I’ve been investigating Zamyatin’s early novels (or novellas, if you prefer), and right now I’m reading his 1914 На куличках [The back of beyond], translated by Walker Foard as A Godforsaken Hole (Ardis, 1988), in which Andrei Ivanych Polovets escapes the provincial tedium of Tambov to serve as an officer in a Pacific port (apparently Vladivostok, since Ланцепупы gets a mention), where he encounters drunkenness and debauchery; its publication resulted in judicial proceedings against Zamyatin for antimilitarism. What spurs me to post is a perfect example of something that’s impossible to translate unless you have the appropriate literary/cultural, not just linguistic, background. Here’s the passage (from ch. 9):
Впрочем, протрезвившись, Тихмень костил себя олухом и карасем с неменьшим рвением, чем своих ближних, и исполнялся еще большею ненавистью к той субстанции, что играет такие шутки с людьми, и что люди легкомысленно величают индейкой.
Год тому назад… да, это так: уже почти год прошел с того дня, как ироническая индейка так подло посмеялась над Тихменем.
I decided to check out Foard’s translation because I had a strong suspicion that he’d get it wrong, and sure enough:
However, after sobering up, Tikhmen would curse himself as an idiot and a sucker with no less fervor than he had his neighbors, and he infused himself with still more hatred for that substance that plays such games with people and that they so flippantly nickname “spirits.”
A year ago … yes, that’s right: it’s already been almost a year to the day since those ironic “spirits” had so cruelly made fun of Tikhmen.
Rendering карась, literally ‘crucian carp (Carassius carassius),’ as “sucker” is OK (it has a number of slang senses, and that works for several of them), but “spirits” is flat wrong. The word индейка means ‘turkey,’ which clearly made no sense to Foard; he made the reasonable guess from context that it had to do with booze and rendered it “spirits.” What he didn’t know is that Russians have, for unknown reasons and for at least two centuries (it occurs in Gogol’s The Inspector General [Не судьба, батюшка, судьба — индейка] and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time [Пусть теперь решат философы: или судьба индейка, или человек индюк]), said that fate is a turkey: судьба — индейка. With this in mind, we see that what Tikhmen hates is fate, and what comes to my mind as a possible English equivalent is the fickle finger of fate, which was made famous by the 1966 Broadway musical Sweet Charity but which preexisted it — Eric Partridge in his useful if unreliable Dictionary of Catch Phrases (Google Books) dates “fucked by the fickle finger of fate” (“often in the shortened or allusive form the fickle finger of fate”) to c. 1930, “Adopted in UK by 1960 at latest.” So I would propose “and he was filled with even greater hatred for that substance that plays such tricks on people, and to which people frivolously attribute a fickle finger.” You could then render the second occurrence as “It’s been almost a year since the day when Tikhmen got so meanly fucked by the ironic fickle finger,” but that might be a tad too strong for Zamyatin.
Obviously судьба — индейка (fate is turkey) simile cannot be properly discussed without Kozma Prutkov:
Aphorism 149: Не совсем понимаю: почему многие называют судьбу индейкою, а не какою-либо другою, более на судьбу похожею птицею?/ I don’t get it, why some people call fate “turkey” and not after some other bird which resembles fate more?
How could I omit Kozma Prutkov??
I’ve never seen a stage production of Sweet Charity, but the film version is an atrocity. It’s Florence Foster Jenkins, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Insane Clown Posse.
I didn’t know the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Thanks for the tip.
I didn’t either. You can hear a bit of their performance of the William Tell Overture at the Wikipedia article.
I, for my part, had not heard of Insane Clown Posse.
I see from WP that ill-wishers have tried to ruin their reputation with malicious insinuations that they were a Christian band. Hurtful stuff.
More on the Portsmouth Sinfonia (audio), which I hadn’t heard of either.
There must be something deeply wrong with me. However, I’m not sure whether it’s that I could, without hesitation, call up the names of several abysmally bad novelty acts, from multiple musical genres; or that I thought that, having mentioned—and panned—Sweet Charity, I should add an obscure further joke referencing the lyrics of one of the songs.
Come to think of it, The Fateful Turkey could be applied to any of those acts.
Now we just need someone to confess that he/she was hitherto ignorant of *both* ICP *and* the P. Sin. I will make only the narrower confession that some decades ago when I was young and unworldly I may have sometimes muddled up the Portsmouth Sinfonia with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
They are of different genres. FFJ was bad, and unaware of it. PS were bad, and aware of it. ICP are technically good, if not to everyone’s taste (e.g., not to mine). I would barely even call them a novelty act.
If you’re going to call yourselves Insane Clown Posse you’re pretty much doomed to be classified as a novelty act. (I confess I know them almost entirely via “Fucking magnets, how do they work?”)
@JWB:
Presumably, all Hatters already knew of Florence Foster Jenkins.
I was sorry to hear of the passing late last year of Darryl W. Bullock. His long-running blog, The World’s Worst Records, documented in loving and scholarly detail vast swamps of wretchedness I had not been at all aware of.
The blog has shut down. The archived pages at archive.org don’t all preserve the sound files but they are still a joy to read, and safer, too.
He also wrote a book-length biography of Florence Foster Jenkins.
For turkey-as-spirits, it appears from Russian wikipedia that the Russian for “Wild Turkey” is “Wild Turkey,” without calquing or even transliteration into Cyrillic. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Turkey
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
An excellent question. Sadly, my research tends to suggest that it may not have been asked in an open-minded spirit of rational enquiry. One might have hoped for at least a passing reference to James Clerk Maxwell in the lyrics, but I sought in vain for even an oblique allusion.
The whole “number”, to my mind, has a somewhat off-putting Carl Sagan air about it.
I’ve never heard of Insane Clown Posse or the Portsmouth Sinfonia, but I have heard of the Really Terrible Orchestra, does that count?
(Although what I’ve read about ICP reminds me more of the KLF than of an amateur orchestra, but maybe I’m missing the point!)
@Y: The variety in the types of bad ensembles I picked was deliberate. The intended subtext was that Sweet Charity is bad in many different kinds of ways.
As to the whole, “Fucking magnets…” thing: The best parody of Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” is this from Saturday Night Live.
I’ve never seen Shirley MacLaine give a performance in anything that wasn’t cringeworthy, though looking at her filmography, she seems to have featured mostly in movies I wouldn’t want to watch anyway. (I have seen The Trouble with Harry, but can’t actually remember anything much about it. I imagine it was an exception.)
I may have been unduly soured by the epically awful Being There: the high opinion so many apparently sane people have of that movie disturbs me …
In fairness to Ms MacLaine, being named after Shirley Temple is a bad start in life.
She’s also a truly horrible person.
i watched The Trouble With Harry again very recently, and it is a genuinely excellent movie!
i won’t go so far as to defend it, but to me the only thing wrong with Sweet Charity besides the plot is that it’s twice as long as it oughta be. which should probably be taken with a grain of salt given that i also think Cats (2020) is the best avant-garde film to come out of hollywood this century (and i think everybody but the director knew exactly what movie they were making).
ICP, however, i’d defend as possibly the most important band of the early 21st century. they’re the only one to have singlehandedly created a genuine mass-scale countercultural movement – in a moment where it has become incredibly and increasingly hard to create even small-scale subcultural spaces, much less sustain them for 36 years! and not only that, the one they’ve cultivated has not only been understood by the state as having created enough internal solidarity among a large enough group of people to be worth specifically attacking, it’s survived and even grown since the feds started targeting them. i suspect ICP will end up giving the Dead and the 5%ers competition for the scale of their long-term cultural influence through popular music. the music itself doesn’t do it for me, personally, and i can’t really say i’m down with the clown, but i’ve got possibly improbable amounts of respect for juggalos and juggalettes. in honor of the upcoming 25th edition, i tried to track down a great piece on the Gathering of the Juggalos that i read a few years ago to share, but the death of actual internet search makes everything harder…
@DE: “epically awful”? What in particular? I liked that film a lot when I was 11. Just rewatched it a few years ago and I thought it held up ok. Maybe a little on the nose about the way media guides perception but also sadly prescient about sane-washing mentally incompetent public figures. Given that it’s a comedy, I found MacLaine pitched her performance about right. I’ve seen people complain that the film is “reactionary” but that seems to me a gross misreading.
My biggest complaint is that the source material was notoriously plagiarized, but that’s more an issue with the novel than the film.
Maybe de preferred Peter Sellers in “The Party”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Party_(1968_film)
Dr Strangelove …
@rozele: I found out about ICP just barely in time for someone to recognize my G-rated reference when I introduced magnetism in a physics class. Or so I thought. Do you think it still might be recognized?
I have retroactive fantasies of grad students setting up some kind of booth outside an ICP concert with materials to explain magnetism on various levels including to the one I don’t understand in detail (about the exchange interaction). They’d show that science does in fact explain some wonderful things, and the things don’t become less wonderful.
the music itself doesn’t do it for me, personally
This is an odd throwaway disclaimer when talking about a band! But I know what you mean; I too admire their perseverance and the dedication of the juggalos. However, “the most important band of the early 21st century” may be over-egging it.
The Portsmouth orchestra article links to the Really Terrible Orchestra and the Really Terrible Orchestra of the Triangle. I was hoping that all members of the latter played the triangle, but no.
“the most important band of the early 21st century”
Given how weak the competition is, maybe? Otherwise you might have to say Coldplay, or worse Linkin Park.
It’s definitely been a century of solo performers. I can think of dozens of great 21st century bands, but it’s hard to argue any of them are “important.” I would like to argue for Tocotronic, but that only works in limited parts of Germany.
@rozele:
> i tried to track down a great piece on the Gathering of the Juggalos that i read a few years ago to share, but the death of actual internet search makes everything harder…
It wouldn’t have been Brian Raftery’s “How Two Outcast Rappers Built an Insane Clown Empire” (https://www.wired.com/2010/11/ff-icp/), could it?
I knew a fan in Vienna in the late 90s. I have no clue if that was normal or if he was the only one.
“Fucking magnets, how do they work?” is now a fixed phrase that I encounter regularly online. Only in this thread did I learn it has anything to do with Insane Clown Posse, which I knew pretty much only by name (and comparisons to Trump administrations for example).
жизнь – копейка consistently rhymes with судьба – индейка; I see the full rhyme e.g. in Merezhkovsky’s 1914 volume, but I’m sure that it’s a much older military ditty. Lermontov mentions only the first part in his 1839 “Princess Mary” – it’s a cavalrymen’s expression there.
If you define “most important band” by commercial success and number of screaming teenage fans, then my guess for most important band in early 21st Germany would be Tokio Hotel. Dyring the mid-oughties they were inevitable if you had any exposure to popular music coverage in the media at all. Other popular bands from the 2000s and 2010s whose music I actually listen to are Seeed and Kraftklub. But I don’t actively follow the scene, and anyway isn’t it too early do define this? (Re Tocotronic, I barely know that they exist, but the mid-to-late 90s were a time when I was mostly abroad and didn’t even have the passive knowledge of the German music scene you get by watching TV and listening to the radio.)
Oh yes.
Off-topicish: I spend a dumbtastic amount of time looking at reference works in languages I don’t read well, so I have this marvelous tool installed called EasyDict (1) that lets me hit certain keyboard commands and translate selected text or a screen grab. Often the results are different, so your early line “На куличках [The back of beyond], translated by Walker Foard as A Godforsaken Hole” got me wondering how else those two words would/could be translated to English by software. Needless to say, because they are just two words, the results are super iffy. Two words are not enough for modern translation software to apply its techniques. In the first place, the language-identifier currently in use by EasyDict, Google, misidentified the words as Ukranian. In the second, you get this:
На куличках
As Russian:
On the straps – Google Translate API
In the middle of nowhere – Google Translate website
On tiptoes – Bing Translate
On the hills – Llama-3-70b
As Ukrainian:
On the waders – Google Translate API
On the heels – Google Translate website
On the Easter cakes – Bing Translate
On the hillocks – Llama-3-70b
1. https://github.com/tisfeng/Easydict
Ha! That’s because the title is truncated from the idiomatic phrase у чёрта на куличках (variations of which occur at least half a dozen times in the text) ‘at the devil’s kulichki,’ and nobody knows what the last word literally means. Isachenko in 1957 suggested that it was borrowed from a Polish kuliczki ‘testicles,’ but there does not appear to be such a word in Polish, and this Polish page says that a similar Polish expression (little known, and only in certain dialects) is borrowed from Russian, adding (per GT):
“Fucking magnets, how do they work?” is now a fixed phrase that I encounter regularly online.
Thanks, I might try it again—though there are a lot of different onlines.
@hat
There is a strange parallel with Irish gual = coal and English goolies = testicles. But this would only work for kulichki if there had been a borrowing from Germanic *kula = coal which is no longer extant in Slavic. I have not seen either of these etymologies considered, so there is probably something that rules them out.
Only now I caught the association in the back of my mind with Mark Twain’s Hunting the Deceitful Turkey.
Damn, that would have been a great post title.
@JF: i adore that idea, and i don’t think it’s too late at all – the 25th Gathering seems like a perfect opportunity!
@MM: no, it was from the late teens, i believe, and very specifically about the Gathering – i don’t think i’ve seen that Wired article though; thanks for sharing it!
@Hat, @Hans: i think importance, popularity, and quality are pretty separable forms of significance (and even popularity is hard to measure rigorously). with ICP, i’m mainly thinking about the scale, depth, and longevity of the counterculture they’ve cultivated, which goes well beyond anything i can think of for a single band (the Beyhive isn’t a way of life in the same way; my impression is that k-pop superfandoms are much more tightly focused on the stars they follow – though i’m far from well-informed; the Wu-Tang Clan i think coulda done something similar, but never really did).
As in Kollikodon.