Dictionaries on line

[Vladimir Bilenkin]

J.Dunn at SLAVONIC.ARTS.GLA.AC.UK wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
> I never thought I would write this, but I wonder if we aren't being a bit
> unfair to poor old Miuller.  His dictionary was never intended to generate
> idiomatic English-Russian equivalents, but to enable Soviet citizens to
> read and understand those timeless classics of English-language literature
> that figured in the canon as defined for the Soviet Union of the 1950s or
> thereabouts.  Since those canonised in this fashion included the odd
> American (Theodore Dreiser, if no-one else), I would have thought that at
> least some arcane Americana would have been included, but perhaps not.

I feel compelled  to defend "poor old Muller" even from his defenders.
To call the author of _The American Tragedy_ and _Sister Carry_  "odd"
strikes me as odd in its own right, especially considering the number of
doctoral
dissertations defended on this odd Driser in the US.  Of course, Soviet citizens

had to read and understand other odd American writers as well, like Melville,
Hawthorn,
Birs, Poe, Tennison, Porter (O'Henry), Dos Passos, Steinbbeck, Hemingway,
Folkner, Salinger,
and others.  Russian translations of all these writers were excellent, superb,
so there was no need for
dictionaries to get aquainted with this classics.  As to English departments, in
the Soviet Union they
were still teaching Queen's Schools English well into the 1970s.

Vladimir Bilenkin
North Carolina State University

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