A possibly confused sentence of Teffi

[Ksenia Adamovitch]

Grammatically speaking, she fears for the woman, not for someone who had
shaped her life. Consider the sentence structure here:

Не знаю, как могу смотреть на тебя и не кричать по-звериному, без слов,
-- не от страха, а от ужаса за тебя, за человека -- "глину в руках
горшечника", слепившего судьбу твою

Taking out all the metaphors, poetry, etc, the bare-bones sentence reads:

Как могу смотреть на тебя и не кричать от ужаса ЗА человека, слепившего
судьбу твою.

"Ужас за" means "terror for", not "terror of" - so, she is in terror for
the person who molded this woman's fate, a fate she (Teffi) disapproves of?
In context, that seems unlikely.

My reading would be that she considering the woman herself the molder of
her own fate, and is in horror at how this woman chose to mold her own
life. I would say that she divides the woman into her current self, the one
living this particular life, and the person n the past who made the
decisions that led the woman to this life. However, I do believe that this
is rather a poetic description of the woman as two people, than an actual
description of two people, molder and "moldee".

Best,
Ksenia


On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 7:34 PM, melanie moore <madeofwords at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello, Robert,
>
> This is my understanding too, that Teffi is terrified for the other woman
> who is no more than clay in the potter's hands and, presumably, therefore
> more acted upon than acting despite her revolutionary fervour.
>
> Hope that helps.
> Melanie
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 8:47 PM, Paul B. Gallagher <
> paulbg at pbg-translations.com> wrote:
>
>> Robert Chandler wrote:
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> After a long and vivid description of a young woman, a brutal, austerely
>>> idealistic revolutionary in a position of considerable power, Teffi (in
>>> her imagination!) says this to her:
>>> Не знаю, как могу смотреть на тебя и не кричать по-звериному, без слов,
>>> -- не от страха, а от ужаса за тебя, за человека -- "глину в руках
>>> горшечника", слепившего судьбу твою в непознаваемый рассудком час гнева
>>> и отвращения...>>
>>>
>>> This is the same in several editions of /Vospominaniya/, including the
>>>
>>> first, but to me it doesn't quite make sense.  Something seems to go
>>> wrong in the sentence at this point: а от ужаса *за тебя, за человека*
>>>
>>>
>>> The important question is this:
>>> Am I right in thinking that Teffi is saying that she is horrified not by
>>> the woman herself, but by whoever it is who is responsible for shaping
>>> this woman's fate?
>>>
>>
>> It seems to me as a nonnative that the part you flag is fine, but I read
>> it differently:
>>
>> I don't know how I can look at you and keep from screaming like an
>> animal, wordlessly -- not out of fear, but out of horror for you [as] a
>> person...
>>
>> So to me the contrast is between fear and horror, not between the various
>> reasons for horror.
>>
>> --
>> War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
>> --
>> Paul B. Gallagher
>> pbg translations, inc.
>> "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
>> http://pbg-translations.com
>>
>>
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