My brother insisted I watch Compartment No. 6 (Hytti nro 6) because he was so sure I’d like it, and indeed I did: it’s about a Finnish woman, Laura, who takes a train from Moscow to Murmansk to see the petroglyphs and has to share a compartment with a Russian guy, Lyokha (a common nickname for Alexei, though his actual name is never given), played by Yura Borisov, who is excellent (and is now starring to great acclaim in Anora, which I am eager to see). Lyokha seems at first to be a brainless, sexist brute, and our heroine flees the compartment to avoid him, but eventually (of course) he turns out to be more complicated and interesting. The movie is mostly in Russian, which Laura speaks well but not perfectly; at one point a fellow Finn joins them for a while, so they speak in Finnish, to the evident annoyance of Lyokha. The movie starts with a gathering of hip intelligentsia in a Moscow apartment, playing a game in which one person quotes a line and the others have to guess what it’s from (“Pelevin?” “Has to be Pelevin — is it from Omon Ra?” “Think higher…”); poor Laura has her pronunciation of Akhmatova corrected by a snooty young woman (she had put the stress on the penultimate).
All of this is Hattically interesting, of course, but what drove me to post is the bit where Lyokha, trying to chat her up, asks how you say various things in Finnish, laughing raucously at her answers, and when he asks how you say “I love you” she answers “Haista vittu,” giving a little smirk afterwards. Since it was not translated in the subtitles, I paused the movie and turned to the internet, where Wiktionary informed me that it means “fuck you (general insult)” and literally “sniff a cunt” (“Considered more vulgar than haista paska” [‘sniff shit’]). The phrase returns very effectively at the end, but the viewer with no Finnish is left in the dark, so as a public service I am providing enlightenment. (If I’ve aroused any interest in the movie, it’s available for a reasonable rental fee at Amazon Prime.)
Let no one say that languagehat does not provide a public service! I’m not sure I quite follow the implicit logic-if-any of the reported Finnish hierarchy of relative vulgarity here, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too judgmental about these foreigners and their quaint folkways.
Well, it’s exactly analogous to fuck off vs. piss off, isn’t it?
(Evidently, the Finnish and the English language both
are very ungutturalprioritize the sexual over the fecal. German doesn’t – and lacks an analogous pair of expressions.)While vittu does originate in a sexual word, it has been desexualized, really. It is no longer the common crude word for that part of the female anatomy (that would be pillu). The offensiveness of vittu lies not in any old literal meaning but in the circumstances it is used: either insults directed at another or, when it is used as a semantically bleached intensifier, as part of an extremely informal register. Rather like English fuck you and fucking great, really: would coitus ever really come to mind upon hearing those?
I appreciate Mr. Culver’s learned contributions on the topic. My concern about the seemingly irrational hierarchy-of-disgust presupposed reasonably literal parses of the various idiomatic expressions and that may well have been a faulty assumption.
I once went to see a play which was a sort of sequel to Macbeth, and the Northumbrian guy whose name escapes me asks Gruach/Lady Macbeth how to say ‘yes’ in Gaelic, only for her to tell him ‘no’ instead and have it repeat it to her. (Yes, I know, but ‘chan eil’ worked in context.)
A silly joke, but I liked the fact that they just moved on and left it as a joke for those who understood.
(I think the play was called Dunsinane, because I was hoping it would be pronounced dunSINnen like the hill, but it wasn’t.
Aha. Dunsinane. And also Dunsinane Hill)
Lyokha seems at first to be a brainless, sexist brute, and our heroine flees the compartment to avoid him, but eventually (of course) he turns out to be more complicated and interesting.
I won’t be giving away too much if I tell you that that describes very well his part in Anora, too.
In a standard Soviet translation of Švejk Czech swearing was translated and bits and pieces of German and Magyar strong words as well. But longer stretches of swearing in those two languages where footnoted with “A dirty German/Hungarian swearing”. Yes, thank you.
I suppose I should mention, though it probably goes without saying, that there’s a tremendous amount of Russian swearing in the movie.
Back in the days I read Hemingway’s “For whom the bell tolls ” in a bootleg typewritten copy in Russian. The Spanish words were supposed to be filled in longhand, but nobody added these Latin letters in my copy. The preface explained that they used Latin script for various untranslateds such as dirty words.
Well, she calls him Ingles all the time, and I kept wondering, what kind of a dirty word does she use instead of the name of her beloved….
Saw this movie in August 2022 and, man, I felt a certain sadness that would not have been there had I watched it on its festival tour in 2021.
It is no longer the common crude word for that part of the female anatomy (that would be pillu).
It is probably just coincidence that pilu has the same meaning in Calabria and Sicily. It means “hair” but by synecdoche also means “vulva”. Although it is unclear to me if that is really a native dialect meaning or if the Italian comedian Antonio Albanese just repurposed a dialect word for comedic effect in his films about Cetto the gangster, known as La Trilogia du Pilu. I assume Albanese doesn’t speak Finnish, but who knows?
In a standard Soviet translation of Švejk Czech swearing was translated and bits and pieces of German and Magyar strong words as well.
I have only read Schwejk in the German translation by Reiner-Straschnow, famous for her use of Böhmakeln, a sort of artificial mix of Prager colloquial German with some Viennese dialect that conveyed, apparently unfairly, a comedic and sometimes buffoonish aspect to Schwejk’s language not actually present in the original Czech. Nonetheless, it is a beloved text in the German world. But I don’t recall any swearing. Maybe because swearing in German rarely registers as strong.
@Vanya: chiù pil(l)u pi’ tutti!
@Vanya: Pili are as close as bacteria come to having external genitalia.
I have now seen Anora and can highly recommend it — both as an excellent movie and an example of freely mixing languages (mostly Russian and English, but with some Armenian thrown in). And of course, as with the posted movie, there’s a tremendous amount of Russian swearing.