Subject
Nabokov & Poshlost'
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A Common Problem to Pin DownEDNOTE. Moscow journalist Alex Fak calls attention to the following exploration of POSHLOST'.
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Friday, September 2, 2005. Issue 3244. Page 9.
Aa Aa Aa
A Common Problem to Pin Down
By Michele A. Berdy
To Our Readers
Has something you've read here startled you? Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas to improve our coverage?
Then please write to us.
All we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number in case we need to get in touch.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Email the Opinion Page Editor
Пошлый: 1) vulgar, crude; 2) a mix of pretentious, superficial, philistine, false, banal, soulless, hackneyed, mediocre, saccharine, tasteless, cliched, all served up with a fine sense of moral contempt
The noun пошлость and its adjective пошлый are what linguists call "key words": words that have a profound meaning for a culture and define its values. Language nuts love them for it; translators loathe them because they often have no equivalents in other languages.
So what does пошлый mean? When in doubt, go back to the word's origins. Пошлый, which is the participle form of the verb пойти (to go) has been used in Russian at least as far back as the 13th century. The original sense was something that had "come into existence," something customary, the way of doing things. In time it came to mean something "ancient" or "usual." When Peter the Great was cutting short beards and kaftans, what was customary (пошлый) became negative. For a while it meant "low quality" (in other words, what's old is no good). And then it came to mean something "devoid of meaning" or "trivial": meaningless custom observed by habit.
Today пошлый is most often used in the sense of "crude" or "vulgar": пошлый анекдот (an off-color joke), пошлый намёк (innuendo) or пошлый юмор (crude humor). Пошляк in this context means a raunchy guy, a leering letch.
But then there is the cosmic key meaning of пошлость, which often has nothing to do with the risque. Vladimir Nabokov once dedicated 11 pages to defining it, and in the end, even he, that master of words, resorted more to examples than to definitions. He preferred to transliterate what he called this "fat brute of a word" as poshlust to capture its inelegant plop and slurp -- and also, one must assume, because lust is to love as пошлость is to all that is genuine, fine, moral, beautiful and true. For as Nabokov says, пошлость is "not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." It's an expanded sense of "devoid of meaning": a pretense of beauty and depth without heart or soul.
There isn't one word in English that captures this. Пошлость is like a fat sow dressed in a ball gown and tiara: "Trashy" gives you the dress, "saccharine" is the cute tiara, "philistine" is the snout, "pretentious" is the beribboned tail, but you still don't hear the oink or smell the pigsty.
When translating you have to choose a meanings that best conveys the sense of пошлость in that particular context. For example, in this description of a tense dinner table conversation: Каждый чувствовал, что в подобные мгновенья позволительно сказать одну лишь пошлость, что всякое значительное, или умное, или просто задушевное слово было бы чем-то неуместным, почти ложным. (Everyone felt that in such moments it was only appropriate to say something banal, that any meaningful, or intelligent, or simply heartfelt word would have been somehow out of place, almost a lie.)
You need something else in this context: Мне не нравятся его картины о сказках -- они слишком красивые, пошлые. (I don't like his paintings of fairy tales; they're prettified and precious.)
Or here: Он интеллигентный и тонкий человек. Но его жена -- пошлая. (He's a very cultured and sensitive person. But his wife is low-rent.)
The final element of пошлость is the implied moral censure. Pawning off pseudo for real, saccharine for sweet, trite for profound, manipulative for moving -- all that пошлость entails -- is ultimately morally wrong.
And that is why we foreigners fall in love with this place: because there are still folks who believe that a cheaply manipulative film, a rabble-rousing speech or a confession of love that's for show and not for real are пошлые and beneath contempt.
My kind of folks.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
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Also In This Issue
a.. Time to Tell the Truth About Beslan (Editorial)
a.. A Centrifugal State (Nikolai Petrov)
Columnists
Inside Russia
By Yulia Latynina
Between the Lines
By Alexei Pankin
Always a Dissident
By Boris Kagarlitsky
Defense Dossier
By Pavel Felgenhauer
Power Play
By Yevgenia Albats
Rules of the Game
By Konstantin Sonin
Ways and Means
By Masha Gessen
Regional Perspectives
By Nikolai Petrov
Uncommon Sense
By Georgy Bovt
Northern Capital
By Vladimir Kovalev
Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru
By Maxim Kononenko
The Word`s Worth
By Michele A. Berdy
Global Eye
By Chris Floyd
© Copyright 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
------------------------------------------------------
Opinion / Columnists / The Word`s Worth
Features
Front Page
News
Business
Opinion
Arts & Ideas
Nightlife
Travel Guide
Stock Market
Latest Wires
Services
Jobs & Careers
Classifieds
Conferences
Photobook
Tools
Archive Search
PDF Edition
Full PDF Archive
My Account
Subscriptions
Print Edition
Article Archive
PDF Edition
E-mail News
Advertising
Classifieds
Online
G!O
Real Estate Catalog
Real Estate Quarterly
Direct Mail
Reprints
Information
Past Issues
Global Eye
FAQ
Request Form
Agreement
About
Archive
January February March April May June July August September October November December 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30
<< Aug.
Archive Search
Advanced search...
Friday, September 2, 2005. Issue 3244. Page 9.
Aa Aa Aa
A Common Problem to Pin Down
By Michele A. Berdy
To Our Readers
Has something you've read here startled you? Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas to improve our coverage?
Then please write to us.
All we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number in case we need to get in touch.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Email the Opinion Page Editor
Пошлый: 1) vulgar, crude; 2) a mix of pretentious, superficial, philistine, false, banal, soulless, hackneyed, mediocre, saccharine, tasteless, cliched, all served up with a fine sense of moral contempt
The noun пошлость and its adjective пошлый are what linguists call "key words": words that have a profound meaning for a culture and define its values. Language nuts love them for it; translators loathe them because they often have no equivalents in other languages.
So what does пошлый mean? When in doubt, go back to the word's origins. Пошлый, which is the participle form of the verb пойти (to go) has been used in Russian at least as far back as the 13th century. The original sense was something that had "come into existence," something customary, the way of doing things. In time it came to mean something "ancient" or "usual." When Peter the Great was cutting short beards and kaftans, what was customary (пошлый) became negative. For a while it meant "low quality" (in other words, what's old is no good). And then it came to mean something "devoid of meaning" or "trivial": meaningless custom observed by habit.
Today пошлый is most often used in the sense of "crude" or "vulgar": пошлый анекдот (an off-color joke), пошлый намёк (innuendo) or пошлый юмор (crude humor). Пошляк in this context means a raunchy guy, a leering letch.
But then there is the cosmic key meaning of пошлость, which often has nothing to do with the risque. Vladimir Nabokov once dedicated 11 pages to defining it, and in the end, even he, that master of words, resorted more to examples than to definitions. He preferred to transliterate what he called this "fat brute of a word" as poshlust to capture its inelegant plop and slurp -- and also, one must assume, because lust is to love as пошлость is to all that is genuine, fine, moral, beautiful and true. For as Nabokov says, пошлость is "not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." It's an expanded sense of "devoid of meaning": a pretense of beauty and depth without heart or soul.
There isn't one word in English that captures this. Пошлость is like a fat sow dressed in a ball gown and tiara: "Trashy" gives you the dress, "saccharine" is the cute tiara, "philistine" is the snout, "pretentious" is the beribboned tail, but you still don't hear the oink or smell the pigsty.
When translating you have to choose a meanings that best conveys the sense of пошлость in that particular context. For example, in this description of a tense dinner table conversation: Каждый чувствовал, что в подобные мгновенья позволительно сказать одну лишь пошлость, что всякое значительное, или умное, или просто задушевное слово было бы чем-то неуместным, почти ложным. (Everyone felt that in such moments it was only appropriate to say something banal, that any meaningful, or intelligent, or simply heartfelt word would have been somehow out of place, almost a lie.)
You need something else in this context: Мне не нравятся его картины о сказках -- они слишком красивые, пошлые. (I don't like his paintings of fairy tales; they're prettified and precious.)
Or here: Он интеллигентный и тонкий человек. Но его жена -- пошлая. (He's a very cultured and sensitive person. But his wife is low-rent.)
The final element of пошлость is the implied moral censure. Pawning off pseudo for real, saccharine for sweet, trite for profound, manipulative for moving -- all that пошлость entails -- is ultimately morally wrong.
And that is why we foreigners fall in love with this place: because there are still folks who believe that a cheaply manipulative film, a rabble-rousing speech or a confession of love that's for show and not for real are пошлые and beneath contempt.
My kind of folks.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
Previous article Print this
E-mail this
Request reprint rights
Back to top
Next article
Also In This Issue
a.. Time to Tell the Truth About Beslan (Editorial)
a.. A Centrifugal State (Nikolai Petrov)
Columnists
Inside Russia
By Yulia Latynina
Between the Lines
By Alexei Pankin
Always a Dissident
By Boris Kagarlitsky
Defense Dossier
By Pavel Felgenhauer
Power Play
By Yevgenia Albats
Rules of the Game
By Konstantin Sonin
Ways and Means
By Masha Gessen
Regional Perspectives
By Nikolai Petrov
Uncommon Sense
By Georgy Bovt
Northern Capital
By Vladimir Kovalev
Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru
By Maxim Kononenko
The Word`s Worth
By Michele A. Berdy
Global Eye
By Chris Floyd
© Copyright 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
