Kapitanskaya dochka: "umyot"

[Timothy D. Sergay]

More to the point for Robert may be that Dal' specifies for the sense 
"odinokii postoialyi dvor v stepi" the regions "astrkh. pen.," which I 
decipher as Astrakhan', Penza (is it just me, or is there simply not a 
"spisok sokrashchenii" for Dal'?). I confess I'm puzzled by the relation of 
umyot to the root "MET- MYOT- MECH-, MES" ("throwing, casting, flinging," 
write Wolkonsky and Poltoratsky in their "Handbook of Russian Roots"), as in 
"metat'", and to the idea of griaz' and navoz as in "ptichii pomet": was an 
umyot a "clean place"? a "swept place"? Amidst the muddy seas of Russian 
bezdorozh'e?

In any case I doubt that a terribly inviting and convincing English 
equivalent for "umyot" exists. I agree with Inna, who must be a neighbor of 
mine, that it looks like a foregrounded item of untranslatable 
ethnolinguistic fact, or "color." I would be inclined to cast it into the 
outer darkness of italicized foreign words, as unsatisfying as this may seem 
at first. I don't think it helps much to decide an "umyot" is something like 
a "roadhouse," say, and offer a word like "roadhouse" as the "rema" of 
Pushkin's aside. The locals don't call it a "roadhouse," of course, they 
call it "umyot." It's always risky to translate into one's target language a 
single exotic substantive introduced by an aside like "ili po-ikhnemu" or 
"po-tamoshnemu." Something to think about, anyway. Perhaps comparably, an 
aul in the Caucasus is rather close to the idea of "hamlet," but one very 
often finds it treated as "aul," introduced in italics, perhaps glossed as 
"\Caucasus village or hamlet." But thereafter in the given text an aul is an 
aul.

Best wishes to all
Tim

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Inna Caron" <caron.4 at OSU.EDU>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Kapitanskaya dochka: "umyot"


Dal' specifies etymology of "umyot" in the sense of "khutor, zaimka" as
"ur.-kzch.," which I decipher as "ural'sko-kazach'ii." Meaning, it is a
dialect word, peculiar to the location, which still seems to be used by
Pushkin for adding the locality (oddly exotic) flair.

-----Original Message-----
From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
[mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul B. Gallagher
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 5:40 PM
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Kapitanskaya dochka: "umyot"

Inna Caron wrote:

> I am guessing it is a Bashkir or a Kyrgiz word, so it has no
particular
> connotation in Russian other than giving the narrative a more ethnic
> flavor, in accordance with the spirit of Orientalism. You know, of
> course, that both Pushkin and Lermontov (not to mention
> Bestuzhev-Marlinsky) liberally used Ossetian and Circassian words when
> writing about Caucasus. I think the same idea applies here.

УМЁТ
одинокое жилище в степи, заимка, хуторок, постоялый двор; станция на
старых солевозных трактах в южной части Руси (уст., Поволжье,
Прикаспийская низменность).

Ср. умет -- <грязь>, <навоз>, <помет>, у+метать [Фасмер, 1973, 4].

<> Умёт и Градский Умет в Тамбольской обл.; Дубовый Умет в Куйбышевской
обл.; Умет-Камышинский и Умет в Волгоградской обл.; Умет в Мордовской
АССР; Умет в Саратовской обл.

Source:
Словарь народных географических терминов [Dictionary of Folk Geographic
Terms], by E. M. Murzayev (Мурзаев Э.М.). Moscow: Mysl, 1984. Several
thousand obscure regional and local terms for geographic features, 653
pp., ill.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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