Читать «Несистематический словарь. Русско-английский, англо-русский» онлайн - страница 527

The Bible is always, in the Anglo-Saxon world, linked with Shakespeare — though quotations from either, Palazchenko writes drily, are found frequently to come from the mouths of those 

who read them long ago — or never.  

In dwelling on the importance of both he reveals again to those of us who speak English as a first 

language that we have forgotten how large props they are to expression. There is no Russian 

equivalent: Orthodox Russians depended traditionally on submission to the revealed truth from 

priests, not on reading.  

524 

 

Most could, in any case, not read until Soviet times — by which time it was a very bad idea to 

read the Bible. Now, after seven decades of militantly atheist communism, most regard religion 

as exotic, and must indeed learn its language.  

Shakespeare is different. No figure, not even Pushkin, the fount of Russian literature, provides 

such a grab-bag of quotations, thoughts, allusions and ironies. The Stratford Bard became a 

"Russian" author: Stalin famously decreed endings to the tragedies (Hamlet lives to succeed his 

murderous uncle, while Cordelia lives to care for a doting Lear).  

So Russians, too, quote Shakespeare — and have even adopted his phrases without knowing 

them. So, Palazchenko writes: " The phrase 'A plague on both your houses' (Mercutio's bitter dying words from Romeo and Juliet) is used by people who have not the least idea where it 

comes from."  

In Shakespeare's verbal universe, the earth is dotted with traps for translators: in the 400 years 

between the writing and contemporary usage, the application has changed in countless subtle 

ways. It can make it impossible to be sure what the distinguished figure one is translating for 

really means. If, for example, he says, "So are they all, all honourable men"  (from Julius Caesar) is he using it ironically as did Mark Anthony, or as a straightforward compliment?  

"If you're translating from speech," advises Palazchenko, "you just have to risk it, or use 

something neutral — like 'person with a well-known reputation'."  

If the "Unsystematic Dictionary" is a textbook for translators, it is also a book of wisdom. It 

shows how words impose their own limits: as, for example, the difficulty of translating into 

Russian the distinction in English between "politics" and "policy" — which has the same word, politika, for both in Russian.  

Thus, writes Palazchenko, when George Schultz, Reagan's secretary of state, would (as he often 

did) insist that he didn't do politics but did do policy, he could barely convey the point to his 

Russian interlocutors.  

And "community" — a word that, Palazchenko writes, has an almost impossibly wide application in English — is wholly inadequately rendered by the Russian kollektiv. Similarly, the 

Russian word avantura — which doesn't mean adventure in any positive sense, but instead means recklessness, or carelessness.