Good evening! Welcome to Russian Book World from The Voice of Russia, a weekly look at books from and about Russia and the context in which they are written, produced, translated and marketed.

My name is Yan Mitchell and in today’s programme we are going to start at the beginning discussing raw material on which everything depends - the Russian language.

I am joined in the studio today by Michele Berdy, one of the best-known English-speaking writers in Moscow on the subject of Russian. Michele has been publishing weekly articles in The Moscow Times for the last eight years and this has now been collected in the book form under the title The Russian Word’s Worth. They give a fascinating glimpse in the heart of the Russian language for those of us who are interested in how the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy is spoken today.

Michele’s lifestory gives hope to all of us who struggle with Russian: its complexities, subtleties and ambiguities. Since she is not a linguist, a philologist, or even a polyglot she claims no special facility for languages and she is not one of those who, as she says in the introduction to her book, “knows everything about 16th century verb usage in Rostov. She is simply an American lady who studied Russian as a second language at MS college in Massachusetts in those distant days when you could not get rich in Russia and therefore took such courses simply for the love of them”. Michele is, in the best sense of the word, an amateur.

Yet she is also a professional in that she has over the period of thirty years in Moscow acquired a sufficient and deep understanding of the Russian language and therefore the Russian mind, that she has been asked to interpret, among many others, Boris Yeltsin and Nancy Reagan.

Michele moved to Moscow in the late 1970s and she says in her introduction, “Since Brezhnev was in his dotage i have been pondering, discovering, contemplating, positing, theorizing and occasionally arguing about what makes Russia so Russian and how that differes or does not differ from what makes Americans so American”.

Every Friday Michele’s newspaper column appears with discussion of one or another aspect of Russian and how it translates or very often does not translate adequately into English. Her pieces are usually related to topics of current interest. For example, on the 6th August this year she began her column by saying “We are now in Week 5 of the Heat Wave Horror” after which she went on to talk about the Russian words for carbon monoxide, for peat bog fires and for gauze masks. All of these would be new to most experts in Moscow and even to many Russian specialists abroad. The most of us would probably understand the Russian word for “smog” which is “смог” (pronounced as “smog”).

And two weeks later as the heat wave was at its hight and everybody was practically praying for rain Michele wrote about the way in which the Russian word for “thunderstorm” is so much more flexible than the English language equivalent, pointing out its adjectival form is been used to describe everything from religious awe to the character of Ivan the Terrible. And all of this is done with a lightness of touch and wit which i personally find charming. It certainly sugars the pill of laguage learning.

Michele, thank you for coming to talk to us. Before we start, can you tell us just a little bit about how you came to write this book?

For many years i have been writing the column for The Moscow Times and for almost as many years people have been asking me to put the columns together in a collection. I wanted to do it for myself. Over the years I have come up with ways to translate things and then i spend about six hours looking for the column that i translated a particular word in. It was a way of putting everything together and providing an index so that other readers and I could find words, phrases that interested them.

In the contents page of your book I see sections about grammar, technical words, children, Russian foibles, animals, politics, food, nature, slang, jokes and even old Sovietic expressions which you missed, now that there are no shortages, queues or black marketeers to talk about. Is there anything you do not know about Russian?

Yes, in every column there is a new thing I do not know about Russian. Almost all of the columns come from what i do not know, what I am curious about. I will hear a particular word in an advertisement or Putin will say something. I call it Mr. Putin’s language lessions because he has a saulty way of speaking and comes up with expressions that we, foreigners, do not understand. So they almost always come from what i do not know. And then I start asking questions, looking till I have a column.

One aspect of your book that I particularly liked was your willingness to admit your ignorance. And that has an effect on me of making me trust more. But I wonder how you learnt so much of the language. In my experience Russian are too polite to correct your mistakes and they certainly do not correct me very often. Do they correct you or, if they do not, how did you learn all this?

I think by living here, practice. And I like to talk. I think there are people who are generally very quiet and very nervious about speaking Russian because they are very nervious about making mistakes. When you start speaking Russian English is a far more linear language: you come up with your noun, you come up with your verb, you come up with your direct object. So I would just blunder along, listen to people. Sometimes people correct me if I ask them to correct me. There is a joke. Russians now like to have country houses and the first thing they do is cut down all the trees and put there grass because they want it to look like an English country mansion. So the joke is: how do you grow this beautiful grass? You plant it and wait for a hundred years. I think it is the same way with language. You learn all the grammar, you start talking and then after 30 years you can actually communicate.

But you think fluency is more important than accuracy then?

It depends. If it is a regular communication, I think, you just open your mouth and blunder and people will more or less figure out what you want to say. In the past, I worked in communications and the most interesting thing that I learnt is that when an advertisement is done where there are visuals as well as verbal messages about 80% of the information people get is actually from the visuals. So that even if you are saying “Куда...?” (“Where...?”), trying to ask where to go, people can tell by the fact that you are looking around, at a piece of paper, by the fact that you have got a map and they know what you are after. And when you are translating or interpreting then accuracy is obviously much more important.

That would explain why I find it much easier to talk to people in my primitive Russian face to face then over telephone because you cannot get any visual sense.

That is one of the most difficult things and it is also difficult when somebody suddenly switches topic. You think you are talking about one thing and then suddenly they ask you a quesiton and you are absolutely at a loss.

You mentioned the verb “засыпаться” which means in English “to fail” or in American “to flunk.” You say, “That is pretty much how we, foreigners, feel about Russian. No matter how long we study we will always flunk the exam.” Do you still feel you have a lot to learn about Russian?

Oh, yes. If I live here another hundred years I will still make mistakes and there will be thing that I will not get right. I think it is even more difficult to write Russian well. I have a totally unscientific theory, totally unproved and perhaps totally unprovable, but I think it is easier to write English well than it is to write Russian well.

Why is that?

They have a lot of rules. And there is still a fairly great distinction between written and spoken language. One of the things that is really fun about Russian that you cannot do in English is that you can switch the word order around depending on what you want to emphasize or where you are in figuring out what you want to say. In Russian that is very fixed and if you open one of those grammar books that tell you how to write correct Russian they always say “first, you put the new information and then you put the old information.” Except that I can never figure out what the old information is and what the new information is. In the quesition “Do you want to go to the moves tonight?” what is new and what is old? It is very very difficult to write well.

Michele, English is famously an easy language to learn to rudimentary standard. Even Homer Simpson managed that. But Russian with its cases and declensions and grammatical structure is more difficult to learn to a basic level. The other end of the spectrum is that English is an extraordinary flexible and poetic language. How does Russian compare at that end of the spectrum, which the most of us do not know much about.

I think it is a very poetic language. Partially because you can move the words around to give more emphasis, to gave a sense of your emotional reaction. And then there is this wonderful thing you can do in Russian that you cannot quite do in English. There are diminutive forms of virtually any word on the planet. So that you can take a word like “рядом” which means “next to”. That is what you say to your dog when you are trying to teach it to heel. But if you say “рядышком” that already suggests somebody sitting tight next to you. It gives an emotional kind of colouration. And I think that is the fun of Russian. Once you begin to relax and you realize you are never going to get aspect right and you are going to confuse some of your case endings and you are never going to say numerals and the instrumental case correctly ever, once you get to play with the language that is where you find all of those wonderful opportunities to colour words.

All undereducated Russians speak flawless Russian?

No, they do not. I can say it with great authority. It is actually one of the things I like most that Russians have a hard time with dozens and dozens of books that explain the difference between very similar words, some of the case endigs Russians will also confuse. Besides, Russian is changing very quickly right now. It has been developing fast forward since the 90s. So there are a lot of slang words, perhaps because of the influence of advertizing. There are some changes even in grammatical usage.

Before we leave the subject of the way in which Russians speak, I am interested in the fact that, as I see it, to learn French, German etc for an English-speaking person is simply learning a different code for your thoughts. But it seems to me, at my Homer Simpson’s level of learning Russian, that to learn Russian is learning a different way of thinking. It is not a different code, it is a different build-up of thoughts, a different way of putting your mental processes together into speech. Would you agree with that?

I would agree. I think it particularly comes in two ways. One is the verbal system. If you think about it, English is totally neurotic in pinpointing when an action took place in time in relation to every other action in time. So we have the wonderful Plus Perfect. “By the end of the day I will have finished...” talking about something that is taking place in the future, describing it from the point of view of a moment even farther in the future.

Russian does not do that at all. There are simply three tenses and the emphasis there is not so much on pinpointing an event in time in relation to another time but on whether it is habitual or one-time, casual or intended. When you begin to learn Russian you kind of open a new way of thinking so that you begin not to care so much about specifying exactly the moment something took place. But you care a lot more about the nature of the action and your attitude towards it.

You have to have the sense of what verb you are going to use so that you know what case you ae going to put your direct object in. In English you just string along, in Russian it is more like that you have to have the whole clump of thought in your head already formed before you open your mouth to say it. Every linguist listening to this show is going to die right now, as that is the most untechnical description of speaking a language ever said on-air.

I have been told by Russians that if you write, because I suspect it is the case only with writing, in short sentences you are thought to be a hayseed. It shows that you have come from the country, that you have not been educated, that you are not sophisticated. And Lord Palmerston famously said of English, “Sentences sould begin with the nominative, go on with the verb and end with the accusative.” And Russians always laugh when I draw their attention to this. Why is this thinking of clumps? Why do these clumps need to be so big?

Because when you have case endings it is very easy to figure out in those clupms what action is being done by, what, or whom to what, or whom. One of the things that happen when you translate is you put the page on the stand, take a look at it and realize that the first sentence you are going to translate is a paragraph that covers the entire page and that the noun is the last word of the sentence.

So what you have to do is very often chop it up because English is much more laconic. And I think we are much more interested in making it very clear so that no one will misunderstand. Russian takes a while getting there. The author will spend some time letting you know his attitude. There is sometimes some suspense that builds up. In English you cannot quite do it that way.

One of the great virtues of your book is your concentration on idiomatic Russian because that is something you do not get in textbooks. Am I right in thinking that Russian is at least as idiomatic if not more than English?

I do not know how to compare them. But certainly the greater shock for me when I came here years and years ago and was able to read Pushkin and Tolstoy is that I had no idea what people were saying to me in the street, that I had no idea how to ask for a half kilo of cheese in the store.

I remember one time going to somebody’s house and as I walked in I tripped a little bit and a person said “тише” which I mentally translated as “quiet” but which is just a slang expression for saying “watch out, be careful”. And I was convinced there must be a child sleeping somewhere in the appartment. So I spent the entire evening speaking in a very soft voice and they must have thought I was totally out of my mind, I had a cold or something. But there are thousands of expressions and they keep changing. Now they are changing under the influence of English. But it is very hard to keep up with everything.

A particulary interesting section of your book talks about the invasion of Russian by English words. Like you, I often wondered why Russians should use a word that sounds good in English but odd in Russian. I have an example in one section of your book of “менеджер” (“manager”). There is a perfectly good Russian word “upravlenets”. And I was fascinated with your solution to this conundrum. You say “upravlenets” implies old-fashioned Soviet-style management because that was the word that was used then, whereas to say “manager” impies a modern western-style of management. It is not just a question of fashion for a word, it is that because it is a foreign word it implies foreign methods, or as you put it, “a guy who can read a spreadsheet and knows something about marketing and the rational use of personnel.”

My dicitionary, which was published in Russia, makes the point less weakly in the sense that it translates “upravlenets” as “manager”, or “administrator”. And, of course, “administrator” does not have any sort of entrepreneurial connotation whereas “manager” does.

What I wanted to know is, before you had the benefit of Michele Berdy’s book, how did you find all this stuff out?

I asked a lot of questions. I spend a lot of time not only looking through dictionaries. Now there is a wonderful online resorce which is the corpus of the Russian language. You can type in a phrase and it will pop out 50 examples going back to 1800s. And when you look at a lot of examples you begin to see. The dictionary does not exactly tell you this word is more used in this sense.

Is it something like an online version of the full Oxford Dictionary?

Yes, something like that. And then I ask people a lot of questions all the time. I run a sort of mini surveys. One of the things I was fascinated with is sense of colour. When you get to the blue colours and the purple colours, there is a great difference between what colour an American would call something and what colour a Russian would call something. For example, they call eggplant blue. To me, an eggplant is of eggplant colour, it is purple, not blue. So I would put together colours and I would point to the colour and have Russians tell me what they call it and I would point to the same colour to find out what British or American experts call it.

I think that is the only way. You need just to continue to ask questions. What you discover is that there is a great variety of individual use of language. Some people will find a phrase absolutely crude and inappropriate and they would never use it. And somebody else finds it perfectly acceptable.

Just to end on the business of the changes in Russian, one of things I admire about Russian is the willingness with which it takes into the lanugage other words from outside without shame or apology. Robert Graves famously said that “English is the vernacular of vernaculars”. Russian could well be heading in that direction. Yet at the same time you say in one part of your book there have been some moves in official circles to ban foreign usages. What is the story behind it?

I think it is a process. I do not think there have been attempts actually to ban English words. But there have been attempts to make sure that when Duma deputies were speaking they were using what is considered to be good Russian.

My personal opinion is that right now there is a great difference between the very englishized Russian used in Moscow and St. Petersbourg and some of the big cities and the way the rest of the country speaks.

Isaiah Berlin said of the Russian language that it can do everything that the English lanuage can do, from rhetoric to science, novels etc. But there is one thing the English language cannot do and that is to describe the mouselike scurries of life. I think it could have something to do with your diminutives.

I am not exactly sure what he means. But with all those diminutives, all those possibilities of moving words around and creating new words Russian does give you a great ability to describe the subtleties of life. There is a word “воровать”, “to steal”. But you can “подворовывать”. You can “steal a little bit on the side”. You can take any word and add a slight connotation to it. In English we tend to do it by adding more words. I Russian you can just take one word and play around with it.

I have found at least three more or less relevant words in English that do not appear to me to have any Russian equivalent. One is “opportunity”. There is “возможность”, but that is “possibility” and “opportunity” is something different, something that you grab. Is there any word for “opportunity” in Russian?

 Thrre are plenty of words in English like “opportunity” where there are a number of different aspects of it and you have to choose one of them. Another word which is also quite difficulty to translate is “fair”, “that is not fair”, “fairness”. There is a notion of honour, there is a notion of justice. But “fair” is somehwere in between them. It does not actually exist in Russian either.

And “wit”, as in “witty person” and in the type of writing that involves wit. I sometimes used to work in Vedomosty and I always asked them how the headlines of the newspaper never had any wit in them and they did not quite know what I meant. There would be a lot of idiomatic expressions, a lot of plays on words in a certain sense but not in the sense we understand it, in maybe Oscar Wildien sort of sense. I have not found a word for that. There is “light writing” in Russian.

There is “остроумие” which implies sharpness, humour and irony. Again, it is another case where there are components of wit in many different words.

And the final one is “fun”.

Yes, “fun” does not exist. There is a thousand different ways to say “Have a good time!”, “Entertain yourself!”, “Cut loose!” but not “Have fun!” The first phrase that Russian emigrants learn whenever they go to an English-speaking country is “fun”. And now they say in Russian “I was at a party last night and мы имели фан (we had fun)” which sounds absolutely ridiculous in Russian. But the notion of fun is not entertaining yourself, that does not quite exist.

This is a free lesson to the listeners, how would you translate “It has been great fun having the opportunity to see a smaple of your unique wit, Ms Berdy”.

Oh, I hate this kind of thing. I would say “Мы имели фан!” Something like that.

That is an unfair question, I am sorry. Thank you very much for coming to this studio, Michele Berdy. Michele’s book The Russian Word’s Worth is published by GLAS Publishers of Moscow.