gender in translation

[Alex Shafarenko]

This smacks of:

Косматый облак надо мной кочует,
И вверх уходят светлые стволы.

and Ivanov's excellent parody:

В худой котомк поклав ржаное хлебо,
Я ухожу туда, где птичья звон.
И вижу над собою синий небо,
Косматый облак и высокий крон.

Now the point.

Ivanov concludes his pastiche with a line that explains it all: "Велик, могучий русский языка! " 
Indeed the Russian language is unimaginably mighty. One can construct a word of the
"wrong" gender and use it. Be warned though that it does not come alone. It drags along
a whole bunch of phonetic, semantic and semiotic links and will significantly colour
the sentence it is used in. 

Specifically, to call a dog "собак" as a term of endearment is perfectly OK (even though
the boringly correct word пёсик is every bit as good in my humble opinion).
However, if it is used in a piece of creative writing, it might, for instance, hark back to 
Fima Sobak, a character from Ilf and Petrov's Twelve Chairs. That's your semiotic connection.
I can imagine a context in which it might sound as a euphemistic substitution -- 
not unlike those in the Cockney rhyming slang. That's your phonetic link. Finally, semantics-wise
one has to ask oneself what shades of meaning may be achieved by calling a dog собак
rather than say кобель or пёс. Clearly the constructed word avoids the association with 
male dog behaviour: кобель is commonly linked with promiscuity and пёс with viciousness.
To me собак sounds like a castrated male. Would that be the intended meaning?

As regards the Russian Narnia, Обезьян produces a totally unintended comic effect by 
association with the youth-culture Armenian twist in the ending (cf Толик -> Толян).
The original character is an old ape (not a monkey, which обезьяна is primarily associated
with in the Russian language) . There would be no problem at all if the translator
chose the word орангутанг. It is (a) an ape, (b) one that looks like an old wrinkly man, 
and (c) a masculine noun in Russian, which fits the original perfectly. 

Also bear in mind that modern-day Russian translators from English like their text to sound
quite unnatural as Russian prose in its own right; I have noticed that a lot. I think the idea
is that if it sounds quite un-Russian, then the foreign flavour of the original is somehow enhanced,
which is "kinda cool". For instance,  "I'd like to teach you a good lesson, baby!"
tends to be rendered as a stilted  "Я хотел бы тебя как следует проучить, крошка!"
rather than, say, " Ох, я тебе и задам, милая",  which would be precise in tone, style
and meaning --- all at once.

Regards,

Alex    

Prof Alex Shafarenko
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield, AL10 9AB, UK
 


 




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