable and as such it also raises questions about identity itself.

But this is above all a skilfully written and very funny novel.

- by Miranda Ingram, former Daily Mail Moscow Correspondent. 

Every time Putin opens his mouth...

...America gets five students of Russian

Alexander Genis, a Russian-American writer, has been to the Summer meet of the language students and professors at Middlebury College, Vermont. Novaya Gazeta published his thoughful report on what is going on with Russian studies in America. 

He has a word or two to say about Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Russian who had lived in Vermont, and many more on Robert Frost, much loved and translated in Russia.

I found two passages from Genis’ article especially interesting, and amusing too.

At one of the workshops Genis asked postgarduate students to name their favourite Russian ‘book.’

...I cautiously walked into an auditorium to see postgradute students, who didn’t look at all like philologists. The girls were pretty and none had glasses, the boys were big and muscular.

“What is your favorite Russian book,” I asked, to open the discussion.

“The Lady with the Dog,” said one girl.

“The Lady with the Dog,” echoed another.

“The Lady with the Dog,” agreed a boy.

“Geopolitics of Russia,” coldly said another, with a crew cut.

“OK,” I said. And, realising I have used an English borrowing, quickly added an awkward Russian “Ladnen’ko.”  (Note: ладненько, from ладно)

I wholeheartedly support the majority choice. Chekhov’s short story is my favorite too, even if it’s not quite a ‘book.’ The force of what Genis is saying is revealed in another striking passage on President Putin’s contribution to the promotion of Russian abroad.

I haven’t been here for ten years and immediately noticed the change for the better. In the number of students, Russian summer school outshone both Chinese and Arabic. 

When I complimented one of the professors, he replied: “What do you want? Every time Putin opens his mouth we get five more students. The tide changed at the time of the Georgian war and grows stronger with each, so to speak, exotic law or, shall we say, judicial trial.

“Slavonics," we sighed, "is the daughter of the cold war. We should be glad that it’s only cold.”

The Russian version of this article is here,

The Novaya Gazeta article is here, 

Read The Lady with the Dog by Chekhov here (Constance Garnett translation), 

Wikipedia article about Alexander Genis here, 

Middlebury College summer language programmes here.

Cosmonaut. (New Russian)

A cosmonaut, of course, is the Soviet/Russian equivalent of astronaut. The word is derived from cosmos, in its Russian meaning of space, and -naut - navigator.

The Russian word entered English at the dawn of space exploration, in the early 1960s, after Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, rocketed into orbit.

Recent protests in Russia, which began late in 2011, gave 'cosmonaut' a new meaning. It became a nickname for officers of riot police in heavy gear. Presumably, because large helmets with sliding visors resemble the look of a cosmonaut in spacesuit. It is a slang meaning mostly used by opposition bloggers and commentators on social networks.

Here's one example, from here:
На площади перед метро 'Чистые пруды' появляются омоновцы-'космонавты' в черных круглых шлемах, в нагрудниках, со щитами и дубинами.
[In the square in front of the metro station 'Chistye Prudy' there begin to appear OMON-cosmonauts in black round helmets, wearing breast-plates and carrying shields and batons.']

Read a humorous 'encyclopedic' article on the cosmonauts here with more links and examples (in Russian), and see this Tetradki article on cosmonaut and other Russian space words in English. 

Photo by Александр Владимирович Плющев: 'Cosmonauts' in central Moscow.

A Simple Matter.

 (Translating Crime and Punishment)

Dostoyevsky by Perov, 1872.

A simple matter of checking one phrase in the Pevear/Volokhonskaya’s translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment left me doubting whether they are as good as publishers and reviewers tell us. 

Zdenka Pregelj's Russia Past and Present published an excerpt from the glowing review of Pevear/Volokhonskaya’s version in Humanities magazine (full text here):

"

"In Crime and Punishment, there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle.

“I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about  it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation.

"

After this dramatic opening, the whole review dances around this ‘simple’ phrase. 

Why was Pevear baffled? Because of the apparent repetitiveness of the phrase? I thought there was something suspicious about it. It can’t be that Dostoyevsky is as repetitive as this. His style is different from the beautifully succinct Turgenev, or the elaborately detailed, thoroughly explorative Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky writes in a semi-colloquial, almost chatty way, as though he is sitting at a tea table and telling a story to a group of friends. At times, it is sloppy, or seems so.

I searched the Russian text of Crime and Punishment to find the phrase that baffled Pevear. (See 'Dostoyevsky on one page') This is how it goes (from Part I, beginning of Chapter VI):

Дело было самое обыкновенное и не заключало в себе ничего такого особенного.

It's not repetitive at all, it's a perfectly normal phrase. I'd translate it something like this:

[It turned out that] It was quite simple and there was nothing unusual about it. 

My wife, a native English speaker, thinks that 'and' is better replaced with a semi-colon. She suggested: 

In fact it was perfectly simple; there was nothing out of the ordinary about it.

You can argue about the first part of the sentence, whether 'the matter' is needed there. It appears in phrases like 

“В чём дело?” - ‘What’s the matter?’

“Это не ваше дело!” - ‘It’s none of your business’

“Я к вам по делу” - ‘I have business to discuss’.

“Дело [оказалось] серьезное”. - ‘It’s a serious matter.’

But the second part is definitely wrong. That's why it sounds repetitive in English.

"Ничего особенного" can mean 'nothing complicated.' For example, when you ask ‘Is it a difficult problem?’, you can get an answer ‘Nothing complicated.’ But here, in Dostoyevsky’s context it's definitely 'nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual, nothing suspicious'. 

When you read the Humanities article between the lines, you can see that every time Pevear, who has 'only a basic Russian' as the author mentions, has doubts, Volokhonskaya bullies him into accepting her version.

Publishers have built such a juggernaut of PV's translations, probably because of 'live' copyright, it's unstoppable now.

You can get a Redmolotov t-shirt with the opening line of Crime and Punishment in Garnett's translation: 'On an exceptionally hot evening early in July...' Click on the image.

The full paragraph from Crime and Punishment in Russian (from Lib.ru/Классика):

"

Впоследствии Раскольникову случилось как-то узнать, зачем именно мещанин и баба приглашали к себе Лизавету. Дело было самое обыкновенное и не заключало в себе ничего такого особенного. Приезжее и забедневшее семейство продавало вещи, платье и проч., всё женское. Так как на рынке продавать невыгодно, то и искали торговку, а Лизавета этим занималась: брала комиссии, ходила по делам и имела большую практику, потому что была очень честна и всегда говорила крайнюю цену: какую цену скажет, так тому и быть. Говорила же вообще мало, и как уже сказано, была такая смиренная и пугливая...

"

The same paragraph, in Garnett’s translation (from Gutenberg): 

"

Later on Raskolnikov happened to find out why the huckster and his wife had invited Lizaveta. It was a very ordinary matter and there was nothing exceptional about it. A family who had come to the town and been reduced to poverty were selling their household goods and clothes, all women's things. As the things would have fetched little in the market, they were looking for a dealer. This was Lizaveta's business. She undertook such jobs and was frequently employed, as she was very honest and always fixed a fair price and stuck to it. She spoke as a rule little and, as we have said already, she was very submissive and timid.

"

Update: It turns out that the phrase quoted in Humanities article didn't even make into P/V published translation. The actual sentence in the book runs like this: 'It was a most ordinary matter, and there was nothing very special about it.' Thanks to Anatoly Vorobey who found it on Google Books here. Which makes the Simple Matter even more baffling. See Languagehat's post and discussion of the phrase.

Update two: In David Magarschak's translation, which I have, the sentence reads: 

It was a most ordinary sort of business, and there was nothing at all remarkable about it.

Disclosure: Tetradki is an affiliate of Redmolotov.com. Every time you buy a Redmolotov t-shirt, Tetradki gets a small commission.

Scrambled Eggs, or Why the Russian Revolution Happened.

Fried eggs - яичница-глазунья.
Design by ©A.Anichkin.

I wrote about Maugham's Christmas Holiday here. Another of his Russian novels is Ashenden.

In a series of novellas Maugham recalls, through his alter-ego Ashenden, how while in the service of the British foreign intelligence he was tasked with preventing the bolshevik takeover in 1917.

Ashenden sets everything in motion to stop the revolution but in the end fails, as we know from history.

It turns out that scrambled eggs were, at least partly, to blame. The passage below describes the falling out between Ashenden and Anastasia, the Russian woman, on whom he later had to rely in St.Petersburg.

There is an awkward translation point here. The Russian translator Victor Veber (see the passage on my Russian blog post here) uses the word омлет  — omelette — for scrambled eggs.

It may be a mistake but could also be a deliberate choice to avoid readers' confusion. Fried eggs in Russian is яичница, or to be more precise, яичница-глазунья — fried eggs with eyes, as in my photo above. Scrambled eggs is also called яичница but with a different extension, яичница-болтушка — whipped, stirred or scrambled fried eggs. To build the growing antagonism between Ashenden and Anastasia on the differences between глазунья and болтушка could distract the reader from the humour of the original, the translator may have thought.

On the other hand he may have missed an opportunity to introduce a play on words: болтушка has another meaning — chatter-box, which is exactly what is Anastasia. See for yourself and enjoy the passage. It's tickling when you think what the world could have been in the past Century had it not been for Maugham-Ashenden's dislike for scrambled eggs.

I also recommend a short review of Ashenden on Tolstoy is My Cat blog.

(English text quoted from here)

Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she would have for breakfast.

'Scrambled eggs,' she said.

She ate heartily. Ashenden had already noticed that she had a healthy appetite. He supposed it was a Russian trait; you could not picture Anna Karenina making her midday meal off a bath-bun and a cup of coffee, could you?

After breakfast they went to the Louvre and in the afternoon they went to the Luxembourg. They dined early in order to go to the Comedie Francaise; then they went to a Russian cabaret where they danced. When next morning at eight-thirty they took their places in the dining-room and Ashenden asked Anastasia Alexandrovna what she fancied, her reply was:

'Scrambled eggs.'

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday,' he expostulated.

'Let's have them again today,' she smiled.

'All right.'

They spent the day in the same manner except that they went to the Carnavalet instead of the Louvre and the Musee Guimet instead of the Luxembourg. But when the morning after in answer to Ashenden's inquiry Anastasia Alexandrovna again asked for scrambled eggs, his heart sank.

'But we had scrambled eggs yesterday and the day before,' he said.

'Don't you think that's a very good reason to have them again today?'

'No, I don't.'

'Is it possible that your sense of humour is a little deficient this morning?' she asked. 'I eat scrambled eggs every day. It's the only way I like them.'

'Oh, very well. In that case of course we'll have scrambled eggs.'

But the following morning he could not face them.

'Will you have scrambled eggs as usual?' he asked her.

'Of course,' she smiled affectionately, showing him two rows of large square teeth.

'All right, I'll order them for you; I shall have mine fried.’

The smile vanished from her lips.

'Oh?' She paused a moment. 'Don't you think that's rather inconsiderate? Do you think it's fair to give the cook unnecessary work? You English, you're all the same, you look upon servants as machines. Does it occur to you that they have hearts like yours, the same feelings and the same emotions? How can you be surprised that the proletariat are seething with discontent when the bourgeoisie like you are so monstrously selfish?'

'Do you really think that there'll be a revolution in England if I have my eggs in Paris fried rather than scrambled?'

She tossed her pretty head in indignation.

'You don't understand. It's the principle of the thing. You think it's a jest, of course I know you're being funny, I can laugh at a joke as well as anyone, Chekhov was well-known in Russia as a humorist; but don't you see what is involved? Your whole attitude is wrong. It's a lack of feeling. You wouldn't talk like that if you had been through the events of 1905 in Petersburg. When I think of the crowds in front of the Winter Palace kneeling in the snow while the Cossacks charged them, women and children! No, no, no.'

Her eyes filled with tears and her face was all twisted with pain. She took Ashenden's hand.

'I know you have a good heart. It was just thoughtless on your part and we won't say anything more about it. You have imagination. You're very sensitive. I know. You'll have your eggs done in the same way as mine, won't you?'

'Of course," said Ashenden.

He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast every morning after that. The waiter said:' Monsieur aime les oeufs brouillés.' At the end of the week they returned to London. He held Anastasia Alexandrovna in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, from Paris to Calais and again from Dover to London. He reflected that the journey from New York to San Francisco took five days. When they arrived at Victoria and stood on the platform waiting for a cab she looked at him with her round, shining, and slightly protuberant eyes.

'We've had a wonderful time, haven't we?' she said.

‘Wonderful.’

'I've quite made up my mind. The experiment has justified itself. I'm willing to marry you whenever you like.'

But Ashenden saw himself eating scrambled eggs every morning for the rest of his life. When he had put her in a cab, he called another for himself, went to the Cunard office, and took a berth on the first ship that was going to America. No immigrant, eager for freedom and a new life, ever looked upon the statue of Liberty with more heartfelt thankfulness than did Ashenden, when on that bright and sunny morning his ship steamed into the harbour of New York.

ZIL. (A Dictionary of Russian Words in English)

A presidential ZIL.

Regular readers of Tetradki know that I am compiling a dictionary of Russian words in English. I have nearly a thousand entries now.

One of them is ZIL, an acronym which stands for Zavod Imeni Likhacheva — Likhachev Works.

ZIL is the brand name for, among other things, the armoured limos reserved for members of the Politbureau (another entry).

The snowstorm that had brought Moscow and its suburbs to a standstill on Friday made some compare Moscow traffic conditions — and conventions — to those in the West.

Here's a quote from the BBC reportage by Daniel Sandford, unrelated to the snowstorm:

"The special Games Lanes for Olympic athletes and officials, which have given rise to jams and infuriated some drivers in London, have been branded "Zil lanes". The nickname comes from the infamous traffic lanes in Moscow reserved for the most senior officials of the Soviet Union travelling in their black Zil limousines."

Photo from Wikimedia, here.

#BBC Trending in Russia.

BBC insignia

A BBC correspondent has just tweeted from Russia, with alarm, that the #BBC hashtag has entered the top-trending list for the country. As it turns out, it's not for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The acronym BBC is in Cyrilic and reads VVS – veh-veh-ehss – voenno-vozdushnye sily, or Russian Air Force.

Tomorrow, 12 August, the centenary of the force will be widely marked in Russia. On this day in 1912 tsar Nicolas II signed a decree forming the first Imperial Air Force unit.

Among journalists, and sometimes among listeners as well, the BBC is often jokingly referred to as Veh-Veh-Ehss. In Soviet times the rule was to cyrillize Western acronyms, either with or without translating the name. BBC was transcribed phonetically without translating its name as Би-би-си and, for example, the CIA as ЦРУ - Центральное разведывательное управление.

In the Russian media these days the old-style Cyrillic transliteration of foreign names competes with direct Latin script. Rules are often defined in-house, different publications have different styles.

This new trend is hugely influenced by the ease of switching scripts and the Internet. In two ways. First, the use of Latin transcription of famous brand names, commercial or public, is a way of increasing global traffic to a website. It is more likely that your content will be picked up by the net spiders if they stumble on the more familiar Latin transcription than on a Cyrillic one. Secondly, many Russians use Latin letters on the Internet as though they were Cyrillic where possible. They do it for convenience, but with the resulting back-influence on the spoken language. BBC=VVS is one such example.

Here is a clip from the iconic 1980s film 'ACCA', pronounced 'AHss-ah'. The singer is Afrika, a famous 80s rocker. The man dressed in the uniform of a Soviet BBC major is in fact a member of a gang of criminals who are planning a heist in Yalta, Crimea.



And this is the official Soviet march of the Air Force, 'We are born to make the fairy-tale true'.

Achtung, or Why job-is-done sounds offensive (Russian office slang).

Read Russian version of this article here.

Earlier this year I was commissioned to write the blog “Как в Европе” (As in Europe) on the Russian business website BFM.ru, the news and analysis portal for a major radio network in the country. 

Business writing, naturally, has its own jargon. To keep up with current business Russian I’ve been reading up BFM and other publications with a focus on economy. A recent article by Dmitri Mungalov and Yekaterina Tropova  gives an excellent overview and a glossary of some of the words and phrases – not all of them ‘Runglish’ – used by office workers.

Slang, of course, is slang, it may disappear quickly but some words and phrases may go into mainstream language. 

Here are a few gems from the article.

Ахтунг – from German Achtung (attention, alert). Russians know this word from war movies and jokes. In office parlance it means something completely different. It’s used for a company conference or meeting where sloppy workers are given a show thrashing by the bosses. Declines as a Russian noun: на ахтунге.

Хурал - khural, from Mongolian for council, assembly. The word has long been used in Russian as a synonym for a large meeting, especially an unruly one. In office slang it is used, according to BFM writers, for general assembly. 

Фуй - fui, from FYI (for your information) read phonetically, with the English ‘y’ read as the similarly looking “у” [u, or u:]. This one is wonderful, because ‘fui’ is not only a slightly archaic interjection of disapproval or disgust, but also a mask-word for the very powerful, unprintable swear-word “хуй” (khui - cock). BFM says фуй is widely used in office correspondence.

Асап - [asʌp] from English abbreviation ASAP (as soon as possible). It has acquired verbal forms (проасапить - to do smth asap) and has become part of a paraphrase of the Russian proverb “поспешишь – людей насмешишь” (haste and make yourself a laughing stock, close to ‘no haste, no waste’) – “ноу асап – ноу факап” (no asap – no fuckup). The rhyming here comes from phonetic pronunciation of asap.

Факап - from ‘fuck-up’, was one of the most often cited words that are used in office slang, with verbal form профакапить (profakapit’ - to fail a project).

Жопиздан [zhɔpizdɑn] - from ‘job is done’, is another monster because it includes two strong invectives: zhópa - ass, stronger in Russian than in English, and pizdá, an ‘unprintable’ maternoye Russian word for ‘cunt’. It is said to be used, though, in the same meaning as in English – finishing a project.

The next two examples are interesting in that the first one shows how borrowings are adapted to Russian phonetic norms and the second how English borrowings commonly change pronunciation when one or more letters are deliberately read as the similar looking Russian letters.

Чипово - сhipovo - adverb, from ‘cheap’, meaning, in PR or advertising, an unacceptably cheap look. Though authors don’t indicate how it is pronounced, I assume it follows the pattern “хренóво” (bad, bad state, bad quality) and has the stress on the first ‘o’ – chipóvo. 

Лахари - lakhari, from English ‘luxury’. Russian letter ‘x’ represents the sound ‘kh’, a hard sound in Russian, close to Welsh or German ‘ch’. ‘Luxury target [audience]’ becomes “лахари таргет”.

Some common brand names are also phonetically transformed. 

Майкрософт интернет испортил - from Microsoft Internet Explorer. Explorer becomes ‘isportil’ - spoiled, destroyed – Microsoft spoiled the Internet. 

Aрбуз - arbuz - watermelon, for Airbus.

Бобик - bobik - common word or name for a small dog, for Boeing.

Mамба - mamba - a snake, for MMВБ, the major Moscow exchange.

Дохлики - dokhliki - dead ones, waifs, for DHL.

Read the full article and the glossary on BFM.ru, some additional examples are in comments.

Picture by Tetradki/A.Anichkin.

Groundhog Day

Groundhog

It's Groundhog Day today, 2 February.

Groundhog in Russian is сурок - surok. 

The European species of marmots are widely spread throughout Russia, Belorussia, Poland and Ukraine and in folklore are associated with deep sleep. One of the well-known idioms is спать как сурок – to sleep like a groundhog, meaning to sleep deeply.

When looking for translations of Russian idioms I recommend this resource: ru.wiktionary.org – Wiktionary. Sometimes there are explanatory articles with interpretations and parallel versions in other languages, sometimes not. If you work with wiki pages, please add your examples and explanations.   

The article on the groundhog is here.

The Russian version of this article alludes to the name of deputy prime-minister Vladislav Surkov, chief adviser to Premier Putin with a controversial reputation.


Groundhog photo: EIC, from here.

Who Quacks, Ducks or Frogs? Bathtime International.

Bathtime in the Anichkin-Ingram household is an international relations minefield. Does a duck, for example, go krya-krya or quack-quack? Are country folk awakened by a cockadoodledoo or a cookarekoo and does the sheep – Vita has a whole menagerie of plastic bathtime playmates – go beh or baa? The one that really gets me is the horse – who has ever heard a horse going eeh-gogo? But then, as Sasha quickly points out, where in the world does a pig (khryu-khryu) go oink?

Meanwhile little Vita’s head is twitching from side to side like a spectator at a tennis tournament as she watches what she had hoped to be two intelligent parents screaming bewildering farmyard noises at each other.

In fact, child psychologists seem to maintain that the child won’t become remotely schizophrenic from having a frog that either croaks or kvahks (quacks?), depending on which adult is making the inane noises at the time.

Is it possibly the parents, then, who become mentally imbalanced?

For, of course, the fight for Vita’s cultural heritage extends beyond the bathroom.

All the way to the kitchen, in fact, where I stuff her with Marmite, both to discourage a Russian sweet tooth and on the grounds that you can’t make a stronger statement about your Englishness than having grown up on Marmite. But now Sasha has her eating it off black bread.

Of course it won’t much matter if she watches ‘Blue Peter’ alongside ‘Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi’ (‘Good Night, Little Ones’) when we sooner or later resort to television as a part-time substitute for parenting, and she will have the distinct advantage of two great literary traditions to call her own.
But there are, nevertheless, serious minefields ahead, especially when the bicultural family straddles the defunct, for now at least, Iron Curtain.

Like all nearly talking children, Vita refers to all pictures of women as mama and all men as papa.
Thus when she pulled a biography of Stalin off the office shelves the other day, pointed to a portrait of Uncle Joe and triumphantly mouthed the word ‘Papa!’ I naturally launched into a long-winded denial which was inexorably heading toward a ‘Russians-as-baddies’ scenario when I remembered to my horror that she is Russian – partly at least.

Sasha eyed me cautioningly and we somehow distracted her until we have had time to agree upon a unified policy toward the past.

Most crucial of all, points out Sasha, is what exactly are we going to say to her when we settle down, en famille, to watch his favourite movies: John Le Carré and James Bond?

Originally published in The Moscow Times in Educating Vita column by Alexander Anichkin and Miranda Ingram. Read another 'Educating Vita' column 'Tolstoy: What We Need Most'.

'Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi' opening jingle: