The Old Bandit Chaps
I have one word for you: Netflix.
Over the past two years, Netflix has revolutionized my relationship with our “home theater,” a lavish facility here Chez Stoux D’Ent that includes a two-bit DVD player hooked up to a 13-inch TV. No expense has been spared to bring high quality entertainment into our gracious home!
I was always the person who got to the video store and—put on the spot—could not think of one thing I actually wanted to watch. Half the time, I’d just get overloaded and confused and go home with nothing.
Those days are over. Thanks to Netflix.
(I swear I’m not getting kickbacks from the company for writing this. I swear. But if you, Joe Netflix Marketing, are reading this now, feel free to get in touch with an offer. Everyone has a price. And the price of a graduate student continues to drop as her dissertation drags on. It’s a little-known scientific law called the “Inverse Sell-Out Principle.”)
And I get a lot of knitting done while I’m watching my DVDs from Netflix. Shelley can vouch for this:
Oh, dear God, why? Why? Dogs don’t wear shawls!
We’ve been systematically watching all the extant episodes of Deadwood and, inevitably, Battlestar Galactica. Some of you who know about my uneasy relationship with sci fi and fantasy will peg Alex as the prime mover behind BSG. I’m just dying patiently waiting for the humans to triumph over the cylons—predictable inspiring as that will be—and for it all to be over.
In the meantime, I’ve made the Regia Bamboo socks, the ones I so cruelly abandoned in August when I took up with Icarus in Vegas, my BSG project:
Ever notice how no one ever knits on a space ship? I just want to point that out.
But I can highly recommend a delightfully maudlin, 1979 Soviet film we got from our “people” at Netflix entitled The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath.
Not only does Irony have Soviet production values that are so bad they’re good, but it features many strange and jarring jump cuts, enough to make you suspect that the editing crew was painfully underpaid, driven by unreasonable time pressures, and chronically drunk on Stoli.
Comrades, these were good and prosperous times in Soviet Union!
But if you watch it, watch it for the subtitles. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.
To be fair, most of the dialogue was translated pretty well (and, I want to emphasize, certainly far, far better than I could do from English into Russian), but the film also includes several songs sung by its main characters. Here things went terribly, horribly wrong.
Song lyrics that were presumably mellifluous, even moving, in Russian were evidently fed word-by-word into a Russian-English dictionary by someone with a rudimentary grasp of the English language and they came out on the other side limping and bleeding, maimed beyond all recognition:
“I cognize both wisdom and happiness…” Cognize?
“You have left your besom in the bathhouse/
And the trumpets are deaf making you…”
Anyone who can convincingly explain to me what “besom” means in this context wins a ball of Trekking XXL and an honorable mention in the design contest. Even if you don’t design anything.
And my personal favorite, which deserves a little context: the gist of the song—as nearly as I could make out through the fog of translation—was that it is potentially better to experience love that is not passionate, but steady and sustainable.
“I do not blush from a stifling heat upsurge/
Whenever your sleeved arm rustles my trousers.”
(For proper scansion—if, heaven help us, that nicety enters into this foul rendering at all—I believe that here “sleeved” is to be pronounced in two syllables, “sleeve” and “ed”.)
Let’s hear from the translator, shall we? What have you got to say for yourself, Boris Mikhailovich?
“Comrades, I translate Russian song into good English with large dictionary using first word I see in entry. Is usually most popular!”
Apparently, Boris Mikhailovich also provided translation services for other films, giving us such wonderful English titles as (I’m not making these up), “Galoshes of Happiness,” “The Old Bandit Chaps,” and “Karl Marx: Young Years.”
Only heaven knows what was intended by the original Russian titles, and heaven keeps its secrets. Even in the face of a stifling heat upsurge.
September 29th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
I cognize a challenge when I see it, Ellen. A besom, despite what a first impression might suggest, is a broom–often used with a connotation of magic and ridding negative energy. Since I’ve never seen nor heard trumpets in a bathhouse making the deafness, I’m assuming the trumpets are metaphorical?
I’d say just about anything for Trekking XXL. I’d even sing the poorly translated Russian song for you.
Which reminds me, have you heard the quip about the inaccuracies of translation? The translators used the phrase “Out of sight, out of mind” translated it to Russian and back to English. It came back as “invisible maniac.” Ah idioms. Gotta love ’em.
Speaking of love–love the pedicure, the bamboo socks, the picture of Shelley (probably my favorite one yet), and, as always, Icarus.
Not feeling the love for Netflix, because by the time the movies come I say to myself, “What was I thinking? Why did I rent this? Did I have too much Stoli?”
And last in this War and Peace-like tome, I’m assuming Stoux d’Ent is Wax Wings? No good translation and I can’t find my french/english dictionary.
September 29th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
geez, ellen, i think i should be paying you. another hilarious post on a day when i really, really, really needed a laugh. thanks! i think i might go have a stoli. 🙂
September 30th, 2006 at 2:13 am
Lurker here… But I’m like a crow when it comes to doing odd research at the spur of a moment. 😉 It’s fun. You never know what you’ll learn. Also I’m ‘satiably curious, which is how I get these odd bits of info in my brain. (Ok, ok, plus you mentioned the Trekking and the Harlot has sockBorged me.)
So it was imperative I check out a suspicion I had. What with also being impatient, I double-checked ‘besom’ on Wikipedia first, instead of trying to find a buried bookmark for a good dictionary site, which I know perfectly well is in my Netscape *somewhere*. Besides, I wondered how the bathhouse came into it all; although once I read a particular line in the Wiki article on ‘besom brooms’, I knew. (Never mind the trumpets, there are some places I just don’t wanna go.)
So the song, er, the translation says:
“You have left your besom in the bathhouse/…”
Whoever wrote Wiki’s stub on besom brooms included this:
(full stub link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besom)
“…refers to besoms as a switch used in a women’s bath house, perhaps in some treatment of women’s backs.”
‘Some treatment of women’s *backs*’?!!::snorts, then falls over giggling, while apologizing for the rudeness:: Ok, whoever wrote this may know about Wicca…but alas, obviously never had reason to read up much on traditional saunas. Nor that it wasn’t only Finns who use them. There is a tradition of using of birch switches during a sauna, which I think I learned the first time I ever heard of them. (For expanded knowledge of saunas, I also have to be grateful for reading, many years ago, Leo Frankowski’s series of Conrad Stargard books. All hail SF, for the general increase in knowledge it can spread!)
To quote Wiki again, they used “…a bundle of birch twigs, to gently slap the skin and create further stimulation of the pores and cells.” (section of article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauna#The_evolution_of_the_sauna) Aside from the health aspect of saunas, if you scan through the article down to the ancient traditions section, the original saunas had major social and spiritual associations. Kind of like a relative of the Native American sweatlodge ceremonies. Which might be why the bathhouse is making an appearance in the song? (I’m stretching, there.)
So – I surmise someone left her birch switch in the women’s sauna, for some pertinent-to-the-sentiment-of-the-song reason that escapes me. That Russian-English dictionary (or Boris, we’ll probably never know), had no clue as to the difference between a broom and a switch. In English, anyway.
Hee. That was fun. Thanks for a hilarious post *and* the opp to go a’researching. I’ll stop now. ]bg]
November 11th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
[…] Last but not least, honorable mentions go to Lorinda and Monica, for explaining a very bad translation from the Russian that contained the unusual word “besom.” See this post for more on that and for their clever responses. […]