Tolstoy Question 2

[Judson Rosengrant]

Many thanks to Will and Alexandra.

I completely agree with Alexandra's general interpretation of the passage;
it in fact is my own.

My question, perhaps not very clearly stated, wasn't about the broad import
of the set линейка, простыня, капризничанье, since that's obvious, but about
the particular meaning of простыня, which, as Will pointed out, may have
several (the Dahl 3rd and the OED are for me essential tools), but none of
which, as I'll point out, seems to have a specifically childhood resonance.

Капризничанье and линейка (it means 'ruler', as Alexandra noted, or
'wagonette', as it is actually used with greater frequency in Детство) have
such a resonance, but простыня doesn't, unless there's a secondary or
tertiary meaning that derives from a special historical application that, so
far, I'm unaware of.

By the way, I've provisionally translated простыня as 'bath sheet' and
линейкa, probably, as 'ruler' (the punishment aspect, I suppose), although I
do think that 'wagonette' (the kids' vehicle on outings) would work as well,
and I could in the end make that choice.  Капризничанье is a bit trickier,
but 'crankiness' or 'petulance' seem much better than 'capriciousness' here,
since it isn't a feature of character but a familiar stage of behavior.

I may seem to be worrying this little point to a fault, but in translating
Tolstoy, I find that the apparently trivial is rarely so, and that one has a
responsibility to retain to the fullest extent one can what in my first
message I called his extreme concreteness and precision.  We translate
texts, to be sure, and must be aware of their larger semantic structures,
but those texts are made up of words, and in Tolstoy the particularities of
the words may have greater significance (pun intended) than they do with
other masters.  There is, I sense, a dimension of простыня (with end stress,
by the way, since with the second syllable stressed it had the meaning, as
Dahl tells us, of простодушие) that hasn't quite declared itself.

Jud    


Judson Rosengrant, PhD
PO Box 551 
Portland, OR 97207

503.880.9521 mobile
jrosengrant at earthlink.net

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