(no subject)

[STEPHENBPEARL at CS.COM]

       If I may add a  little oil to troubled waters - or fuel to the fire.
       I was Chief of the English Interpretation Section of the U.N. in New
York from 1980 to 1994, and have previously had occasion to attempt to track
down  chapter and verse in connection with the Khrushchev shoe-banging
episode.  It was  a little like trying to locate the other end of a rainbow;
no one but a leprechaun ever found a crock of gold there.

       1)  Not only was Khrushchev never given the floor on that occasion,
but delegations' desks were not equipped with microphones at that time.
Hence, whatever Russian words he may have uttered to accompany his percussive
tantrum are lost to history - although not to impressionistic second - and
third-hand reconstructions -  and for the reasons given above, neither should
nor could have been interpreted into English, or any of the other U.N.
official languages for that matter.

       2) This point is corroborated by the response of Harold Macmillan, the
U.K. Prime Minister at the time, who was noisily interrupted twice by
Khrushchev on another occasion during the same 1960 Session of the General
Assembly. At the time of the interruption Macmillan was speaking from the
rostrum of the G.A. and was in possession of the floor and the only live
microphone in the hall.  After the second outburst, Macmillan turned towards
the President of the Assembly, Ambassador Bolan of Ireland and said: "I
should like that to be translated if he wants to say anything." Clearly, it
had not been.

       Macmillan had been deploring the failure of the Paris summit  meeting
of the "Big Four"  which had been aborted owing to Khrushchev's walk-out in
protest at the lack of an official apology from President  Eisenhower for the
U -2 incident. The official Soviet version of  Khrushchev's first attempt at
heckling which was issued the following day was: "Don't send your spy planes
to our country! Don't send your U-2s!"

3)       On another occasion at the same Session when Khrushchev was formally
in possession of the floor and the microphone, he did indeed call the
Philippine Ambassador inter alia a "kholui" and a "stavlennik".  An older
colleague who had been responsible for the Russian -English interpretation at
that meeting told me that he had said "jerk" for "kholui" and "stooge" 'for
"stavlennik". Khrushchev may or may not have also used "lakei" in the same
tirade.

 4)      The source of the apocryphal notion that it was on one of these
occasions at the 1960 U.N. General Assembly that Khrushchev used the
expression " Ya pokazhy vam kuzkinu mat, " may have been his own memoirs
where he writes that he took  a Philippine delegate severely to task, telling
him, in an English version, "You'd better watch out, or we'll show you
Kuzma's mother!" . His memories of what he said and did on various occasions
have not always proved entirely reliable.

5)      For purposes of simultaneous interpretation  - as distinct from
literary or other kinds of translation - discretion is always the better part
of valour  and it is always advisable not put to fine a point on utterances
which are liable to give offence, something which, in any case, is not always
an easy thing to recognise in the heat of battle!   Whatever the etymology or
origin of the expression, it seems to have come to mean the verbal equivalent
of shaking one's fist and the somewhat open-ended "We'll show you!" would do
the trick without over-committing the hapless interpreter.

       The endless medieval disputations about "my vas pokhoronim" also seem
to lose sight of the fact that on the notorious occasion [s] when it was
uttered, the interpreter's English version was the product of simultaneous
interpretation and not of pondered translation. The implication is that the
interpreter should have said something different or "better".  "We will bury
you" is not at all a bad rendering of the original. The unwary interpreter
who strays too far from the literal in the course of heated debate is in
something of a "lose-lose badly" situation.  If he or she says "bury" for
"pokhoronim", Monday morning translators may tell him/her loftily that it
should have been "outlive" or "survive". If he/she says "outlive" or
"survive" and another participant in the meeting then reacts to the
Soviet/Russian delegate's remark, the original Russian speaker may hear
through the reverse, English to Russian, interpretation that he is understood
to have said "perezhit," or "vyzhit," when in fact he said "pokhoronit" and
he will then, not entirely unresasonably,  pillory the unfortunate
interpreter for "not knowing how to translate a simple Russian word like
'pokhoronit' ". The complexities are endless.

       Like politics, simultaneous interpretation is the art of the possible,
often in trying and even well-nigh impossible circumstances. To the extent
that translation is an art rather than a science, there is practically no
translation of a word, expression or phrase than cannot be second-guessed,
even when it has been pondered in tranquillity.  As any practitioner of the
art can tell you, a rough-hewn, lame, halting or even deficient translation
can in context  be a heroic feat of simultaneous interpretation.

Stephen Pearl

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                  http://home.attbi.com/~lists/seelangs/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------