Beowulf and Honey

Where do I start?

When I was very tiny, back when I still thought that every language had its own alphabet (how could it be otherwise?), my favorite bedtime story was Beowulf. Sometimes my father read it to me in Old English. Sometimes he read it to me in modern English from the Norton anthology. Sometimes he retold it out of his head using small words and directing my attention back to the original words when there was a link. Beowulf was important.

A few years ago I happened to see Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf at Third Place Books and picked it up mainly for the pictures. Once I got into it, I was intrigued by Heaney's description of how he found his register - he brought up in his mind's eye (or ear) the sound of some of his father's relatives and used their voices to achieve what he calls "forthright delivery."

I know that's something I do. I shamelessly use friends and relatives to choose a register for translating dialogue. If I've ever talked to you, consider this fair warning.

In a similar vein, a while back I read an interview with a Russian screenwriter who admitted that he researched the speech patterns for the cops in one of his movies by watching hours and hours of amateur videos posted online by young cops. Hats off to him for that, of course.

But back to Beowulf. The hero's name is a cypher for "bear" (bee+wolf). Interestingly, the Russian word for bear - медведь - is also a cypher: "one who knows where to find honey." Several people have told me that there used to be another word for bear in Russian: бер (ber). For whatever reason, Russians preferred to call the bear by a nickname and the nickname eventually outlived the true name. You can see the older word in the name for a bear's cave: берлога (ber-LO-ga, or "bear-lying place").

Give me some salted cabbage, no sauerkraut!

I bought the December issue of Хлеб*Соль (Bread*Salt) because it advertised an interview with Valery Syutkin, whose music makes me feel happy and nostalgic. What's that tower of veggies on the cover? It's салат оливье (Olivier salad), the eternal "company's coming" dish made of finely diced potatoes, carrots, pickles, hard-boiled egg, green peas and the meat of your choice, all dressed with mayonnaise and lots of fresh herbs. That may not sound fantastic, but I've had iterations that were very tasty. My friend and mentor Alla Kornibad always added diced green apple. My mother-in-law dresses the salad with sour cream instead of the hated mayonnaise, which she claims is an urban abomination particular to Muscovites. All the wonderful advice I've received about rescuing Olivier from its many pitfalls is for naught - I won't be making it for New Year's or any other holiday.

I do, however, want to make квашенная капуста (salted cabbage). It's nothing like the sauerkraut I remember trying sparingly at church suppers and German-themed festivals in Texas. Russian salted cabbage contains nothing but finely sliced white cabbage, julienned carrots and salt (non-iodized). I've even got a special cabbage knife that produces paper-thin strings of cabbage. You put it all together in a big jar or pot, cover it, and poke holes in it every few days until it tastes done. It isn't really done, however, until you dress a bowl of it with unrefined sunflower oil and add fresh cranberries and chopped green onion. Then you're in heaven (if that's your kind of thing). There's a good article in this issue of Bread*Salt about salted cabbage. From it I learned the word крошиво (kroshivo) - salted cabbage made from the tough outer leaves of the head, plus rye flour.

Lentils - чечевица, сочевица, сочево

I'm still interested in how the word сочевица morphed into чечевица (lentils). One book I ran across while searching is "Food in Russian History and Culture" - I'll have to pick this one up next time I'm home. I love the cover picture of people carrying boxed cakes. The Google Books preview brought up an interesting passage about disagreement in the Orthodox Church on the proper recipe for kutya.

Gogol-Mogol and the "M" Trick

Some people like to have a гоголь-моголь (GO-gol MO-gol, a raw egg beaten with sugar) for breakfast, some people don't. I stay away from raw eggs but I'm very interested in the name of the drink. Repeating a word with an "m" instead of the first consonant is a funny little habit that you hear a lot when you talk with people from the Caucasus region. Think шашлык-машлык (barbecue-marbecue) or чай-май (tea-mea). It doesn't seem to mean anything in particular when people do the "m" trick; it just injects a feeling of relaxation into the conversation.

I usually hear Armenians do the чай-май thing on food words, but the other day a Russian relative who grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia was over for tea and he did the "m" trick on a word that had nothing to do with food. He was talking about construction materials and I sat up straight in my seat when he did it. I was too shy to pull out my notebook and write it down at the moment and now, of course, I've forgotten it - a fitting punishment.

Mamalyga

At lunch today I put cornbread on the table. My father-in-law put on his glasses and exclaimed "It's mamalyga! Where did you find it?"

I told him it was from Trader Joe's.

Mamalyga is polenta. I believe the name mamalyga is used in lots of places from Hungary to Georgia. Here's a very appetizing picture of people eating mamalyga with delicious condiments in Abkhazia. Apparently the name comes from "melega," an old Italian word for corn (or sorghum, depending on where you look).

POSBON, the whole story

I did find out what the name of the funeral home ПОСБОН stands for: Производственное объединение специализированного бытового обслуживания населения

Here comes the full translation: Production Group for Specialized Life Services for the Public

Life Services?

Быт (life) is a strange word in Russian. It means everyday life, as in slogging through. Small towns still tend to have a Дом Быта, a building full of small businesses that cater to those annoying tasks every human faces: taking your clothes to get dry-cleaned, buying a new extension cord, getting your picture taken for a passport application, buying the specific, hard-to-find brand of cat food your vet recommends, getting the sole glued back on your shoe, etc.

Now that I re-read the above paragraph, I think I prefer the funeral homes that advertise as Ритуальные Услуги (ritual services).

Lahmajoun, and a mystery herb revealed

First off, the lahmajoun:

I know you can get lahmajoun in Moscow, but I only eat it in L.A. It's a paper-thin Armenian pizza sold in pairs, the sides with the toppings facing each other and a square of paper in between. You roll each one up and eat it with hot tea. Lahmajoun is supposed to be mildly spicy, but this particular lahmajoun stopped at being just savory. Still satisfying.

And now for the mystery herb:

[01/15/10 NOTE: this is actually summer savory, NOT oregano, which is what the saleslady called it!!]

My mother-in-law always chops up a bunch of this very pungent herb and puts it in potato salad or potato piroshki. She calls it citron and I always assumed it was some exotic Armenian herb you could only find at an Armenian grocery in Los Angeles. I've never seen it anywhere else in the U.S. and never at markets in Russia.

I saw some on sale at the store today, and since the place was otherwise empty I asked the saleslady what it was called in English. After a moment she remembered the name - oregano!

I took it home and compared the aroma to a good bottle of dried oregano. The dried oregano smells slightly sweet, like it's already on its way into a bottle of Italian seasoning. Aside from being much stronger, the fresh oregano has a hint of the smell you get when you touch a tomato plant. And it has none of the sweetness of the dried oregano.

My father-in-law remembers picking wild oregano in the hills when he was a boy, and he says the smell was enough to knock you down.

If you can get fresh oregano, try this potato salad:

Start with cooked, chopped potato (starchy, not waxy)

Add chopped bell pepper, halved kalamata or other purple olives, a good handful of chopped fresh oregano, a little bit of finely diced onion

Dress it with olive oil and lemon juice

Память на века

"Погребение в мавзолее-усыпальнице: скидка - 5% с предъявлением этого купона"

"Mausoleum burial: 5% off with this coupon"

This ad made me put down my fork. I'll let other people wonder about how the deceased are supposed to present coupons, or better yet, pay $26/month for a double. Here's my take on the words:

Мавзолей (mav-zo-LAY) is an obvious borrowing of the word mausoleum. The root of усыпальница (oo-si-PAL-neet-sa) is the Russian word for sleep, and the prefix means "away." It's another word for mausoleum. I'm not sure why the two are used together so often. Perhaps the pair functions as a euphemism. I've always been partial to the word склеп (sklep, or tomb). Makes me think of the mask of Agamemnon. Click the link to see a map of what sklep means in different Slavic languages.

In the same vein, I've wondered for years about ПОСБОН (POSBON), the name of a chain of funeral homes in the area where we live near Moscow. I tried to make it be an abbreviation of funeral home - похоронное бюро - but it just doesn't work. What are the "s" and the "n" doing there? I guess I could call them and ask.

I promise the next entry will be about lovely food and food words.

Лапша

Now that he's in school, my son's Russian is getting better every day. The other day I heard him say, "Не вешай мне макароны на уши!" ("Don't hang macaroni on my ears!") The actual Russian expression is "лапшу вешать на уши," or hanging noodles (lapsha) on someone's ears, and it means "to tell a lie." I suppose he heard the expression at school and didn't know the word лапша so he substituted Italian macaroni for Russian noodles. Curiously, Russians use the word macaroni for any pasta product, not just elbow macaroni. The word lapsha is reserved for homemade noodles.

According to Vasmer, лапша was borrowed from Tatar laksha, meaning little pieces of dough cooked in a stock.

Зачем вам столько гуталина?

The гуталин obsession continues. I've found the full names of the "MM. Worms and Zwierchowski" who patented guttaline some time in the 1890s.

Eugene Worms and Alexandre-Sigismond Zwierzchowski worked together on a number of patents, like one here for "an improved bicycle." They also invented things independently and with other partners. I doubt they had much knowledge of Mongol footwear, though.

Sakhalin Island and Buccaneer Physicians

In re-reading Chekhov's "Sakhalin Island" late last night I ran across the following interesting passage:

"Иду в избу. Там в горнице сидит старик в красной рубахе, тяжело дышит и кашляет. Я даю ему доверов порошок - полегчало, но он в медицину не верит и говорит, что ему стало легче оттого, что он "отсиделся".

Сижу и думаю: остаться ночевать? Но ведь всю ночь будет кашлять этот дед, пожалуй, есть клопы, да и кто поручится, что завтра вода не разольется еще шире? Нет, уж лучше ехать!"

My translation:

"I went into the house. There was an old man in a red shirt sitting in the good room. He was breathing heavily and coughing. I gave him some доверов порошок (doverov poroshok, "dover powder"). It helped, but he didn't believe in medicine so he said that "sitting it out" was what had helped him.

"I sat there and considered whether or not I should spend the night. I knew the old man would be coughing all night, and I suspected there would be bed bugs. And who could say that the water wouldn't spread further tomorrow? No, I decided to keep going!"

As soon as I read доверов порошок I immediately thought that there must be a Mr. Dover somewhere. And there was:

Dover's Powder, a combination of opium and ipecac, was invented by Thomas Dover in 1732. His biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography draws Dover as a colorful figure living in a colorful era. The man got his name in print for reasons ranging from his involvement in "privateering" (read "piracy") and the slave trade to his energetic promotion of his own remedies and his encouragement of patient self-diagnosis. The New York times ran an article about Dover on June 1, 1902 as a retrospective about an obscure figure who invented a remedy that was still very much in use at that time.

Chekhov took his trip to Sakhalin in 1890, and I found incomplete information in a Google Books preview of a 1933 dissertation that Dover's Powder was known in Russia as early as 1812.

The attraction of Dover's Powder at the time of its creation was that the inclusion of a small amount of ipecac (which causes vomiting) would supposedly prevent patients from overdosing.

It would be interesting to know if Chekhov, physician-writer-activist, knew anything about Thomas Dover, physician-pirate-activist.

On Possums

В детстве мне казалось, что название нашей улицы обусловлено самой природой - в любой день здесь можно встретить по крайней мере три-четыре раздавленных опоссумов. Позже я узнала, что официально улица называется FM 1374 ("farm to market"). Но народное название очень стойкое, чему свидетельствует этот краеведческий знак.

Слово "опоссум" происходит от алгонкин opassom ("белая собака" на языке племени индейцев), позже стали пропускать букву о- в начале слова. To play possum означает притворяться мертвым.

Каково было мое удивление, когда я открыла новый номер "Вог-Вязание" и увидела дорогие нитки из шерсти опоссума.

Indefinite Article

"A church with a voice like a trumpet"

Английские артикли многим мешают жить. А с дргуой стороны, они тонко передают некоторые нюансы, в том числе и теологические... Прихожане этой церкви не настаивают на своей уникальности. Вполне возможно, что таких божих мегафонов много. Если бы написали "The church with a voice like a trumpet", то это было бы куда более агрессивное заявление.

Мегафон мегафоном, но напротив есть еще одна церковь, которая привлекает посетителей и зарабатывает на текущие расходы продажей барбекью. Там всегда толпа стоит... Пробовали - вкусно (но жирно).

Redneck Putdown

Back in August I read about a wonderful British expression for taking down an over-confident blow-hard, "all mouth and no trousers." Today I ran into that expression's country cousin, "all hat and no cattle." I saw the phrase in an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle, but I can't tell you if it's a genuine Texas saying because I've never heard it before.

There's a roach!

I've got roaches on my mind today for all the wrong reasons.

Did you know that, in addition to the word таракан (ta-ra-KAN), Russian has another word for roach? It's прусак (pru-SACK). Think back to Chukovsky's Fedorino Gore, where she is making big concessions if only her dishes will agree to come back to her:

Я почищу вас песочком,

Окачу вас кипяточком,

И вы будете опять,

Словно солнышко, сиять,

А поганых тараканов я повыведу,

Прусаков и пауков я повымету

These прусаки are small roaches, and apparently they got their name because Russians thought they came from Prussia. In America, small roaches are called German cockroaches. Supposedly the Germans call them Russian roaches. Lots of finger-pointing going on... I don't care where they're from as long as they stay out of the bathtub. That's all.

Findability

I'm reading a fascinating book called Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. I picked it up in hopes of gaining some insight on how information turns up when we go digging for it. While there are plenty of Aha! moments in the book (such as a quote from Calvin Mooers, "An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome...to have the information than...not to have it.") - I keep noticing that discussions of information retrieval and findability on the internet focus on searchers/users as consumers who want to buy something. As translators, that's not how we use the internet, and I think that how we DO use the internet is worthy of some attention, both as a purely interesting phenomenon in itself and as a way to make our searching more effective.

Vacation Vocabulary

У нас официальный конец лета - Labor Day (первый понедельник в сентябре). В армии такие дни называют DONSA - day of no scheduled activity. Почты все, кого я видела в ресторанах и кафе на острове Галвестон сегодня, были одеты в стиле island casual или resort casual. Рестораторы в туристических городках используют эти формулировки, сочетающие в себе расслабленность и небольшой шик, чтобы народ не приходил в мокрых купальниках. К сожалению, судя по пустым пляжам, многие в Хьюстоне решили ограничится staycation - то есть, дома сидели.

How to Dig

I just now got my hands on the July issue of the ATA Chronicle and very much enjoyed Jost Zetzsche's article on ways to get more out of your Google searches by limiting the kinds of results you want to see. Now my head is full of an article I want to write on how translators can more effectively plot our searches before we even get to the stage of deciding whether or not to search site:.gov or site:.org.

A lot of how I approach my searches is based on intuition, but I'm going to pay more attention to my searches and mine the brains of a few friends - if I come up with something good I'll share.

Natural

A question on ProZ.com today reminded me about all the nuances of the word натуральный (na-tour-ALL-nee, "natural") in Russian. It can mean roughly the same thing as "natural" in English, but it can also mean homemade or homegrown. And it can mean plain, like if you serve baked fish without a sauce or eat yogurt without fruit or honey added.

Hooliganism, Part II

I think I've mentioned before that I love finding answers. I can't quite put my finger on why the word хулиганство has stuck with me for several months now, but it's had my imagination all fired up. How did the word get borrowed into Russian?

Reading offers some answers: Joan Neuberger's Hooliganism: Crime, Culture and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 gave me a name - Isaac Shklovskii, a journalist who wrote a column on life in England for the paper Russkoe bogatstvo. He wrote about the word hooligan in a colum in 1898, which happens to be the year the OED records as the first use of the word in print in English.

You can find some of Shklovskii's articles online by searching for his penname (Dioneo), but I couldn't tell from the ones I read what kind of sense of humor the man had. I mean, hooligan would have appealed to his Russian ear in a purely phonetic sense, wouldn't it?

Horses

I've been digging in horse terms a lot lately. Here are some interesting ones I've found:

Шпрингартен is a jumping chute

Берейтор is spelled "bereiter" in English (-er instead of -or) and means a horse trainer who specializes in training young horses

Левада is a paddock (or corral)

Schlumberger to the Rescue

I'm not an oil&gas translator, but, like everyone who translates Russian, I run into sticky oilfield terms on occasion and find the illustrated glossary maintained by Schlumberger to be an invaluable resource.

Унитаз

Our hot water is off for the next two weeks (a scheduled summer occurence, if you can believe it), so the other day I bought a big metal таз (taz, "basin") to fill with hot water for bathing.
My son was very approving - "I like that унитаз (oo-nee-TAZ, "toilet bowl") you bought!"

After I set him straight about the big difference between taz and unitaz, I started digging around to find out where the word came from. My usual first source (who conveniently sits across the table from me at breakfast) suggested that унитаз is short for универсальный таз (all-purpose basin). I knew - no, I had to believe - that he was wrong.

And he was!

I soon uncovered a very entertaining article on the invention of the flush toilet. The article is attributed to Twyford Bathrooms, but it isn't posted on the company's site. Twyford's site does, however, confirm that Thomas Twyford invented the "unitas" in 1883. The prefix uni- was chosen because it was the first one-piece toilet. What about -tas? I guess that was a prudent euphemism. The OED has entries for the word "tass" (meaning a cup or small goblet) dating back to the 15th century.

As the artice concludes, "The Unitas was shipped into Russia and the name UNITAS became the Russian word for WC!"

And how convenient that the trade name dovetailed so nicely with a Russian word that made the shape (if not the purpose) of the new product very clear! That's all I have to say about унитаз.

Таз, by the way, came into Russian and lots of other languages from Persian via Turkish. The OED says that the immediate ancestor of tass in English is, of course, tasse in French, but it also ultimately traces the word back to Arabic and Persian, where it meant cup or goblet.

Решето

We bought a sunflower head at the market today - now we'll have to dry it and then pull the seeds out and toast them.

While we were picking through the box choosing the head we wanted, a tiny old woman told my son "Смотри, у тебя решето почти полное" ("See, your seed head is almost all full"). I've always known the word решето to mean colander or strainer. Now I'm thinking it can mean anything with a grid- or mesh-like structure. Neat, huh?

Sunflower seeds and oil are such a huge part of Russian cuisine that I was surprised to learn that Helianthus annuus was actually brought to Europe from the Americas.

Architecture Glossary

Плужников В.И. "Термины Российского Архитектурного Наследия" Москва, "Исскуство" 1995

Pluzhnikov V.I. "Vocabulary of Russia's Architectural Heritage" Moscow, Isskustvo, 1995

I bought this book ages ago - well, ten years ago actually, but it feels like ages. I've only used it a few times to look things up for a translation, but it's fascinating reading and has illustrations for some of the entries. Here's a taste:

ОБЫДЕННАЯ ЦЕРКОВЬ - A church built in one day in gratitude for a military victory or in order to prevent or put an end to some calamity.

ЗАБОРОЛ - A wooden platform above the walls of a fortress from where one could throw logs at the enemy or pour boiling water or hot pitch on him.

ЕЗ (ЭЗ) - Piles or net stretched across the entire bed of a river to stop fish from moving upstream.

At the back of the glossary is a detailed chapter on how to decode the old Russian system of writing dates with letters instead of numbers, which you can sometimes see on very old buildings or works of art.

Лисички

These are my favorite mushrooms - лисички (lee-SEECH-kee, chanterelles). We have found baskets and baskets of them in the mountains east of Seattle and I always buy them at the market when we're in Russia.

I saute them in butter until all the liquid is gone, and then I add sauteed onion (from a separate pan) and salt to taste. Some people add sour cream, but I don't thinkit's necessary when you have meaty лисички. Serve with steamed or boiled potatoes.

We love mushroom-hunting in the late summer. Funny, but there is a fair amount of disagreement in Russian and U.S. mushroom books on which ones are edible. To be on the safe side, I stick to hunting the supermarket varieties.

Here is a list I put together of the Russian and English names for some common mushrooms and the Latin names linking them.

Russian common name	Scientific name	English common name
Шампиньон	Agaricus silvaticus	Button mushroom
Шампиньон тонкий, Шампиньон желтокожий	Agaricus xanthoderma	Poison yellow meadow mushroom
Лисичка	Cantharellus cibarius	Chanterelle
Лисичка ложная	Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca	False chanterelle
Лисичка серая	Craterellus sinuosus	Chanterelle
Белый гриб	Boletus edulis	Porcini, king bolete
Бледная поганка	Amanita phalloides	Death cap
Мухомор красный	Amanita muscaria	Fly agaric
Мухомор поганковидный	Amanita citrina	False death cap
Подберезовик белый	Leccinum aurantiacum	Brick cap, red cap bolete
Подберезовик обыковенный	Leccinum scabrum	Birch bolete
Масленок поздний	Suillus luteus	Slippery Jack
Масленок зернистый	Suillus granulatus	Weeping Bolete, granulated slippery jack
Моховик пестрый	Xerocomus chrysenteron	Red Cracking Bolete
Моховик зеленый	Xerocomus subtomentosus	Suede Bolete
Навозник серый	Coprinus atramentarius	Tippler’s bane
Навозник белый	Coprinus comatus	Shaggy ink cap
Навозник рассеянный	Coprinus disseminatus	Fairy ink cap
Навозник мерцающий	Coprinus micaceus	Glistening ink cap
Навозник складчатый	Coprinus plicatilis	Pleated ink cap
Вешенка устричная	Pleurotus ostreatus	Oyster mushroom
Вешенка беловатая	Pleurotus pulmonaris	Pale oyster
Сыроежка пищевая	Russula vesca	Bare-toothed russula
Сыроежка зеленая	Russula aerguinea	Tacky green russula
Сыроежка сине-зеленая	Russula cyanoxantha	Charcoal burner
Сыроежка сереющая	Russula decolorans	Graying Russula
Подгруздок белый	Russula delica	Short-stemmed russula
Подгруздок черный	Russula adusta	Wine-cork brittlegill
Опенок осенний	Armillaria mellea	Honey or oak mushroom
Опенок луговой	Marasmius oreades	Fairy-ring mushroom
Опенок зимний	Flammulina velutipes	Velvet foot (Enokitake)
Опенок серно-желтый	Hypholoma fasciculare	Sulfer tuft
Опенок летний	Kuehneromyces mutabilis	Sheathed wood tuft
Опенок Кандоля	Psathyrella candolleana	Pale brittlestem
Опенок темный	Armillaria ostoyae	Honey mushroom
Рядовка	Tricholoma caligatum	Booted tricholoma
Рядовка белая	Tricholoma album	White knight
Рядовка буро-желтая	Tricholoma fulvum	Birch knight
Свинушка тонкая	Paxillus involutus	Brown roll rim, poison pax
Головач продолговатый	Calvatia excipuliformis	Pestle puffball
Дождевик	Calvatia gigantea	Giant puffball
Дождевик шиповатый	Lycoperdon perlatum	Common puffball
Сморчок высокий	Morchella elata	Black morel, fire morel
Сморчок обыкновенный, настоящий	Morchella esculenta	Yellow morel, white morel
Сморчковая шапочка	Verpa bohemica	False early morel, spring verpa
Ежовик желтый	Hydnum repandum	Hedgehog mushroom
Майтаке, грифола курчавая, гриб-баран	Grifola frondosa	Sheep’s Head (Maitake)
Строчок обыкновенный	Gyromitra esculenta	False morel, brain mushroom
Строчок гигантский	Gyromitra gigas	Snowbank false morel
Рогатик гребенчатый, клавулина гребенчатая, коралл гребешковый	Clavulina cristata	Crested coral fungus
Свиное ухо	Gomphus clavatus	Pig’s ear gomphus
Рыжик	Lactarius deliciosus	Delicious milk cap
Трутовик настоящий	Fomes fomentarius	Hardwood conk