Sunday, October 01, 2006

Я не знаю, как это у Вас, но я читаю статьи Мишель Берди не раз, с увлечением, радуюсь интересными выражениями и юмором. Большое спасибо, Катя, за это великолепное чтение!

Сегодня заново прочитала статью о русских и их отношение к спиртным напиткам. Мне вспомнилось, что где-то в интернете есть забавное фото, показывающее меня в время "Сухого Закона". Вы спрашиваете, что это такое - Сухой Закон! Время летит! Это было еще в горбачевские времена, когда русские "официально" решили, что им лучше будет без алкоголья. Друг от меня, который как сервисный инженер часто выезжал в командировки в Россию (и он любил эту работу!), рассказывал: "Ох, знаешь, Мартина, сейчас, как у них "сухой закон", там больше не весело, праздновать уже не умеют, сидят тихими, с грустными глазами, веселиться не с чем ..."

Потом, в 1986 г., сама выехала в Россию. Видела пустые до слез магазины и удивилась, как русскими женщинами все-таки удалось накрыть стол изысканными пищами и напитками ... (Знаете, русские женщины - волшебницы! :-) )

Ну, водка и вино еще продавались, но раз в неделю только, и только каждому по бутылке (если правильно вспомню, может и быть, что по две ...). Но зато они дома нелегально производили "самогон" ... У подруги попробовала брагу - по-моему, брага даже крепче водки! Видела, как они готовили брагу: В спальной у них стояли большие бутылки, в которых бродили рис и сахар. Бутылки были закрытими резиновыми перчатками, которые все больше надувались в ходе брожения. Забавно выглядели эти бутылки, как большие петухи! :-)

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by maxie1956

Это я - где-то в 1988 или 1989 году в Пермьской области. Обратите внимание на большую доску с кулаком, бьющей по бутылке с водкой! :-)




posted by Maxie @ 1:58 PM 0 comments

Michele Berdy - More Letters to Choose From

Here is this week's column from The Moscow Times.


Friday, September 29, 2006. Issue 3508.
More Letters to Choose From
By Michele A. Berdy

Азбука: alphabet, primer, basics

If anyone still needs proof that you should entrust your translation jobs only to qualified professionals, just look around Moscow. A new American film has opened with a tag line reproduced in big letters on posters and billboards, much to the puzzlement of Russians. It reads: Любовь -- это слово из четырёх букв. (Love is a four-letter word.) The problem with the translation is, of course, that a "four-letter word" is a swear word -- and more obviously, that the Russian word любовь has six letters.

Okay, so the translator was having a bad hair day. But how could dozens of editors have looked at that line and thought: "A six-letter word is a four-letter word. Yup, that's right. Print!"?

Other than sending me into deep depression about the state of translation, that tag line set me wondering about Russian letters in general. On the one hand, those 33 letters give foreigners lots of problems at first. On the other hand, there are plenty of synonyms and pronunciation systems to help the hapless non-Russian speaker.

Once upon a time буквы (letters) all had names in Russian. The first two were called аз and буки and gave us the word азбука, which means either the alphabet itself (today more commonly called алфавит) or a primer. Азбука can also mean "the ABCs" of something -- the basics. So the supermarket chain Азбука Вкуса is The ABCs of Taste. If you forget the word азбука, you can also call a primer букварь.

The proper way in Russian to describe a capital and lowercase letter is прописная and строчная, respectively, but people will understand if you ask: Слово пишется с большой буквой или с маленькой? (Is the word spelled with a big or small letter?) You can also use the phrase с большой буквой in the figurative sense: "человек с большой буквой" is "a human being with a capital H" -- that is, the finest example of a human being.

Alphabets are called кириллица and латиница (Cyrillic and Roman alphabets); for example, one web site tells you: Наберите текст латиницей, а потом программа переведет это в кириллицу. (Type the text in the Roman alphabet and the program will convert it to Cyrillic.) But you could also ask: Написать русскими буквами или английскими? (Should I write in Russian or English letters?)

If you don't understand a word, you can say: Скажите по буквам. (Spell it, literally "say it by letters.") Here it can get confusing. Most Russians agree on how to pronounce the letters at the start of the alphabet: they say: "а, бэ, вэ, гэ, дэ..." But they diverge on pronunciation towards the end. Schoolbooks tell you to say "эр, эс" for the letters "р" and "с," but often you'll hear "рэ, сэ."

If you get totally confused -- particularly when you're taking down a name over the phone -- the speller might switch to words that start with the letters in question. If you are, say, trying to find out where your lost baggage went, the answer might be «эр, и, эм» or it might be Роман, Ирина, Мария. In other words, your bags are having a fine time without you in the eternal city of Рим (Rome).

I now spell my last name in Russian: Борис, Евгений, Роман, Денис, Ирина. I used to say Берди -- как композитор Верди, только на "Бэ" (like the composer Verdi, only starting with a "B"). Once I spelled it that way over the phone to get a pass into a building, but when I arrived, no pass could be found. The kind woman went through the list again and again as I repeated my spelling routine. Suddenly she burst out laughing and held up a pass for Мишель Багнер. My great composers spelling trick had failed: Verdi turned into Wagner, and Berdy into Bagner.

Ольга, И краткое. (Ой!)


Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based interpreter and translator.


posted by Kate @ 11:43 AM 3 comments

Michele Berdy - Blame Them for the Rollercoasters

Here is last week's column.


Friday, September 22, 2006. Issue 3503.
Blame Them for the Rollercoasters
By Michele A. Berdy

Шведская спичка: safety match

Russian has plenty of words borrowed from other national languages, but it doesn't have too many examples of a nationality itself infiltrating the language.

But the Swedes slipped in -- in a nice way, that is. They gave Russian шведская спичка (safety match, literally "Swedish match"), which was invented in Sweden in 1844. Although these are the same kind of matches you light your stove with today, the adjective is no longer used. But you find it in 19th-century literature -- in fact, Шведская спичка is the name of a short story by Chekhov.

Sweden also gave Russia шведская стенка (literally "Swedish wall"), which for a while I thought might refer to wall storage units from IKEA. But no: Шведская стенка is a wall-mounted ladder, the kind you find in school gymnasiums.

Russians also use the expression шведская семья (literally "Swedish family") to conjure up images of wild sexual license. This is hopeful rather than ethnically accurate, and Swedes must get tired of explaining that they may have invented the first safety match, but they didn't take out the world patent on free love.

Swedes have also been immortalized in the expression как швед под Полтавой (like a Swede outside Poltava). It is used with a variety of verbs that denote defeat or disaster -- сгореть (to burn up), пропасть (to be defeated), погибнуть (to die). It refers to a battle between the Swedish and Russian armies outside Poltava in 1709, where the Swedes were trounced. Today it is used to describe a hopeless situation, where you are certain to fail -- like this poor guy trying to invent a rhyming toast at the dinner table: Пытаясь спасти остатки своего тоста, я просил друга: "Подскажи рифму, хоть одну, горю как швед под Полтавой". (In an attempt to save what was left of my toast, I begged my friend: "Give me a rhyme -- just one -- I'm dying here!")

The Italians made their mark with both a word and a concept. Who knew that забастовка -- a (workers') strike -- comes from the Italian word basta (enough)? Some sources claim it came from the 15th century, when the Italian architects working in the Kremlin cried "Basta!" and refused to work. Nice story; too bad it's not true. The original Italian word mutated into the Russian verb бастовать and was first used in card games to end the play, and then eventually to stop work.

The phrase итальянская забастовка (Italian strike) appeared to describe the clever protest of Italian railway workers in 1904: they came to work, but did everything so slowly and badly it would have been better if they had stayed home. You can find this phrase in the news every once in awhile: С 9 июля на руднике "Апатит" началась итальянская забастовка. (A work slowdown began July 9 at the Apatit mines.)

One of the oddest of all the foreign attributions is американские горки (roller coaster, literally "American mountains"), which in a dozen other languages are called "Russian mountains" -- even though the modern version of this ride was invented by the French.

The French-Russian-American ride all started with ледяные горки (ice slides) built as far back as the 1600s in Russia. Although a Russian inventor in the 18th century made the first version with a track and wheeled cars, the concept was rediscovered by some French folks after a winter trip to Russia and called les montagnes russes (Russian mountains). The trick was picked up by Americans and renamed the roller coaster, which in turn reappeared in Russia as американские горки. This might have sounded as exotic and exciting to the Russians as les montagnes russes sounded to the French. We Americans stressed the exciting experience, not the exotic origins.

In both Russian and English, roller coasters can be used metaphorically to describe any dizzying experience -- like tracking the etymology of американские горки.


Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.

posted by Kate @ 11:35 AM 0 comments