RARA-AVIS: hard-boiled Arkady?

From: Carrie Pruett ( pruettc@hotmail.com)
Date: 29 Apr 2002


>I would
>suggest (and it's been years since I read GORKY PARK
>and I've never read the sequels) that if we knew
>Russian, and we could hear Renko speaking in Russian
>(rather than an English that pretends to be translated
>Russian but is really just plain English), we'd be
>hearing colloquial Russian.
>JIM DOHERTY

the narrator in "Gorky Park" comments that one of the most common phrases in "tough" everyday spoken Russian is, loosely translated, "f*** your mother". Renko doesn't say this quite as often as his more streetwise sidekick, but i'd be very surprised if he doesn't say it. hard to get more colloquial than that. (BTW, apparently this really is such a common phrase that when I took Russian in college, we were counseled always to use the informal "mama" rather than the proper "mat'" to mean mother because the latter is used almost exclusively in profanity. the profs never told us what the actual phrase was and my Russian friends all claimed not to know what i was talking about or said that they wouldn't teach me any cusswords because a foreign woman using them in public would amount to either a sexual proposition or an invitation to an asskicking.)

carrie
-

He got thirty years for lovin' her/ from some Oklahoma governor,/ who said
"everything this doughboy does is wrong" - Tom Waits

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