I watched Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (see this post) with great pleasure; not only is it well made (and surprisingly avant-garde for the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era), but it’s in Estonian, which is fun. But not all of it! At one point our hero, Inspector Glebsky, gets an anonymous note in French that warns him of “un terroriste dangereux, connu par le surnom Filine.” The subtitle called him Owl, which puzzled me; when I checked the Russian text of the Strugatsky novel the movie is based on, I found the note read thus:
«Господина инспектора Глебски извещают, что в отеле находится в настоящее время под именем Хинкус опасный гангстер, маньяк и садист, известный в преступных кругах под кличкой Филин. Он вооружен и грозит смертью одному из клиентов отеля. Господина инспектора убедительно просят принять какие-нибудь меры».
In the translation by Josh Billings:
“MISTER INSPECTOR GLEBSKY: PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT A DANGEROUS GANGSTER, SADIST AND MANIAC IS CURRENTLY STAYING AT THE INN UNDER THE NAME HINKUS. IN CRIMINAL CIRCLES, HE GOES BY THE NAME ‘THE FINCH’. HE IS ARMED AND THREATENING DEATH TO ONE OF THE INN’S CLIENTS. MISTER INSPECTOR IS KINDLY REQUESTED TO TAKE SOME SORT OF ACTION.”
So Филин explained Filine, but why Owl? It turns out that филин is the Russian word for Bubo bubo, the Eurasian eagle-owl, a bird with which I was unfamiliar. As for the word филин, Wiktionary sez: “The origin is uncertain. Has been compared to Ukrainian квили́ти (kvylýty, ‘to groan, to moan’).” And it turns out the French equivalent is Hibou grand-duc, which is a splendid name: “Il est possible que les aigrettes proéminentes de cet hibou aient été rapprochées de la couronne ducale.” I have no idea why Billings chose to render it “finch.”
Maybe Billimgs picked “finch” for sounding like “Hinkus”? “Owl” has a very different ear-feel.
Modern Hebrew adopted (rightly or not) the biblical אֹחַ ʾoaḥ for the genus Bubo. It also is a very owly word.
Apparently a friend of mine has it, and is willing to lend me to read.
Why, in the context of the plot, is the note not in Estonian (or at least glossed in Estonian)?
Well, the movie isn’t set in Estonia but in some vaguely Western country where they have snowy mountains and speak French (the hotel signs are in French, anyway). The movie is in Estonian because it was produced in Estonia (though some of the actors weren’t Estonian, so their lines were dubbed into that language). I presume when it was shown in the USSR the note was subtitled in Russian.
Which reminds me — I forgot to mention that the music, composed by Sven Grünberg (who despite his name is Estonian, and who got the job despite being in his early twenties because Arvo Pärt, who was slated to do it, was in the process of trying to leave the USSR, and the experienced composer who took his place wandered off during a drunken party and never returned, so his young assistant was hired), includes a song in nonsense words because Grünberg knew if the lyrics were in Estonian or any other actual language it would be dubbed into Russian, and he didn’t want that. Another piquant detail is that the censors held up the movie because they were certain the song was actually a Pink Floyd track being smuggled in without authorization.
I assume they speak Estonian with outrageous fake-French accents, a la Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau? If someone passed Clouseau a note “in French” there would be some clever way to convey its substance to the audience in English …
Oh, and according to this Grunberg already had some prior soundtrack work under his belt before this project. https://imposemagazine.com/bytes/cinema/avo-paistik-sven-grunberg-estonian-cinema
That’s a nice writeup. As for “As adaptations of Strugatsky Brothers novels go, this is certainly not Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker” — that’s as may be, but the Strugatskys preferred this one. They resented the liberties Tarkovsky took with their novel.
languagehat : “Another piquant detail is that the censors held up the movie because they were certain the song was actually a Pink Floyd track being smuggled in without authorization.”
So it was in the era where it was not The Beatles but Pink Floyd that was considered subversive. (that’s an actual thing — people would get stamped (literally) if they dressed like a “beetle”.
@V: This might be the scene with the “controversial” track in question. Don’t know that it sounds that much like Floyd, but it certainly doesn’t sound like the Beatles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4SxKp9bp9I
J.W. Brewer : “Битълси” was a catch-all term for counter-culture in ’60s in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian equivalent of the KGB used it as a synonym for a certain type of dissident. Pink Floyd persisted more. Still does.
@V: as we have previously discussed, by some point in the ’70’s the Western intelligence agencies had (in their inscrutable wisdom) decided to use Юрая Хийп as the key musical combo for undermining construction of the glorious socialist future among Bulgarian youth. They may have had a different strategy for Estonia, though.
J.W. Brewer : I actually remember that discussion. When was it? I can’t find it by search.
In the event, it was Yugoslavia’s Eurovision victory that sealed the fate of the Soviet Union.
Филин is Russian poetry’s regular
https://imagopedia.spbu.ru/f-cfauna/360-filin-v-russkoj-poezii-xviii-xx-vv.html
David Eddyshaw : we do not talk about THE EVENT. (david mitchell voice). Remain indoors.
Then modern Zakhoder classic
Только ночью
Страшен
ФИЛИН.
А при свете –
Он
Бессилен!
And the classic sonnet crowned with
Пусть гибель вновь пророчит филин
И пусть Господень гнев всесилен –
Одна слеза из этих глаз
Проклятье смоет с крыш усталых,
И всё, что на сердце осталось,
Я в сердце сохраню для вас
https://www.vekperevoda.com/1930/betaki.htm
I presume when it was shown in the USSR the note was subtitled in Russian.
No, it’s shown in French and the protagonist just reads it aloud in Russian. The whole film was released in the USSR in a Russian language version, which you can see here: https://youtu.be/502odL5ZcUU?is=TFoWhgDPSrbvT5nl
The note appears at minute 18:30.
I guess, because Russian is a gendered language, using more common word for owl, сова, to refer to a man is uncomfortable, филин then can fill the void.
@D.O.: I think it has more to do with the tradition also alluded to in the poems quoted in this t hread that the call of the филин is a foreboding of doom.
The owls are not what they seem…
I think it has more to do with the tradition also alluded to in the poems quoted in this t hread that the call of the филин is a foreboding of doom.
I agree.
With no more context, I like Billings’s “finch”—I feel like it could come across as a stylish criminal nickname or a silly one, depending on your mood, but “owl” hits me as just silly. That’s probably both Y’s “ear-feel” and my idiosyncratic associations, where “Finch” is a person’s last name, and “owl” is X the Owl or the Tootsie Roll Pop commercial.
Yes: “owl” just has too many wrong associations in English. (It makes me think of Billy Bunter, or Winnie-the-Pooh, or “drunk as an owl.” And “owlish” is not a positive word in English.)
Might “Raptor” do for a Cool Criminal name?
[Kusaal viug “owl” belongs to the “nasty/useless animals” noun-class-pairing/”gender”; mind you, so do other words for raptors, like silʋg “hawk.”]
It’s weird that the owl from the Tootsie Roll Pop commercial is a cultural touchstone. But I guess that’s what happens when you keep showing the same commercial for more than half a century. I remember the animation looking dated when I was a kid, but that same commercial has been running, off and on, since 1969. It was charming, and it has a fair amount of nostalgia value now (for all that I dislike Tootsie Roll Pops), but it was not a great achievement even by the standards of television commercials.
The name of Bubo bubo will be impressed forever in your memory if you read Alan Garner’s masterpiece The Owl Service, one of the greatest novels of sociolinguistics, the one for which he said he learned Welsh “in order not to use it”. Bubo bubo appears only in one scene, but it’s a whopper.
Welsh tylluan “owl” is an etymological enigma (the Wiktionary note on it just seems like free-associating guesswork to me.)
free-associating guesswork
There hasn’t been much improvement in almost three centuries.
I thought it was onomatopoeia – it does sound a bit owlish. (Although not owlish enough to stop me mixing them up with mice.)
Maybe. The u is [ɨ] nowadays, which is not very owl-like, but it was [y] in Middle Welsh.
“Owl” itself may ultimately be of onomatopoeic origin, if Wiktionary is to be believed.
Come to think of it, even Kusaal viug “owl” might conceivably be related to the verb vu “make a noise”; vowels quite often get sporadically rounded after labial/labiodental/labial-velar consonants in Oti-Volta, and the tones match OK.
“Eagle-Owl” could almost be a criminal alias. But not quite.
“FInch” strikes me as too harmless, and suggests “fink”.
“FInch” strikes me as too harmless
That was my reaction.
Yes, I thought so too.
One of your more famous fictional Finches is of course Atticus Finch, and he does appear in a narrative with some elements of detective-mystery about it, but he is neither the intriguing villain nor even the intriguing noirish P.I. And then there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidd_Finch
However, “They call him The Goldfinch” works wonders for me. Neck-hair-erecting name right there. Sounds like someone who steals from the Louvre.
Finch was David Spade’s character, the conniving bastard in the ca. 2000 sitcom Just Shoot Me!
True; but it makes you think of the gangster as a sneaky thief who outwits the security. Eurasian eagle owls, bigger than the American ones, use brute force and sometimes kill foxes.
(Uhu in German, with phonotactics sacrificed to onomatopoeia. Also Austria’s most widespread brand of glue for, presumably, some reason. Masculine as in Russian.)
Not just in Austria. In Germany it’s even occasionally at least used as a generic term for glue, whatever the actual brand.
Interesting:
Pfeifer has only “eine lautnachahmende Reduplikationsbildung des Vogelrufs”, first attested in the 16th century, no OHG form or Proto-West Germanic reconstruction.
And then there’s Harold Finch, Michael Emerson’s character on the memorable (to me) series Person of Interest.
early modern German Huhu, itself an onomatopoeic reduplication …
NZ Huhu grubs are supposed to be a delicacy.
from Proto-Polynesian *fufu (“weevil”).
The grubs are silent; the beetles scuttle. So the explanation can’t be onomatopoeia.
@Rodger C: My younger brother used to be a background extra on Person of Interest. He could often be seen doing paperwork while Emerson and the other principals were talking.