SEELANGS Digest - 18 Jan 2007 (#2007-28)

Fri Jan 19 15:05:27 UTC 2007

The problem of ty vs.vy, the subject of the first of Kim Braithwaite's two queries, is one I address in the Translator's Note to my recently published translation of "Oblomov". What follows is an expanded version of the relevant excerpt.

  "The Problem of You.

        One of the most fascinating aspects of comparative language study is the way in which, with respect to one and the same universal reality, one language feels it necessary to make distinctions which another language is content to do without.

        Spanish need two versions of corner [rincon, esquina]  not to mention the verb to be [ser, estar], where English has one.
  French has two words for year [an, annee] and day [jour, journee]; English has one. Chinese has six or more words for different kinds of uncle and at least the same number for the different kinds of carrying. Russian has two words for blue,and at least three for brother-in-law. English, on the other hand, compared with other languages, is peculiarly rich in words for ambulation or getting from A to B on two feet [amble,stroll,saunter,sidle lurch, just to name a few]. Other languages have to struggle to catch up by using adverbs or paraphrase.

        However, when it comes to the matter of you, English, in comparison with almost all other European languages is truly the maverick, the odd man out. English alone stuggles along manfully with but a single version of you. Clearly where there is such a strong consensus in favor of two versions of you on the other side, the distinction must be a useful, if not a necessary one. 

        In Russian, like most of the other languages in question, use is made of what is grammatically a singular and a plural version, although the uses to which these pronouns are put are by no means necessarily just grammatical. Russian, like many of the other languages, also uses these two versions ty [singular] and vy[plural] to convey distinctions of respect or deference due to superior status of age or rank. Broadly speaking vy is used when speaking to ones elders and betters and ty to ones juniors and inferiors. When two people of comparable station interact, the choice of ty or vy will often depend on the degree of familiarity.

        One of the most appealing features of Oblomov is its humor and irony, humor ranging from glinting and subtle to something close to farce or knockabout, when Oblomov and his manservant, Zakhar, are on stage. Here the stumbling block of the British-American divide arises in a special way. There are two competing models for the dialogue between master and servant.  On the one hand, there is the Britain of Dickens with its landed gentry and its servants  the upstairs-downstairs model  where the relations between the two classes, and hence the language of the exchanges between them, was clearly delineated, formal and cold to the point of frigidity. On the other hand there is the land-owning and plantation-owning gentry of the America of Mark Twain and their slaves.

        The relations between slave and master in the U.S and between serf and master in Russian in roughly the same part of the nineteenth century had much more in common with each other than either had with the British master-servant model of the same period. The former were marked by the same paradoxical blend of familiarity, even intimacy, often born in both cases of a shared childhood, and brutality and even outright cruelty. 

        Oblomov and Zakhar were in very real sense family members. These bonds were strengthened further both by their shared roots in the ancestral Oblomov household and by the fact that by the time their story begins, they were the only surviving members of it, with memories they could share only with each other. Their master-servant relationship was complicated by their older brother-younger brother relationship where the servant was the older and the master the younger brother. Their mutual dependence was well-nigh total, although not necessarily symmetrical. If one was parasitic on the other, it would have been hard to say which was the ivy and which the oak. Like all cohabiting family members, they could each see right through the others poses and artifices to their hidden vulnerabilities and knew instinctively which buttons to push in both attack and defence.

        The language of Zakhars exchanges with his master could be impudent, even insolent to the very limits of insubordination, but it would have been unthinkable for him to have transgressed to the point of addressing him as ty, or ever making him the subject of anything but a plural verb  another token of the proper deference. Equally unthinkable was the possibility of Oblomov ever addressing Zakhar as Vy or making him the subject of a verb in the plural. Thus, no matter how insubordinate the content, these lines were clearly drawn and never crossed.

         English lacks the means of conveying this crucial notion, at least directly, but part of the art and craft of translation is to find ways of transferring the semantic and other charges carried by the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of the sentence in the original language to other forms and parts of the sentence in the target language. Thus,in British restaurants at least, waiters and waitresses, without realizing that they are instinctively and ingeniously solving what is in essence a knotty translation problem, will compensate for having to use the equalizing you to their customers, by resorting to such locutions as : Were you wanting/ would you be wanting another beer? or  Would madam prefer the lamb?, and making the deferential verb tense or the switch to the third person do the work that the vous,and the vy would be doing in their respective languages.

        It was with some regret that this translator dismissed the possibility of using the closest available equivalent to the missing vy, namely yourself or your honour [analogous to the Spanish vuestra merced which in the form of Usted has now become the standard form of the formal second person] These were the forms traditionally favored by Irish retainers of bygone times for addressing, and referring to, their Anglo masters and mistresses. Doing so would have meant unaccountably and bizarrely placing the whole novel, lock, stock and barrel, in a nineteenth century Irish setting. The price was too high.

        At one point in my career, this was a problem I was simply incapable of solving in a high pressure simultaneous interpretation setting. I was interpreting an extensive interview with Manuel Noriega from his Florida jail for ABC TVs 20/20. His interviewer was the young and attractive Diane Sawyer. Noriega started out circumspectly while he was feeling out his opponent and used Usted in addressing her. Later, clearly feeling he had taken the measure of the opposition, he switched to tu. There was no way in the circumstances that I could convey to the English listening audience the subtle manner in which Noriega had now declared himself master of the situation. With hindsight I might have signaled the shift by initially translating Usted as Ms. Sawyer and then switching to you, when Noriega switched to tu.

      I hope this sheds some light for Kim Braithwaite. Stephen Pearl

SEELANGS automatic digest system <LISTSERV at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU> wrote:
  Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:00:11 -0500
From: SEELANGS automatic digest system <LISTSERV at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: SEELANGS Digest - 18 Jan 2007 (#2007-28)
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU

There are 4 messages totalling 204 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

1. Translation question ("swine's meat before men")
2. Translation question
3. politeness survey
4. Translating TY-VY; pre-glasnost literary realism

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Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:18:11 -0500
From: "Timothy D. Sergay" <tsergay at COLUMBUS.RR.COM>
Subject: Re: Translation question ("swine's meat before men")

Dear colleagues,

I think the key to the figure "swine's meat" is the archaic English 
sense of "meat": "food of any kind" (New Oxford American English 
Dictionary). The philosophic topic is the derivation of virtue, that is, the 
tracing of our knowledge of the good to its proper roots, specifically, the 
question of whether those roots lie in some metaphysical realm or in the 
realm of natural and common human experience. Butler argues strongly for the 
latter. As for Butler's figure in its context, I believe the rhetoric of 
"casting swine's meat before men" would parse logically as follows: it is a 
satirical reversal of the Gospel figure "to cast pearls before swine" that 
operates by redistributing the attributes "worthy" and "unworthy" between 
two elements: (1) the thing cast (i.e., offered) and (2) the party BEFORE 
whom (1) is cast (i.e., the party TO whom [1] is offered). Pigs, or more 
precisely, the category "swinish," functions as a metaphor for 
"unworthiness" in both cases. In the Gospel, element 1, pearls, something of 
great worth, is cast before swine (unworthy recipients); in Butler's figure, 
element 1, "swine's meat," is something unworthy of men (worthy recipients): 
it is "meat fit for swine". If you cast "swine's meat before men," you offer 
men something unworthy of them, unfit for human consumption. In Butler, 
then, element 1, the thing offered, is ethical theories that seek to derive 
virtue from something other than "man's experience concerning his own 
well-being," namely, "a lineage, deduced as it were by spiritual heralds, 
from some stock with which she [virtue] has nothing to do." In other words, 
there is no doctrine of ethics more wretchedly unfit to offer to human 
beings than that which seeks to derive virtue from metaphysical sources, 
i.e., sources other than human experience of natural comfort and advantage. 
(In ethics, I believe Butler's preferred line of thinking derives from 
Plato, if not further back: what is good ultimately contributes to human 
wellbeing, vice is in essence its own punishment, as in the hangover.) The 
true, sufficient and only source of virtue is, again, "man's experience 
concerning his own well-being." Prosecuting any other view of ethics, i.e., 
any metaphysical accounting for its origins, is akin to offering decent 
human beings meat fit only for swine.

The whole passage of "Way of All Flesh" is available here:
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/drama/TheWayofAllFlesh/chap19.html.

I would expect the Russian treatment of the sequence before the comma to 
go something like "íåò õóäøåãî ìåòàíèÿ ñâèíñêîãî êîðìà ïåðåä ÷åëîâåêàìè, ÷åì 
òî, ÷òî òùèòñÿ ëüñòèòü äîáðîäåòåëè, áóäòî åå íåäîñòîéíû åå æe ñîáñòñâåííûå 
èñòîêè, íî åé íåîáõîäèìà ðîäîñëîâíàÿ..." ("net khudshego metaniia svinskogo 
korma pered chelovekami, chem to, chto tshchitsia l'stit' dobrodeteli, budto 
ee nedostoiny ee zhe sobstvennye istoki, no ei neobkhodima 
rodoslovnaia...").

Best wishes to all,

Tim Sergay 

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Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 23:59:15 +0000
From: Alexandra Smith <Alexandra.Smith at ED.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: Translation question

"net khudshego metaniia svinskogo korma pered
> chelovekami, chem to, chto tshchitsia l'stit' dobrodeteli, budto ee 
> nedostoiny ee zhe sobstvennye istoki, no ei neobkhodima 
> rodoslovnaia...").---

Why not to be more bold and say: stoit li metat' biser pered 
svin'iami? eto podobno..., etc.?....

All best,
Alexandra

==========================
Alexandra Smith (PhD, University of London)
Lecturer in Russian
School of European Languages and Cultures
The University of Edinburgh
David Hume Tower
George Square
Edinburgh EX8 9JX
UK

tel. +44-(0)131-6511381
fax: +44- (0)131 650-3604
e-mail: Alexandra.Smith at ed.ac.uk

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Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:30:29 -0500
From: Christopher Lemelin <lemelinc at DICKINSON.EDU>
Subject: Re: politeness survey

On Jan 18, 2007, at 2:10 PM, Patricia Chaput wrote:

> I find this topic very interesting and hope that you will let 
> participants know where they can learn about your results.

I second Prof. Chaput's request....

CWL
========================
Christopher W. Lemelin
Assistant Professor of Russian
Dickinson College
lemelinc at dickinson.edu

(On sabbatical 2006-2007)

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Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:31:40 -0800
From: Kim Braithwaite <kbtrans at COX.NET>
Subject: Translating TY-VY; pre-glasnost literary realism

I'd like to request anyone's expert input, not terribly urgent, on two topics. I will be grateful for communication via seelangs or to me personally at kbtrans at cox.net:

(1) When translating a short story or a novel, what are some good ways to convey in English the subtleties of familiarity/affection (or over-familiarity or disdain) as expressed by the various uses of ty/tebya..., versus respect/formality (or obsequiousness), as expressed by vy/vas...? I realize that the "subtleties" are on a sliding scale, and in many passages there's no need to spell it out explicitly in the English. In other contexts it makes a big difference, and the difficulties are compounded when one or both parties to a dialogue switch back and forth in a game of one-upmanship (or perhaps just playfulness). Also, what about the nice custom of people agreeing to be friends and switch from vy/vas to ty/tebya...?

(2) I've never read much Russian literature, either the classics or popular contemporary works, but I have read a lot of Georgian stories and novels. And in the 1970s and early 1980s - before the full advent of glasnost - I was struck by what seemed to be an increasing trend toward frank depiction of the bleaker and nastier aspects of life in Soviet Georgia. Many of the protagonists of high or low status, even "sympathetic" ones, were shown to be mean-spirited, tyrannical, ready to stoop to anything for their own gain, material or otherwise. Corruption was shown to be always blatant or lurking just below the surface. My question: Were things being portrayed the same way in Russian stories and novels around that time? My hunch is that they were. How about other languages?

Thanks for your comments!

Mr Kim Braithwaite, Translator

"Good is better than Evil, because it's nicer" - Mammy Yokum (Al Capp)

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