But he’s a great source for the Elizabethan era.
That’s the literal translation, but it’s much more subtle than that.
It sounds as though he considered going to a shvits in America, but decided to stay in Russia instead. This, of course, is nonsense, since there was no way he could visit the USA.
This is a good example of irony in Russian satire. You really have to come from that culture to get the joke. (I had to ask my ex about it.)
Do you mean he’s a great source for Elizabethan era propaganda?
I mean that if you want to study Elizabethan history, you could do worse than starting with Shakespeare.
He’s a good source for life in Elizabethan England, especially if you know the meaning of all the obsolete words he uses.
My translation, which really should be read with a Yiddish accent: “I went to the local bathhouse last Saturday. I thought about going to one in America, but decided against it.”
Studying history is about more than just looking at politics. But that aside, “What ideas and attitudes were acceptable in popular culture in the Elizabethan Era?” is an excellent historical topic.
How about simply: “I went to the local bathhouse last Saturday. (I decided not to go to one in America.)”
Does that convey the irony of not being allowed to leave Soviet Russia?
I think it does to some extent. Probably no translation can adequately convey the original.
It fits - I’ll pencil that in.
His deciding not to is immaterial. He had absolutely no other option, hence the absurdity of his statement.
The setting is vital. It’s Soviet Russia in the 1920s. He couldn’t have gone to America regardless of his status or finances. The Russian reader grasps this immediately and sees the irony.
Right. He may as well have said, “I decided not to go to one on Pluto.”
That would have been really confusing since Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930.
It’s the translator’s responsibility to do just that. I sometimes write a sentence a half dozen ways (or more) before I’m satisfied with it.
You don’t think that anything is untranslatable? How about poetry?
Poetry is a whole 'nother bag. You have to be a good poet in your own language to translate it well, and I’m not.
If you have the talent for it, poetry can be translated well. An English friend once asked me to translate a poem by Emily Dickenson into Russian for her wedding to a Russian. I didn’t feel I was qualified, so I gave it to one of my Russian girlfriends who was fluent in English. She translated it beautifully, far better than I could have done. Both the literal meaning and the sentiment of the poem were conveyed perfectly. So it’s not impossible
I should probably mention here that my girlfriend was highly literate. She had read Les Misérables (unabridged) as a child and was a graduate student at a pedagogical institute.
The movie “The Interpreter”, which is about interpreters at the UN, makes this point very well – interpretation, not just translation. The interviews with real interpreters in the extras are fascinating – I am in awe of the language skills necessary to do real-time interpretation in such a setting.
Simultaneous translation is a highly specialized skill, one at which I’m not qualified. (I can do consecutive translation, but not simultaneous.) When I was at Middlebury, I knew a woman who was a Staff Sergeant in the US Army. As soon as the intensive summer course was over, she was heading back to the Army Language School in Monterrey, CA, for training in simultaneous translation. I was in awe of her language skills.