Introduction
It’s
probably about time for a Russian-themed blog post, since (according to
Pageview stats) 11% of my albertnet audience is Ukrainian and another 4% is
Russian.
This post is
about a children’s picture book that I wrote in Russian for a high school
class. The book itself is presented here,
with my shockingly bad illustrations, along with a handy English translation
that gave me some trouble (more on this later).
Beyond the
story itself, I describe here how my brother wrote computer software to enable
me to actually type out the story in Russian.
(This was a pretty big deal back in 1986.) Meanwhile, the simple tale is greatly
enriched by the story of my civil-war-torn Russian class, so I’ll give some
background on that, with further observations sprinkled among the storybook
pages.
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The translation
It’s been a
very long time since I studied Russian, and in the interim I’ve stuffed my head
with French and Latin and also killed off a tremendous number of brain cells
riding my bike too hard. Thus, when my mom—having decided I can
finally be trusted with a precious family heirloom—returned to me the picture book
(which she had been archiving), I was unable to read it. I had written the book using the simplest
prose imaginable, but now I found myself stymied.
I made a
little stab at translation using Google Translate, but gave up quickly. For one thing, you have to enter each word using
the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian, and the mouse-based methodology for this is
clunky:
Second, when
writing this book my spelling was less than perfect, and it’s difficult to
Google-translate misspelled words.
Consider сотворил above: in my
book I’d spelled it сотровил. And then
there’s the grammar to consider.
And so, oddly
enough, I had to find somebody to translate my own book into my native
tongue. I wasn’t about to post a
craigslist ad, because a) how could I validate the ability of some random
would-be translator? and b) my budget for this project is based on my income
from this blog—that is, it’s nonexistent.
Fortunately, my daughter has made a new friend in school who is fluent
in Russian (she speaks it at home). This
friend not only translated my book, but read it aloud to us in Russian, which
was a pleasure to hear.
The font and typesetting
The teacher,
when assigning us the children’s book, said we had to bind all the pages up
nicely, with a cover and everything, and I refused. “This isn’t an arts and crafts class,” I said
snottily. (Like so many teens, I was a
jerk.) “But I will type it,” I declared. I
didn’t know exactly how I’d do this, and of course the teacher assumed I was just
BS-ing her.
I asked my
brother Bryan if he could create a Russian character set for me on the
computer, and software that could typeset my story. He didn’t ask, “What’s in it for me?!” but immediately
accepted the challenge just because it sounded cool. He didn’t have his own computer—not so many
people did back then—but we had access to our dad’s Hewlett Packard 85 computer
(described here). The only problem was, its built-in thermal
printer used a spool of paper that was only about four inches wide. So Bryan borrowed his friend Thaine’s HP-86, and wrote a program on it using the HP
version of the BASIC programming language.
The program
drew the characters using the graphics capability of the computer. Bryan had me design the characters myself on
8½-by-11 graph paper. They were huge—one
graph-paper box per pixel—and he shrunk them down with the software (this was
long before scanners and I have no recollection of how he got from paper-based
drawings to computer pixels). His
program gave me rudimentary word processing capabilities and mapped the
Cyrillic characters to their nearest QWERTY keyboard equivalent. The font was lovely; in fact, his characters
were far prettier than those of the existing English-language font sets
available for a dot-matrix printer.
Compare:
When I’d
written the story, typed it, printed it, and added my pictures, it did seem
like a shame to just staple it. Before I
even had time to think about how I might bind it, Thaine’s girlfriend Erika
offered to make a cover for me. She used
black silk for the back cover, and a brilliant red floral pattern in silk for the front cover. My teacher, expecting a stapled stack of
papers, was pleasantly surprised. Then,
when she opened the book, she was astonished.
“It’s typed!” she cried.
“Well of
course it’s typed,” I replied casually.
“I told you I was going to
type it.”
The backstory – my Russian class
Before I get
to the picture book itself, it should be useful and amusing for you to read
about my Russian class and how the personalities involved shaped my story. During my junior year, I decided
to take Russian simply because I’d been studying French since 7th grade and was
kind of burned-out on it. Most of the
other kids in my class chose Russian because it had the reputation for being
the easiest foreign-language class on offer—an “easy C.” This was because there was only one teacher,
Илена Нетровна, who was the nicest old lady on the planet. (I haven’t changed any names in this post,
because throughout I’ve used our classroom Russian names. Нетровна isn’t my teacher’s last name, but
her patronymic—literally, “daughter of Peter.”)
During a test, you could wave Илена Нетровна over and flat-out ask for the answer and she’d give it to you. She didn’t have the heart to leave a student
behind, so we learned at a tectonic pace.
(Russian is easy to begin with, because it is such a logical and
consistent language, and much easier to pronounce than, say, French.)
My class was
like the band of misfits you’d find in a teen coming-of-age movie. There was Тимофей, a leather-jacket-clad punk
rocker whose bleached hair was arranged in corn-rows and set in epoxy; his
female counterpart Маша, whose hair was also bleached but merely swooped
straight up (I had the hots for her); Матвей, a pal of mine I feared had a
drinking problem (but then, I was a goody two-shoes type; in England he’d probably
have been thought a “hale fellow well met”); and Адам, a very small dude (dare
I say Fun-Size?) with an outsized knack for troublemaking. There were others who were much better
students, the best being Катя, who was really nerdy but kind of attractive, and
who was cursed with a nickname so cruel I won’t repeat it here (hint: it combined her reputation as a nerd with an
accusation of meretriciousness).
(An
interesting aside: the CIA came to our
class to try to recruit us into an intensive language program, promising us exciting
cold-war spy jobs where we’d eavesdrop on Soviet radio communications. Nobody bit.)
The first
year passed with the whole class in lockstep, meaning that very little of the
language was actually covered. Perhaps
for this reason, or perhaps because Илена Нетровна (phonetically “Elena
Petrovna”) got tired of being disrespectfully called “Yilyenna” (which probably
cannot even be rendered in Russian), we got a new teacher the next year, who
was just out of college and commanded more of the guys’ attention. (We were
teenagers, so it didn’t take much.) She
decided that one half of the class was ready for harder work, so she split the
class into Russian 2 and Russian 3, dividing her attention between the two
groups. The so-called Russian 2 students
immediately renamed themselves “The Dumb Group,” and renamed Russian 3 “The
Smart Group,” and (notwithstanding that I was technically in Russian 3) dubbed me
the “Leader of the Dumb Group.” I felt
like Max in Where the Wild Things Are.
Why me? Well, in that school district, at least at
that time, being smart really was uncool and good grades could be the kiss of
death socially. So I tried to hide my
good test scores, not just by covering them up, but by playing dumb. Well, one day we got back a big test, and Катя
bragged to a friend that she got like a 97%.
Somebody—it might have been the teacher, or somebody else who happened
to see my paper—told Катя that I’d gotten a 100%, after which (the cat already
being out of the bag) I ribbed her a bit about being beaten by a dumbass. Maybe I ribbed her a bit too much—she got
really flustered and I thought she was going to actually start crying. I felt bad, but from that day forward I was
like a hero to the Dumb Group: a guy who
could hold his own against the nerds while still being a troublemaker at heart.
Was I really
a troublemaker? I guess I was, though I
can’t remember exactly how I misbehaved.
I must have, though, because one day the teacher (the new, young one)
dragged me out of class into an empty classroom and chewed my head off. She was really ticked, her face flushed, and
then I noticed her undergoing another physiological effect that seemed
inappropriate to the situation (a response usually associated with either cold
weather or a specific stimulation unrelated to anger). It was one of the most remarkable situations
of my life to that point, and though I must have cleaned up my act somewhat, I
can’t say I was totally inclined to turn over a new leaf. I did work a lot harder, though, when we tried
to read a chapter of Lermontov’s A Hero
of Our Time (a brilliant novel) in the original Russian. That effort seriously humbled me, and I guess
I needed that.
Okay! Onward!
As you read my picture book, you’ll surely pick up on my anti-elitist
theme; it’s about as subtle as being struck across the face repeatedly with a
frozen sea bass. Obviously I was quite
the little hypocrite; after all, what could be more showy and pompous than
being the only kid in the class to type his story?
Лучше Девушка
Here is the
first page of the story, exactly as it appears in the book:
That “139”
in the corner must be an artifact of some glitch in my brother’s software. I should have whited it out. My name in the upper right, Юрий, pronounced
“Yuri,” was my chosen Russian name (there being no real equivalent for
Dana). Since there’s a lot of wasted
space with my full-page format, hereafter I’ve cropped the pictures a bit,
resized the text for easier reading, and added the English translations.
I think
“music classroom” is pretty klunky (though it’s a literal translation of what I wrote). If
my daughter’s friend had lived in Russia, perhaps she’d know a better term for
this.
I guessed
wrong on the Russian spelling of Scrabble.
It’s actually СкрЭбл. (In my
defense, we didn’t have the Internet back then.) I probably made all kinds of mistakes in this
book. It’s kind of amazing my daughter’s
friend could read it at all.
This page
presented a particular challenge for the translator. She said “soccer,” because that’s what футбол
(or футболе in the accusative case) translates to. And yet, Олег is quite obviously holding a
football. Needless to say the game of
American football isn’t played in Russia.
Where is this story supposed to take place? I never even considered this. Looking back, I did a pretty half-assed job
on this picture book, notwithstanding the great work others did on it.
Look at
those shoes. The sad thing is, I can’t
draw any better today.
This bit
about the Talented And Best club was a dig at an actual society (whether it was
regional, national, or an assortment of individual clubs, I have no idea)
called TAG, for Talented And Gifted. To
be a member was the ultimate stigma socially.
Right around the time I wrote this story, I got into some pretty hot
water over TAG. I had a really plum word
processing job at the Boulder Community Hospital, typing lab procedure manuals
into the computer and formatting them neatly.
(Before this, these manuals had been typed on a typewriter or
handwritten, so it was impossible to update them.) There was only one personal computer in the
whole place, in the big boss’s office, which was fine when I started because
the lab was between bosses so the office was empty.
Then they
hired this blowhard who sat in there all day talking on the phone, never conducting hospital
business, always working on something like getting his car fixed. It was unpleasant to work with him breathing
down my neck, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go on. One day he got into an argument with his teenage kid, right there in the office while I was trying to work. The argument was about TAG. I’d most likely have kept my mouth shut, but
then my boss dragged me into it. “Say,
Dana, you seem bright. Have you been
offered membership in TAG?”
I replied,
“Yeah, I was invited.” He asked if I
accepted, and I said I had not. He asked
why, and—who knows, maybe this was intentional career suicide—I just couldn’t
restrain myself from saying, “I think TAG is just a club for kids who don’t
have any real friends.” His kid broke
in, “See, Dad? See? It’s just like I was sayin’!” Needless to say I
didn’t last long in that job after that.
I guess I really did belong in the Dumb Group.
