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.