words that don't exist in English

[Victor Steinbok]

Comments interspersed.

On 5/18/2012 11:05 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> The translations are so random that the examples work only if you have
> no knowledge at all of the language cited. E.g. the meaning of the
> Russian *noun* - *not* verb - _toska_ is pretty much covered in
> English by "the blues" - the emotion, not the musical genre.

I like it, although the nuance is lost on much of the Anglophone population.

> OTOH, how easy is it to distinguish
>
> "he came _to_ me with a knife"
>
> from
>
> "he came _at_ me with a knife"
>
> in other languages?
We just use different verbs--or different prefixes instead of prepositions.


> And the englishing of Russian
>
> "on zhdal, no ne dozhdalsia"
>
> always brings a smile to my face, because it's so, IMO, *weird*!
>
> "he waited, but he did not complete [his] act of waiting (very
> approximately)" =
>
> "he waited, but the person that he was waiting for didn't come" / "…
> the event that he was waiting for didn't occur"
>
> or something like that.

He waited, but waited in vain.

The problem is in trying to communicate the words exactly, rather than
the full expressions. Why do we have to be so literal?

> It's impossible, IMO, to borrow the Russian into English or even to
> calque it, but,
>
> Youneverknow.
>
> Someone more fluent in Russian may be able to work something out or to
> provide a translation that better captures the _Gefuehl_ of the
> Russian.


There is something very unusual about Nabokov's ability to write in both
languages. Of course, some people on both sides think his work to be
crap (not me). If you've ever seen Osennii Marafon (The Autumn Marathon,
although that's a very weak translation), there is a scene there where
the main character tries to explain to a Danish translator (another main
character) the nuances of interpreting Dostoyevskii. He specifically
focuses on the sentence with "obliz'iana", which is, of course,
untranslatable because it's a made up word--but it's made up with a
purpose. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079679/ There are a few other
language-related jokes with cultural background ("Cocktail! Cocktail!").
But this one is directly on point.

I was going to mention some of BZ's earlier posts on LL, but then I
started digging through a series of blog posts with similar titles and
it's largely the same list recycled, with a handful of variations. But
many of these (not LL) posts are good for the comments. Some are quite
informed (often by BZ), but others are absolutely silly.

VS-)

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