Dermo!: The Real Russian Tolstoy Never Used - Softcover

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Eduard Topol is a Russian novelist. His books include Red Square, Submarine U-137, Tomorrow in Russia, and Dermo!

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Not even Tolstoy would dare use the eyebrow-raising Russian you'll find in this wickedly humorous language guide by one of Russia's bestselling novelists today. Whether you're traveling to Russia for the first time or you are a student of the language, this indispensable book is your entree to the real and new Russian that has never been taught. You'll be armored with triple-decker curses and insults, endearments and expressions for situations ranging from high-level business meetings to cocktail parties to sexual encounters. Filled with words, idioms, and vulgarisms you won't learn in a classroom, plus twenty hilarious line drawings and a complete index to vital expletives, Dermo! will provide you with the uncensored answers to the questions you always wanted to know...but no translator would ever tell you!

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DERMO!

The REAL Russian Tolstoy Never Used

ZVER’ MUZHIK

A sex machine.

(literally, “animal man.”)

KAK ZHIZN’?

How’s life?

KRYSHA POEKHALA

To go bonkers.

(literally, “the roof is sliding.”)

NA KOI PES?

What the hell?

(literally, “on whose dog?”)

STROIT’ GLAZKI

To flirt.

(literally, “to build eyes.”)

YA TEBYA LYUBLYU

I love you.

EDWARD TOPOL is one of Russia’s best-selling novelists.

Edward Topol

Translated by Laura E. Wolfson

Illustrations by Kim Wilson Brandt

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the publisher for the honor of presenting to an English-speaking readership the rich treasures and the soul of the great Russian language. The author also thanks translator Laura E. Wolfson, who in translating this book of Russian slang and swear words performed a most difficult task and successfully expressed the essence of the Russian soul in English. An enormous thanks to the editor Julia Serebrinsky for the care and attention she’s given to this rather unladylike project.

Translator’s Note

Reader beware: The verses that appear in this book in English translation accompanied by their Russian originals are not literal translations. Some liberties have been taken in order to achieve greater literary effect. Russian words presented in the Roman alphabet have not been transliterated according to any of the standard transliteration systems; priority has been placed on ease of pronunciation.

The translator wishes to thank GHK for his invaluable expertise and assistance with Cyrillic software during the translation of this book.

I will now reveal to you the secret of Russian as spoken by real people.

But first, a brief introduction.

The great Russian author Ivan Turgenev, famous for his novel Fathers and Sons, his lyrical descriptions of the Russian countryside and his insights into the hearts and souls of Russian women, once proclaimed: “In time of doubt, in time of agonizing reflection, you have always been my mainstay and my hope, oh great and mighty Russian language! . . . There can be no doubt but that such a language was conferred upon a great people!” Ironically, Turgenev himself preferred to live in Paris with the French singer Paulina Viardot, a fact which people in Russia would rather overlook.

I have never heard the British say that English is a great and mighty language, nor do I recall ever hearing the French speak of the great French soul, but Russians tend toward gigantomania: Peter is Peter the Great, Catherine is Catherine the Great, Tolstoy is great, Stalin is great, Mother Russia is great, literature is great, snowfalls are never anything but great, and on the map of Russia there are twenty-four cities containing the word “great”: Great Lip, Great Ruble, Great Digging, and Great Deafness, to name a few. It’s worth noting that neither Paris nor Istanbul nor Tokyo call themselves “great cities,” and yet here in Russia we find a place called “Digging” that is most definitely great, and its name alone reveals the secret ambitions of even the most provincial of Russian souls.

Of course, no one denies the greatness of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but I have a feeling that in everyday life nineteenth century Russians never spoke like Turgenev’s noble young heroines, Anna Karenina, or the brothers Karamazov, and if today someone were to stand up—in the Russian parliament or even at a Russian writers conference—and speak in the language of Tolstoy, people would think he was nuts.

The Russian language as it is taught in the most prestigious colleges in the West with reference to “great” Russian literature is as different from present-day speech in smell, taste, and potency as Evian water is from home brewed potato vodka.

This is why whenever I send off a new novel to be translated, I provide notes on every page of the manuscript explaining new words and slang expressions I use. Even professional translators, whose résumés include translations of the great Russian classics as well as serious contemporary works, do not know hundreds of words that make up contemporary Russian. These words are not included in the latest Russian version of spell check which is on my computer, so I enter these words into the memory myself. But then even if you memorize an entire dictionary of Russian curses and slang, you won’t come close to organic Russian speech, if you don’t know the main, or rather, the Great secret of the Russian language. And this is a secret I reveal to my translators in a note I always attach to the first page of the manuscript. It reads:

Dear Colleague! I will now reveal to you the secret of Russian as spoken by real people. Please remember it when you are translating all dialogues. I rely on this secret when writing dialogues and speeches for all my characters, from Gorbachev and Yeltsin right down to a prostitute plying her trade on Moscow’s main drag. Here is the rule:

Every real Russian sentence is constructed so that the word “motherfucker” or “whore” can be inserted at any point—even after every word.

Only the translator’s unfailing adherence to this rule can assure that the Russian characters’ conversations and speeches will sound as if they are coming from the mouths of real people.

Flexibility is a trademark of Real Russian. In English, for example, words observe a certain etiquette and are placed in a sentence according to strict British norms of politeness (i.e., the predicate never elbows its way ahead of the subject and the verb always bows down in deference before His Majesty, the noun). Russian, on the other hand, emulates its homeland, where chaos generally rules, and the word order in a sentence is dictated by nothing more than how the speaker is feeling that day. This is why four-letter words can appear anywhere in a sentence and sound natural and even indispensable if the emotion calls for it. In English, the following sentence would sound extremely odd: “I, fuck, love, whore, you, bitch, so much!” Does that sound like any declaration of love you’ve ever heard? But if I write in Russian, “I love you so much!” it strikes a false note or sounds ironic to the Russian ear. To lend this exalted phrase the convincing note of genuine love, I have to let it go slumming, or as they say in Russian, let it sink down to the level of (der’mo—shit) and write (Ya, tebya, pala, tak lyublyu!) that means literally “I, you, bitch, so much love!” or more idiomatically, “I love you, bitch, so much!”

Of course, when a foreigner comes up against this total linguistic chaos where words elbow in front of each other like winos in Great Digging lining up to buy apple vermouth (the cheapest liquor available in the old Soviet Union), despair sets in. But I do know one American who mastered real Russian flawlessly in a mere two days. I met this phenomenal linguist in 1979, five days after I arrived in the U.S. His name was Rabbi Bernstein and he was the head of a Jewish organization where I, a freshly minted émigré, went to interview for a job editing Jewish religious books in Russian, which paid a whopping $150 a week.

When I arrived, a tall man of fifty rose to greet me. He was wearing a yarmulke, a dark suit, and on his shoulders was a sprinkling of dandruff flakes. His nose was large and swollen from a cold.

“Good...