Easy Russian for English Speakers

Both in teaching and in learning languages I have often used the 'Survival Kit' method. Start with what is absolutely essential to get by and then build on. Easy Russian for English Speakers (English and Russian Edition) is constructed in the same fashion.

It is on an ipod-ready CD, a course with 17 tracks/lessons. I could put ticks practically in all the boxes on my check-list: asking people if they speak your language, asking for help, asking to slow down, saying hello and goodbye, please and thank you etc. There is very little commentary and hardly any grammar.

There is not enough emphasis on one-word phrases which give the beginner an extremely long mileage. Ellochka the Man-Eater, a character from the popular Russian novel The Twelve Chairs famously fulfilled all her communication needs with just 30 words and phrases. Humorous as it is, the idea is perfectly practical. Take, for example 'Mozhno' (May I). It means all of the following: 'You can', 'You may', 'Can I?' 'May I' 'Can I have it?/Yes, you can' (both can be expressed with this one word), 'Can I have a look?/Yes, you can' 'Can I take this seat?' 'Can I take it?' 'May I come in?' - all this - and much more, can be covered by just one word.

Likewise, 'pozhalusta' is 'please', 'you are welcome' (in reply to a 'thank you'), 'yes, thank you' (in reply to an offer of a drink or something to eat), 'please go first', 'please, come in', 'here you are' (when showing something or handing something to someone) and so on.

Russian phrases on the disc could have been shorter to make for easier memorizing. Sometimes I felt as though they were clips  from a larger, more comprehensive Russian course. For example, 'Where do I sign?' is represented as 'Gde mne podpisat?' while it could be just 'Gde podpisat?'

There is a serious mistake in the chapter on Business Meetings (track 14). The word 'meeting' is given as 'sobraniye'. 'Meeting' in the business sense is "встреча" (vstrecha) and 'sobraniye' is a gathering or an assembly. 'Sobraniye' could be  'meeting' in the 'members of a group' sense, i.e. a political party meeting or a stockholders' meeting, but not as in 'a business meeting'. And of course there is a long-established English borrowing 'митинг' which used to mean 'rally', 'manifestation', but these days is often used instead of or on a par with 'vstrecha'.  This should be corrected.

There is a bonus track attempting to describe 'the Russian soul' and how the word (душа - doushah) is used. It's a nice idea and would provide a beginner - or anyone - with a good talking point. It's a shame though that whoever put the CD together muddled the CD tracks (or Contents on the printed jacket) - you click on the Russian Soul (17) and get Saying Goodbye (16).  Well, as the great  Russian poet Pushkin (a poem by him is on the disc), you can't speak a language without making mistakes. And a book is not a book without a mipsrint.

 I'd give this one three out of five.

Ian MACMILLAN, Life on Earth (a study in translation)

I sent this poem from The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (Faber poetry) to a friend of mine, when he told me he was moving to France.

I translated it into Russian here, on Russian Tetradki.

IAN MACMILLAN
LIFE ON EARTH

When he came in
she gave him a flower
called 'Welcome Home Husband
However Drunk You Be'.

I am not drunk, he said;
this isn't my home,
I am not your husband.

'Three mistakes
do not change the name of a flower',
she replied.


And here the Talking Heads sing a similar theme:

Russian poetic school of Noughtters Lives on in English poetry

Please read the Russian version of this post here.

ETA Hoffman

Veniamin Kaverin, one of the best loved Soviet novelists, once proclaimed that the two best Russian writers were R L Stevenson and ETA Hoffman (pictured) of the Nutcracker fame. Much later, in 1965, a wise and respectable Kaverin published his book of memoirs 'Hello, Brother, It's So Hard to Write', which included a humorous account of an evening in The Pegasus Stable, a Moscow literary cafe popular in the late 1910s - early 1920s.

He mentions a loud poetic school of the time called "ничевоки" – 'noughtters' (nothingers, nadaists). They were the Russian version of Dada. Articles about both schools (here and in Russian here) say they flourished between 1916 and 1922. Nichevoki espoused minimalism in verse. Their poems often were a chain of a few nouns in nominative, and that was that.

'Here was the poet Truvor Kanunnikov, writes Kaverin. He never wrote anything. Not because he couldn't, but as a matter of principle. He was one of the noughtters, an extreme one. He proclaimed that the supreme level of poetry was the blank white page'.

I have always thought that Kaverin's story was a joke. Surely, Dada and Nada are a thing of the literary past. Amazingly it isn't. The other day I was reading a brilliantly compiled book of humorous poems of British and American authors The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (Faber poetry) (edited by Wendy Cope) and found several poems straight from the book of Noughtters.

Here is one:

The Lover Writes a One-Word-Poem

You!

(Gavin Ewart)

And this one is even better:

On Going to Meet a Zen Master in Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him
for A.G.

(Don Patterson)

(Note: it's just the title and the dedication, the rest is a blank page).

By the way, any better suggestions as to how to render ничевоки into English?

GOING TO THE DOGS (a study in translation of poetry)

From time to time I suddenly remember that I love poetry. 

I was inspired to translate this little poem by the parallel discussion of free verse on Languagehat and AVVA. Blog authors were asking, in a puzzled way, why is it that while most of the West writes poetry largely in free verse Russia continues (mostly) to rhyme her poems.

This poem is from 'The Funny Side. 101 Humorous Poems', compiled and with contributions by Wendy Cope. It is very obviously with rhymes. To read my translation please go to Tetradki in Russian. I've substituted the granddads in the original with my own granddads in the translation.



GOING TO THE DOGS

My granddad, viewing earth's worn cogs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in his house of logs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in the Flemish bogs.
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in his old skin togs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
There's one thing that I have to state –
The dogs have had a good long wait.

(Anon.)



By the way, in case you think that all verse without rhyme is free verse (vers libre), it is not so, there is also blank verse, beloved of Shakespeare and Pushkin.

And an impressive list of modern Russian poets writing in vers libre is here.

Kreacher: A Study in Translation of Names

(this post in Russian is here)

I struggle to keep up with my children's reading. I have long tried if not to read in full, but at least to leaf through their books. It's been two years since I last read to them at bed-time. They now read a lot themselves, already progressing from children's books to 'serious' literature. My son has just finished 1984 and my daughter's bookshelf is heaving.  So I am falling behind miserably.

But we all have kept affection for J.K. Rowling whose books kick-started my children's reading as they did for many others. I am an old embarrassing parent. I don't dig quick enough. That's why I got so excited when, on the last book of Harry Potter, I realised that the house-elf Kreacher's name is a phonetic transcription of Creature.

So excited, in fact, that I decided to try and find a good translation of his name into Russian since the  edition of Harry Potter we have renders him just as it is - Кричер, which sounds like a German name. No link to 'creature' there.

The first word that comes to mind in Russian is существо. But it doesn't sound as a name. And the phonetic play on words is also lost.

Креатура? No, this is from bureaucratic lingo. It means someone is under patronage of someone else higher up.

There is a synonym: творение (creature, creation). Again, it's too long and doesn't sound either like a name, or like a nickname. But the stress in the word falls on E which makes the O in the root sound like A. So, the root part phonetically is TVAR-. That's something interesting.

We have the word тварь (thing, creature). Close, may be, but it's too direct. And the usage of that word doesn't fit. It's either used as an imprecation, or in a Biblical or Dostoyevskyan context. And Rowling's phonetic joke is lost.

Russian is strong in affixes. What can we do with тварь? Here is one: тварюга (shaggy dirty thing, shaggy creature). It does sound like a nickname and the length of the word is close to Kreacher. Make it Тварюг? No, it feels awkward to a Russian tongue.  Тварюго? No, that's silly, we don't want to make Kreacher into someone sounding like doctor Zhivago.

Then, is it possible to capture the play on words Kreacher-Creature? There is another word ending with -юга: ворюга (burly intimidating thief).

Put together тварюга and ворюга to get ТВОРЮГА (Tvoryuga).  This sounds right. Can spit it out like a nickname. The sense is there and the thieving grumpy character of Kreacher is reflected. The word is as solid in your mouth as Kreacher's pride in his master's house. And, best of all, Rowling's trick is there. You read the word and see the ВОР  (thief) bit, you say it - and you hear just the 'creature' bit. I hope I got there.

Here is the thread from Kreecher to Творюга once again:

Kreecher - creature - существо - творение - тварь - тварюга - Творюга

Wikipedia article on magical creatures in JK Rowling's books is here.
Kreacher's  page on Harry Potter wiki is here.

Photo of JK Rowling by JSHILL

The Sun supports Labour, or Who runs Britain

The Sun newspaper, the biggest selling British tabloid, announced recently that it switches its support from Labour to Conservative party. In 1997 the Sun's decision to support Labour was seen as a major turning point in Tony Blair's New Labour campaign to stop Conservatives' ruling streak which had begun with Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979. This time Labour is trying to dismiss the Sun as a paper whose readers are not interested in politics.

TV series Yes, Prime Minister,  a satirical take on British politics ran all through the 80-s. In this episode Prime Minister Jim Hacker explains to his aides Sir Humphrey and Bernard the importance of the papers and who reads which one. You will see that in those days the Sun, famous for its Page 3 full page photos of topless girls, wasn't regarded very high too.

Bernard closes the scene with his famous quip 'they don't care who runs the country so long as she has bit tits'. Another colloquial word for this vital part of human anatomy is 'boobs'. But what is the difference between tits and boobs?  I am told that tits is menspeak and boobs is women's. Is that correct?

Carla Bruni's Russian Tongue-Twister

Click on images to watch the FemmeActuelle.fr video

The French President wife's name is Carla. They have a dog called Clara.



And there is a Russian tongue-twister based on the names of Karl and Klara. In the rhyme they steal similarly sounding things from each other. It goes something like this:

Off Klara Karl cleared the corals,
Off Karl Klara cleared the clarinet

(read phonetically transcribed Russian verse below)

No matter how hard you try, you end up mixing Klara into Karla, or Karl into Klar. Which is exactly what happened to a French journalist at the recent interview with Carla Bruni. Her dapper husband President Sarkozy 'accidentally' walked into the room and, for want of something to say, decided to present the dogs to the journalists.

'This is Clara, the second one is Dumbledore and the third one - oh, it's just ran off somewhere...'


The journalist, looking somewhat dazed, tries to remember who is who. 'So, that one is Dumbledore, and this one is Carla'

'No, no, Carla is her-is me' Sarkozy and Bruni say in unison. 'The dog is Clara'.

Perfect to learn to roll your 'R-s' this tongue-twister is also one of the most difficult.

I have always thought that it was difficult only to a Russian tongue - because of pleophony (full-voicing), a feature of Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian languages where, in most words, consonants are naturally wrapped-up in vowels, i.e. consonant and vowels always come one after another.

But now I see that it can be equally difficult to West Europeans.

While the tongue-twister has been popular in Russia for generations, I could find no attributions to any known authors. It seems likely that the verse was composed in 1920-1930s when names of foreign revolutionaries, particularly German, were popular with internationally minded young Soviet generation. Karl could be Marx, but I think it is more likely to be a reference to Karl Liebknecht, leader of German left-wing social-democrats, who was killed in the failed communist attempt to seize power in 1919. He became one of the biggest figures in the Soviet Pantheon of revolutionary heroes. And Klara is definitely a reference to Clara Zetkin, also a German social-democrat and one of the leading figures in women's rights movement from 1880s to 1930s. Liebknecht and Zetkin were often mentioned together. As a friend of both Liebknecht and Lenin, and a communist leader in Germany at the time in 1920-1930s when Hitler's nazis by no means had the upper hand, she became an iconic figure in Russia. After Hitler banned the communist party she went into exile to the Soviet Union and died in Moscow in 1933. Streets, factories, ships were named after here in Russia.

Or it could be Karl Radek, a prominent revolutionary in Germany and Russia. Radek and Zetkin were both high up in Comintern, and Radek is also credited as the author of numerous jokes, including jokes about Stalin.

Phonetic transcript of the Carl-Clara rhyme:

Karl ooh KlAry ukrAl corAlly
KlAra ooh KArla ukrAla clarnEt

Please let me know if you know of any other English language versions of the Carl-Clara tongue-twister.
(read it in Russian here)

Ten Thousand Words That the English Hate

The Guardian (UK) newspaper book blog has created an astounding bestseller by inviting readers to contribute newspeak (and some oldspeak) English words and phrases that make them wince or, simply put, angry - because of their misuse or abuse.

Most are politically motivated, many go onto the hate list because of their use in marketing, a lot are 'flips' - words that changed their straightforward meaning in group slangs. And some of the choices are very personally motivated. People remember their emotional experiences, their own little hates and worries.


The brilliant idea came to Michelle Pauli, deputy editor of guardian.co.uk books and herself one of the regular authors of the Guardian books blog. Poets participating in the Ledbury Festival this year were asked 'What word do you hate and why?' Pauli, in her blog about poets' choices, suggested that readers send in their most hated words. The result was an astounding 1750 contributions! And still counting. Even more, the comment section is laid out in a way that allows readers to 'recommend' certain entries - support them without actually posting their own suggestions. Some entries have over a hundred such recommendations.

It's not that the usual number of comments on the Guardian book blog hardly ever reaches a dozen. It's the passion, the linguistic sophistication - and the effort that people went through to post their words (you have to register with the Guardian web-site before being allowed to post comments) that impresses. Who would think that in our age of clipped words of 'texting' and the ramshackles of marketing lingo there are so many of us who still care for the clarity of plain English?

The Guardian has also inadvertently created a treasure trov of cultural references of the modern language fit to go straight into any academic paper or dictionary. If you are a translator, do go to Pauli's post and check the entries and comments. It will enrich your feel for the language like no lectures or seminars would.

And if you have one yourself, hurry up, post a comment before they close it.

Kitchen Debate: 50 years since Khrushev and Nixon shook hands in Moscow

A wonderful event in US-Soviet relations: Russian Premier Khrushev and Vice-President Nixon debate whose achievements are stronger and end up shaking hands. They called each other to be open to new ideas. The kitchen debate took place at the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959 at the height of Khrushev's thaw.

Susan Sontag: who would I be without Dostoyevsky?

The very first time I raised to myself the problem of a poor translation was when I started going to the opera, in Chicago, when I was sixteen. There I held in my hands for the first time an en face translation – the original language on the left (by this time I had some French and Italian) and the English on the right – and I was stunned and mystified by the blatant inaccuracy of the translations. (It was to be many years before I understood why the words in a libretto cannot be translated literally.) Opera excepted, I never asked myself, in those early years of reading literature in translation, about what I was missing. It was as if I felt it were my job, as a passionate reader, to see through the faults or limitations of a translation – as one sees through (or looks past) the scratches on a bad print of a beloved old film one is seeing once again. Translations were a gift, for which I would always be grateful. What – rather, who – would I be without Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov?

from The World as India (London 2002)
St Jerome lecture on the nature of translation

The nature of translation was a central subject of interest for Susan Sontag, both in the narrow sense of interpreting a text in the one language into a different language and in the wider, philosophical sense of how reality is interpreted in a work of art.

The Russian version of this post is here, the lecture in full (highly recommend to all professional translators!) is here