Summary of comments on extract from Grossman's VSE TECHET

[Robert Chandler]

Dear all,

I have received many interesting off-list responses, and I think I should
attempt to summarize them.

These few lines (which I had not at first thought of as esp. difficult!)
contain so many problems that I wonder how I or anyone else ever dare to
translate entire books!


Завидя  его,  два раздевальщика  выбежали  из-за  барьера, пришептывая:
"Пожалте,  пожалте",  - и,  похрапывая как жеребцы, в нетерпении тянулись к
богатым  пинегинским  доспехам. Глаза  у  них  были зоркие,  хорошие глаза
рысистых   умных   русских ребят  из  раздевалки  интуристского ресторана,
умевших  точно запомнить, кто был да как одет, что сказал невзначай. Но уж к
Пинегину  с его  депутатским  значком  они  относились всей душой, открыто,
почти как к непосредственному начальнику.


1.
The first problem is рысистых. Several people have pointed out that this
derives from the Russian for ‘trot’ rather than the Russian for ‘lynx’.  One
person pointed out that the normal adjective for the latter is рысий.  I too
had originally understood the word as relating to ‘trot’ and imagined that
it might just refer to some kind of general quickness about these lads.
When a student came up  with ‘lynx-eyed’, that seemed to make so much better
sense that I accepted it at once.  BUT, though ’зоркий’ appears to confirm
this, the image of жеребцы appears to confirm the other reading.  I shall
stay with ‘lynx-eyed’, if only because it is so much clearer an image.  And
it is perhaps worth remembering that this is an unfinished book that Gr. Was
revising right up till his last days.

2.
No uzh k Pineginu s ego deputatskim znachkom
It was suggested that he must be a deputy of the Leningrad gorsovet or he
would not have a car and secretaries, etc, there in Leningrad.  Someone else
contradicted this, saying, ‘под депутатским значком здесь понимается только
значок депутата верховного совета союза или республики: таких же заметных
номерных нагрудных знаков с флагом ссср у депутатов местных советов в
советское время не было. Они появятся только в ельцинское время.’  This
convinced me.


3.
 они  относились всей душой, открыто,
почти как к непосредственному начальнику.
  oni otnosilis’ vsei dushoi, otkryto, pochti kak k neposredstvennomu
nachal’niku.

One correspondent thought that they genuinely did ‘think the world’ of
Pinegin, seeing him as one of the family.  Someone else wrote ‘They
PRETENDED TO BE OPEN, which is a very Russian thing to do.
It is a quality that is deeply valued by this culture, and so
scoundrels often manipulate with it. They were of course playing their
little game of prostodushnie rebiata, open, simple, good hearted guys,
who loved their boss kak podnogo.’  This seems right to me.

At the end of all this I have made only a few slight changes to the
translation.  I may not yet have succeded in making it entirely clear that
there is sarcasm and irony in the final sentence:
On catching sight of him, two cloakroom attendants sprang out from behind a
partition, whispering ‘Welcome!  Welcome!’; neighing like colts, they
impatiently stretched out towards Pinegin’s luxurious accoutrements.  They
were observant, clever, lynx-eyed Russian boys from an Intourist restaurant
cloakroom – boys with a precise memory for who had been where, what he had
been wearing and what he had happened to say.  But they were, naturally,
entirely open-hearted and spontaneous with Pinegin, treating him, with his
Deputy's badge, almost as if he were their immediate superior.

Best Wishes – and thanks to all!

Robert

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