The Russian word пророчество means prophecy. Below you will find one of the most famous prophecies from the Old Testament. The text on the left is from a Russian Bible written in pre-revolutionary orthography.

You'll notice the verse numbers in this particular Russian translation and the English King James version don't match. That's no error. Verse numbers were not part of the ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible. They are a reference convenience added years later, and from edition to edition they don't always match perfectly.

Translation is a complex art. You might want a translation to:

• clearly indicate the words and grammatical structures of the original. This kind of translation is useful for people who have some skill in the original language and are trying to fine-tune their language skills.
• clearly indicate the informational content of the original without overly worrying about mimicking the grammatical structure of the original. This kind of translation is suitable for technical documents and newspaper and magazine articles.
• reinterpret the original for a specific target audience in such a way as to catch its emotional content, which is the approach you want to use for poetic translations.

This topic came to mind recently when I ran across a blog entry from the Director of the Vladimir Bakanov School of Translation, in which he cited a poem by Агния Барто, a Russian author of children's poetry whom I had never read before. Judging from this first example, she was talented. I decided to try to produce a translation of the poem for American children. Before I show that translation, I'll adduce the poem along with a fairly close word-for-word translation. And then I'll give you a more poetic interpretation.

When you reinterpret a poem, you hope to first of all produce the overall meaning of the original. That's a minimum. Then you attempt to reproduce the emotion of the original, which is tricky because conflicting cultural values may mean that what's emotionally important in the source culture is not as important (or worse yet, emotionally important in a different way) in the target culture. If you can do those two things, then you have a good a translation. And if you can throw in some relatively non-essential aspects like rhyme scheme or rhythm in addition to those other two, then you have a very good translation.

My translation below has one important modification: I have replaced the New Year imagery with Christmas imagery since the latter is the more important winter holiday for most Americans. The poem also reproduces the rhyme scheme of the original, though not the rhythmic structure. Feel free to comment on the translation's inadequacies.

Months long before the springtime thaw
A pine stood 'neath the winter's gray.
Nearby within a snowy draw
The hungry wolves would prowl for prey.

One winter's night when all was calm,
When no one would expect it least,
Ten bunnies and their bunny mom
Perchanced across one hungry beast.

In the month of Santa Claus
No hare would ever care to be
Consumed by such ferocious jaws,
So they jumped into that lone pine tree.

Those bunnies who had no defense
Just hung like Christmas ornaments.

Ten bunnies hung without a word
Where only snowflakes could be heard.
They tricked the wolf so thoroughly,
Quite long before the springtime thaw,
The only thing he thought he saw
Was a decorated Christmas tree.

(Translation © 2008 Donald E. Livingston, Jr.)

There are two ways to say “What time is it?” in Russian, and they are «Который час?» and «Сколько времени?» «Который час?» is the traditional way of asking the question, and you will find some Russians still who insist that it is the only way you can say it. But truth to tell, «Сколько времени?» or «Сколько сейчас времени?» are perfectly normal and perfectly educated ways to ask the question as well nowadays. If someone is inclined to be contentious about this point, please refer to this entry (mirror) from the Dictionary of Difficulties at gramota.ru.

In conversational Russian you will also hear people say «Сколько время?» but that is conversational and low style. No one will ever use it in writing or in an educated context, so foreigners should avoid it.

Asking what time it is is a piece of cake in Russian. Answering that question is more like a piece of gristle... actually a whole mouthful of nasty ol' gristle. It turns out that you have different rules for saying what time it is depending on whether the time is:

• right on the hour, or
• a quarter after the hour, or
• a quarter to the hour, or
• half past the hour, or
• at a particular minute during the first half of the hour, or
• at a particular mintue during the second half of the hour, or
• generically somewhere between one hour or another.

That's right. You have to figure out how to say each of those things separately. Over the next couple of weeks we will review the different ways to say what time it is in thorough detial. Are you starting to wish you had studied Arabic?

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

As mentioned in previous entries, the most common word for arm/hand in Russian is рука. What if you want to be more specific?

First off, the actual hand is called кисть, which is a feminine noun. It includes запястье the wrist, пястье (the area from the wrist to the first knuckle of each finger, which is also called пясть... heck, do we even have a word for that in English?), and пальцы “the digits.” I say “digits” here because the word палец can mean either finger or toe. If you want to specify fingers, then you say пальцы рук, and if you want to specify the toes, you say пальцы ног.

Next we have the forearm предплечье, in which the major bones are the radius лучевая кость (literally “the ray bone”), which is the bone on the same side of the arm as the thumb, and the ulna локтевая кость (literally “the elbow bone”). I think the average American doesn't know the words radius and ulna. The Russian phrases are a bit more descriptive than the Latinate English equivalents. I wonder if the average Russian knows the names of those bones in Russian? Maybe we'll be fortunate and a native will add a comment about that to this post.

Moving on up we have the elbow локоть, a masculine word, whose second о is a fleeting vowel, thus genitive локтя.

Moving farther up we have плечо, which can mean either the shoulder itself, or it can mean collectively both the shoulder and the upper arm. The bone in the upper arm is плечевая кость, literally “the shoulder bone.” That sounds funny to us Americans. Although the proper name of the bone is “the humerus,” there is a song called “Dry Bones” that contains a line “the arm bone's connected to the shoulder bone;” it sounds amusingly folksy. Even humorous… pun intended.

Last but not least, the English word palm means the front side of what the Russians call пястье. Isn't that curious? We have a word in English that describes the area from the wrist to the first knuckles of the fingers as understood from the front side of the hand, but we don't have a word that describes it from the back side. The Russian word for palm is ладонь, which is a feminine noun. Isn't that curious? Both languages have a word for that part of the hand as considered from the front side. Russian has two words (пястье & пясть) for that part of the hand as considered from either side, but English has no such word. And both languages (as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong) do not have a single word describing that part of the hand as considered solely from the back side.

Finally, Russian has a conversational term they use sometimes, пятерня, which means “the palm and the fingers,” i.e. what we English speakers usually call the hand, but пятерня is used much, much less often than рука.

As mentioned before, рука can be translated 'hand' and 'arm.' Sometimes that distinction will be reflected in the choice of за and под: use with за usually indicates 'hand,' and под 'arm.' For instance:

Hand in hand, arm in arm… Russians are not nearly as freaked out about physical contact as we Gringos are. Male friends can walk arm in arm without any connotation of romantic involvement. Female friends often walk hand in hand without anyone thinking twice about it.

I remember the first time I was in Russia, 1986, I was interested in the fate of the баптисты. Баптист at the time was the closest equivalent to "Evangelical Christian." At church one Sunday I passed a Bible off to a Russian guy. (They were still not all that easily available then.) We ended up talking; I was invited to his home. After dinner he escorted me back to the subway station, and then eventually all the way back to the university. As we sat in the subway car, he threaded his arm through my arm; that by itself was odd for me as an American man. But when he got to a sensitive part of the conversation, he leaned over to whisper; as he whispered I could feel his lips moving inside my ear. Fortunately I had been taught that Russians have very different perceptions of personal space and contact, so I didn't overreact. I should say that this was not typical. None of my other Russian acquaintances have ever been quite that touchy-feely. The important thing is to give people the benefit of the doubt when you first experience a new culture first hand.

There are other entries about the word рука in this blog. Click on the 'ruka' category to find them.