Nepenthe

Let's check these many illustrated by Anjana Iyer , for the Found in Translation project.  Backpfeifengesicht – DE – A face badly in need of a fist. (Em PT, somos negativos e depreciativos, a pessoa nem tem cara para levar um estalo / um soco.) Iktsuarpok – Inuit – The frustration of waiting for someone to turn up. (We have seen this one before, but with another translation: “The sense of anticipation as you wait for someone to visit.”) Tingo – Pascuense / Rapa Nui – To gradually steal all the possessions out of a neighbour's house by borrowing and not returning. (We have seen this one before, but with another translation: “The act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.”) Ilunga (Tshiluba) – A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time. (Em PT, Luba é uma das línguas bantas.) Hanyauku – KWN – The act of walking on tiptoes across warm sand. (E...

For The New Yorker This piece contains spoilers for the series finale of “The Americans.” My life prepared me to do one job, and this job was translating for “The Americans,” the FX show that wrapped up on Wednesday after six seasons. Most of the episodes contained at least a few scenes in Russian, and “The Americans” was the first show I’d encountered whose creators cared to insure that the dialogue was scripted and spoken in actual, idiomatic, living Russian. For the last three seasons, it was my job to translate these scenes, scripted in English, into Russian. It wasn’t just any Russian, either. The show begins in 1981 and ends in 1987, just before the language began to follow, and to facilitate, the country’s transformation by absorbing hundreds of words from foreign languages— office , bucks , management , and so many others that capitalism brought with it, but also electoral’niy , exit poll , and more to describe the mechanics of democracy—and by creating brand-new ...

 

It’s who you are inside that matters

We did it! It's been almost 15 years since we watched this work of wonder - twice, in my case. Now we managed to take the kids and they absolutely loved it.

"In  Crime and Punishment , there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle. “I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about  it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation. The inconspicuous passage would resurface before long, though. The translation was published and, Richard recalls, “one very eminent revi...

This week's poem is Punk Prayer by the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot , three of whose members have just been  sentenced to two years in a prison colony for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" . Is there any truth in the accusation? It's worth taking a closer look at the lyrics of  Punk Prayer . This, of course, is the song that sparked the trouble when the three women performed it in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour five months ago. The performance was mildly shocking, at least for any believer unused to trendy vicars putting on rock concerts. Loud, rude, up-yours protest is what punk is all about. But the lyrics are not all raw obscenity: they have something significant to say, which the careless translations slopping around the internet tend to obscure. Western commentators have cherry-picked simple-mindedly to find quotations. In offering my version of Punk Prayer as Poem of the Week, I'm expressing solidarity with the ...

as interviewed by  Ekaterina Loushnikova for Open Democracy Russia - full text “It’s most important to remember that the camp is a negative school from the first day to the last – for everyone.  No one, from the camp commandant down to the convict, should have to see it, but once you have done so, you have to tell the truth, however terrible that may be.”   Varlaam Shalamov Kolyma is often compared with Auschwitz, but without the ovens and the gas chambers.  The killer here was something else: cold, hunger and backbreaking labour.  In the Stalin years millions of prisoners did their time in the labour camps of Kolyma. Not many survived to tell the tale; and today there are even fewer of them left.  Pavel Kalinkovich Galitsky, one of those very few, lives in St Petersburg. A journalist by profession, Galitsky spent 15 years doing hard labour in Kolyma. He recently celebrated his 100th birthday and I went to see him. Spit it out! I st...