When a Russian idiomatic preposition can be used with both animate and inanimate nouns, but its English equivalents have animate/inanimate restrictions, these restrictions are specified as part of the equivalent; for example:
C-714 • В СТОРОНУ. 1. ~ кого-чего, чью. in the direction of s.o. (sth.); in s.o.‘s direction; toward s.o. (sth.); s.o.‘s way.
Citations and Examples
Most of the entries in the dictionary are illustrated by citations from Russian and Soviet literature accompanied by a published translation or, in many cases, more than one translation. In the absence of clear, typical, or correctly translated citations, some entries are provided with invented examples. No excerpts from published translations have been retranslated for the purposes of this dictionary. Literary citations and invented examples are generally presented in the same order as their corresponding equivalents.
style and Conventions
All citations from works of literature, memoirs, and so forth are followed by the author’s name and the number that the given work has been assigned in the Bibliography. The English translation of the citation is followed by the same number plus a letter indicating which translation of the work has been cited (that is, if two translations of a work have been used, they are designated “a” and “b”). Illustrations that do not include an author’s name at the end are invented examples provided by the compiler. When selecting literary citations for illustration, minor inaccuracies in translation have been disregarded if they do not harm the sense of the text or the effective illustration of the idiom. It must be kept in mind that a certain amount of freedom is acceptable, and even desirable, in literary translation, as the goal is to make the translation faithful to the original both in meaning and in style. However, some steps have been taken to draw the Russian and English versions of the citations closer together and to clarify points that may not be clear out of context.
In some cases, for example, part of the Russian and/or English text has been ellipted in order to make the texts match better. There is no typographical difference between the author’s/translator’s ellipsis points and the compiler’s.
In other cases a word in a citation is followed by square brackets providing information about that word (for example, that it is a nonce word, a phonetically spelled word, or an un-grammatical, dialectal, regional, or Ukrainian word). Square brackets in citations are also used to indicate pertinent names and pieces of information intended to clarify citation contexts.
Finally, some bracketed additions serve to make the Russian and English variants more similar. It should be noted that such insertions do not imply that the translation is unfaithful; they merely reflect the reality that dictionary contexts are sometimes insufficient to present the situation clearly. Wherever possible, wording found in the cited texts is used for such insertions.
[ xxv ]
When a speech impediment is shown through English spelling, as in some citations from Tolstoy, the affected words have been replaced by their correctly spelled counterparts in brackets. For example, in ОТДУВАТЬСЯ СВОИМИ БОКАМИ ‘bear the brunt of sth.’ the translation of the citation from Tolstoy’s War and Peace reads, “This is certainly Scythian warfare. It’s all [very] fine—except for those who bear the [brunt] of it.” The translator has spelled the bracketed words as “vewy” and “bwunt.”
Generally, the transliteration chosen by the translator is preserved for proper names in citations and for the names of characters in plays. However, since the designations of characters in Gogol’s The Government Inspector are so different in different translations, the compiler has chosen to make uniform the names of the characters when indicating the speaker in citations. For example, although Городничий is translated as “Mayor,” “Chief of Police,” and “Prefect” in various translations, it is uniformly rendered “Mayor” in this dictionary.
Occasionally, two or more translations of the same citation are quoted. The user must be aware that translators’ approaches differ, and so there may be significant differences in the cited translations. For example, two translations were used for Saltykov-Shchedrin’s История одного города (The History of a Town). The names in this book are meaningful. One translator (Susan Brownsberger) chose to translate them into meaningful English names, while the other (I.P. Foote) transliterated them. Thus, “Melancholov” and “Dormousov” in the Brownsberger translation represent the same characters as “Grustilov” and “Bajbakov,” respectively, in the Foote translation.
In some cases, the tense forms in the Russian and English versions of a citation do not coincide, but it would require a great amount of context to show why this is so. In such cases, the tense discrepancy has been overlooked. For example, in K-269 СВОДИТЬ/СВЕСТИ КОНЦЫ С КОНЦАМИ (sense 2) ‘tie up the loose ends’, the beginning of the citation from Zalygin reads «.Мужикам, по их натуре, нужна любая техника.» (present tense) and the translation has “By their nature they [men] needed any sort of science.” (past tense).
Another lack of parallelism in citations concerns the use of quotation marks. Some Russian authors (as Aksyonov and Zinoviev) omit quotation marks in some of their works, while their translators have chosen not to do so. The authors’ and translators’ choices are retained in the presentation of citations.
Russian citations are presented exactly as they appear in the published text with the exception of a few archaic forms that have been replaced with contemporary ones. For example, in the entry Б-274 НИЧУТЬ... НЕ БЫВАЛО the archaic того же дни in the Gogol citation has been replaced by the contemporary того же дня. In some cases, Western editions of Russian texts have been used as sources for citations. However, since these editions are not as carefully edited as most editions published in Russia and the former Soviet Union, Soviet/Russian editions have occasionally been used to check punctuation, spelling, etc.
The word «Бог» in the citations is capitalized when the source has it capitalized, and lowercase when the source has it lowercase.
The transliteration of proper names in invented examples and Russian names in etymological notes follows the transliteration system used in the Handbook of Russian Literature, edited by Victor Terras. The transliteration of authors’ names
in the Bibliography follows the spelling currently used by the Library of Congress (with diacritics omitted).
When a Russian author uses a nonstandard form of an idiom, the citation is preceded by the bracketed label “author’s usage.” When a Russian author uses an idiom either metaphorically or in an atypical context, the citation is preceded by the label “extended usage.”
When the English translation of a citation translates the given idiom correctly but in a way that would not apply in most or any other contexts, the translation is preceded by the label “context transl” (contextual translation). Such translations of idioms are not included in the list of equivalents. Citations with contextual translations are presented in order to offer the user examples of creative and original approaches to translation.
When an idiom that originated in a work of Russian literature is illustrated by a citation from that same work, the citation is preceded by the label “source.” For example, the idiom P-432 КУВШИННОЕ РЫЛО ‘jug snout’ originated in Gogol’s Dead Souls, so the Dead Souls citation containing the idiom has this label.
English translations of citations are rendered precisely as they occur in the published texts with two exceptions: spellings or orthographic forms that are not found in any mainstream American or British dictionary have been normalized, and the American system for quotation marks has been adopted throughout (that is, double quotes for direct speech and single quotes for a quote within a quote).