Alexey, la-canonique: you offer more links and traps than St Andrew’s!
Fascinated by VN’s use of the phrase seksual'nyi levsha ("a sexually left-handed person"), matching the Brit. Idiom “left-hander” for "homosexual.” BUT, note the incongruity: the Brit idiom would NEVER use the predication “sexually.” It’s a redundant qualification in slang usage which rather spoils the SLUR! The whole point is the in-group “knowing” wink that the “left-hander” IS a queer. Outside dictionaries, you say “left-hander” and “queer” leaving the “sexual” implications UNsaid.
Even when “left-hander” is used as a religious slur (for Catholics by Proddies*), it’s the context that disambiguates. We don’t hear “You bleedin’ religious left-hander.” In fact, my friend Frank Shaw (co-author of our “Lern Yerself Scouse”) wrote “The Memoirs of a Left-Handed Customs Official” without the need to spell out that this referred to his SJ (Jesuitical) apprenticeship. And to be frank and honest, neither of the “left-hand” slurs, sexual or doctrinal, are really widely bandied about these days. Verbal insults are extremely volatile over space and time, witness the current debate in the UK over “golliwog” which displaced the usual economic-doom headlines.
I wonder if VN’s seksual'nyi levsha was translated as "sexually left-handed", leaving the reader to deduce "homosexual?" Usually, idioms are a major challenge for the poor translator, but here we have levsha that might well be rendered literally as left-handed As others have noted, the “left as sinister” seems common to many cultures, so levsha might also “go” literally in many other languages.
Can’t leave the fertile lev-left roots without noting:
Bstat’ c levoi nogi “getting out of bed on the WRONG foot”
Levak = LEFTIST: praise for some, but a political SLUR in VN’s book! And all because of a quirk in how the French Revolutionary parties were seated in 1789. Also colloq. Levak = Black marketeer (Brit. SPIV). Linguistic confusion with “Left” acquiring both good (“Progressive,” “Liberal”) and bad (“sinister,” “false,” “gauche = awkward”) connotations.
Compare “The Left was Never Right,” “The Looney Left” and “The Left Behind” (a sarcastic hint that Marxism might in some respects have been er er discredited.) Not to be confused with those “left behind” by the Rapture in the Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins apocalyptic novels. Nor with Bush’s brave NCLB (No Child Left Behind) educational project.
IMPORTANT: ALEXYEY, MY OFF-LIST EMAILS TO YOUR SKYLARK05 RU ADDRESS HAVE BOUNCED. SEND ME AN ALTERNATIVE.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 15/02/2009 14:00, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
Stan K.-B.: could “left” here also have an echo of the Latin “sinister?” This meaning persists in derog. Brit. Slang: “left-hander” (and “left-footer”) applied (rather irrationally?) to both Roman Catholics AND Homosexuals.
In the last paragraph of my recently published (in Zembla) article on Chose (the name of Van's University in ADA) I quote the Russian saying dva sapoga para ("they make a pair"; sapog is Russian for "boot"), about two people who, having something in common, match well. Reading Skitalets's story Ogarki ("The Scum", 1906), I belatedly discovered that this saying can be continued as follows: dva sapoga para i oba na levuyu nogu (literally: "the two boots that make a pair and both are for the left foot"). Because I speak in my article of Ilf and Petrov, the two Soviet writers (and patriots with leftist views) who make a wonderful pair, the full version of the saying would be even more appropriate.
Re homosexuality: Gomoseksualizm ("homosexuality") is one of some one hundred and eighty words that make up Fima Sobak's vocabulary. Fima Sobak is a character in Ilf & Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs". Compared to her friend Lyudoedka Ellochka ("Nellie the Cannibal"), who manages with only thirty words, Fima is certainly a cultured girl. It is interesting to compare the names Sobak, Tobak (in ADA, the name of Cordula de Prey's first husband; Van suspects Cordula of being a lesbian: 1.27) and... Koba (Stalin's nick-name, after the hero of Kazbegi's novel "The Parricide"). Sobak (accented, like the word in its singular form, on the second syllable; the family name Sobak is stressed on the first syllable), is gen. pl. of sobaka, Russian for "dog".
Mayakovsky (who, like Stalin, comes from Georgia) is the author of Levyi marsh ("Left March", 1918).
The phrase seksual'nyi levsha ("a sexually left-handed person", in the sense "a homosexual") occurs in Nabokov's Soglyadatay ("The Eye", 1930). A character refers thus of the narrator, a Russian emigre named Smurov. Vanya Smurov is the hero in Kuzmin's tale Kryl'ya ("The Wings", 1908). Kuzmin was a notorious gay author. In Nabokov's story, Vanya (a diminutive form of Ivan) is the affectionate name of the girl with whom Smurov is in love.
Sorry to be so laconic. "Brevity is a sister of talent" (Chekhov).
Alexey Sklyarenko