A Boundary Is Not a Field.

I watched Alexander Dovzhenko’s famous 1930 movie Земля (Earth), which is terrific filmmaking (it’s “commonly regarded as Dovzhenko’s masterpiece and as one of the greatest films ever made,” to quote that Wikipedia article) and also a celebration of Stalin’s forced collectivization, which killed “on the order of 12 million people” and destroyed Soviet agriculture, so it might well be compared to another famous and morally dubious filmic masterpiece… but I digress. I want to complain about a badly translated word in the version I watched. The hero of the movie, Vasyl, is (of course) a Bolshevik agitprop guy, and he’s convincing the villagers to give up their individualistic fields and flocks and join the kolkhoz; the villains are (of course) the kulaks who don’t agree and want to keep their own stuff. When the community’s first tractor arrives to much fanfare, it eventually (after it stops because of an overheated radiator, which the villagers solve by pissing into it, a scene cut by prudish Soviet censors) starts plowing much more efficiently than the peasants’ horses and oxen, those relics of the outmoded past. And at one point we see a guy rush up to one of the kulaks and holler “Хома! Василь межу трактором переехал!” [Khoma! Vasyl plowed over the field boundary with the tractor!]; later, after the furious Khoma has killed the noble Vasyl, at the funeral service (a Bolshevik service, with singing and dancing and no priest!) a speaker says “Большевистским стальным конем разворотил Василь тысячелетние межи” [Vasyl broke up thousand-year-old field boundaries with his Bolshevik steel horse]. Unfortunately, whoever did the subtitles didn’t understand the word межа́, and rendered it “field” both times, which makes nonsense of the dialogue (and counterrevolutionary nonsense at that — accusing a Bolshevik of destroying the peasants’ fields will get you ten years without right of correspondence, citizen). So if you ever see the movie, remember this post!

Comments

  1. Perhaps these too-versatile subtitlers were nudged from their strait and straight furrow by words generally importing “meadow”, “land destined to be mown” (like -math in aftermath, mentioned approvingly in this recent post), so something resembling “field” at least. Those are ultimately from a PIE mē- (various forms), which appears highly productive but not into Slavic.

  2. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    Surely “Большевистским стальным конем” is no mere steel horse but specifically a a Bolshevik steel horse, isn’t it, comrade?

  3. How… how did that happen?

    *runs to fix the inadvertent error, wipes sweat off brow*

    Please don’t mention this to the commissar!

  4. Just as well it wasn’t a сталинский конь, товарищ.

  5. Dmitry Pruss says

    разворотил may also be “tore up”. It’s an epic, foobar-quality level of raw destruction.

    I was surprised that the Baltic cognates mean “forest” rather than “middle, separator”.

  6. For a non-Bolshevik perspective, see Deut. 27:17: “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen.” I will defer to the Slavicists to see what what lexeme is used for “landmark” in the Slavonic version.

  7. The Russian Synodal Version has “Проклят нарушающий межи ближнего своего! И весь народ скажет: аминь.” As you see, it uses межа (in the plural). But the Church Slavonic version is “Проклѧтъ прелагаѧй предѣлы ближнѧгѡ своегѡ. И рекꙋтъ вси людїє: бꙋди.” This uses the more general ‘boundary’ word, прѣдѣлъ (предел).

  8. The LXX has ὅρια, which looks to be the plural of a generic “boundary” word and does not (typically?) refer more specifically to a stone or what have you placed to mark it. That’s probably why the Slavonic is similarly general.

  9. бо між наших вороних повелися тії коні, що вже знала я про них
    Author was a minister of culture (I think) in Soviet Ukrainian government and is known to Ukrainian children by a line “it’s better to eat a brick than to learn Tychina’s poetry”. But this one is not bad and his most famous (that is, most forced down Ukrainian schoolchildren throats) “In the square by a church…” is also ok.

    As for moving a landmark, Ibn Ezra thought that it is cursed because it is done in secret, so doesn’t apply to “Bolshevik’s steel horse”

  10. Trond Engen says

    Dmitry: I was surprised that the Baltic cognates mean “forest” rather than “middle, separator”.

    For the development “border mark” > “forest”, no doubt by way of “land between fields”, compare the Gmc. mark word.

  11. PlasticPaddy says

    @trond
    doesn’t need to be land between fields–hedgerows are typical borders where there is not so much wood or stone to make and repair walls and fences.I had supposed the tractor to have destroyed a hedgerow, rather than a wall, palisade or stand of trees.

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    “A boundary is not a field” sounds rather California Zen. Or perhaps a Yodaism. Words to live by …

  13. I had supposed the tractor to have destroyed a hedgerow, rather than a wall, palisade or stand of trees.

    Probably not even a hedgerow, just an unplanted narrow strip between fields. The point was to eliminate the private fields and force everyone to farm collectively.

  14. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Known as a headland in English, I believe.

  15. I’ll be damned:

    2. The unplowed boundary of a field.
    Synonym: (obsolete except Britain, dialectal) furlong

    I had no idea.

  16. Jen in Edinburgh says

    It feels a bit like the biblical landmark – two words which have lost a small-scale meaning and kept a large-scale one

  17. LXX has ὅρια

    גבול can mean the area bounded as well as the boundary, can’t it? But maybe as metonomy and not etymology, so that for most, if not all, the verses where it gets translated “territory,” there’s an alternative translation that manages to keep “boundary.”

  18. California Zen. Or perhaps a Yodaism.

    Or a lemma of a general semantics spinoff.

  19. Stu Clayton says

    Or a lemma of a general semantics spinoff

    “A is not B” is true exactly when A is not B, never was and never will be. As a consequence there are very few true statements. Semantics is a barren pear tree.

  20. David Eddyshaw says

    All this is not that.

  21. The boundary of a boundary is null.

  22. jack morava says

    ninja’d by Jerry F:

    this is a central dictum in topology and calls to mind a line (2nd hand via James Blish) from Theodore Roethke I think: the edge cannot eat the center.

    In geometric contexts this is usually an assertion about the relation of an n-dimensional manifold to a lower ((n-1)-dimensional) topos/whatchamacallit, \eg a 2D portal like Alice’s LookingGlass into a 3D world, a table to its edge, a line to its end. See also

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

  23. The Shape Of The Fire:

    […]

    3

    The wasp waits.
      The edge cannot eat the center.
    The grape glistens.
      The path tells little to the serpent.
    An eye comes out of the wave.
      The journey from flesh is longest.
    A rose sways least.
      The redeemer comes a dark way.

  24. A watershed is not a watershed.

  25. A frontier is a field.

    Wiktionary: “The part of a country which borders or faces another country or unsettled region.” And it gives this handy quote: “Unlike a boundary, which evokes the image of a line on a map and demarcates spheres of political control, the frontier is an area where colonisation is taking place … no authority is recognised as legitimate by all parties or is able to excersise undisputed control over the area.” WIth neither tractors nor tanks.

  26. David Eddyshaw says
  27. Ceci n’est pas une phrase, sauf si …

  28. The sea’s name is inien, well and good. But what we call the Inmost Sea has its own name also in the Old Speech. Since no thing can have two true names inien can mean only ‘all the sea except the Inmost Sea.’ And of course it does not mean even that, for there are seas and bays and straits beyond counting that bear names of their own. So if some Mage-Seamaster were mad enough to try to lay a spell of storm or calm over all the ocean, his spell must say not only that word inien, but the name of every stretch and bit and part of the sea through all the Archipelago and all the Outer Reaches and beyond to where names cease.

  29. “A boundary is not a field” sounds like topological truism.

  30. Speaking of strange subtitles. I am now watching Bosch: Legacy which features a team of Russian thugs. (Parenthetically, the Russian language representation in this series is very good). At some point, one of them refuses to eat before doing their job saying “Только найдем этого козла, а потом и поедим по-человечьи” (Let’s find this scumbag and then eat properly). The last part is subtitled as “Then we’ll feast like Vikings”. Why Vikings?

  31. PlasticPaddy says

    @do
    This is only a guess–they interpreted the Russian phrase to mean “like real men” and then went from “real men” to “Vikings”.

  32. I agree with PP.

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