Translation by Elkin (Own) Selph of
first page of Anthony Burgess’ Clockwork
Orange into English. All words in Cyrillic are Russian.
“What’s it going to be, then, eh?”
There
was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs [ друг, friend], that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really Dim,
and we sat in the Korova [корова,
cow] Milk Bar, making up our rassoodocks [рассудок, intellect, common sense (here: mind)] what to do with the
evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard, though dry. The Korova Milk Bar was
a milk-plus mesto [место,
place], and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like,
things changing so skorry [скорый,
quick, fast] these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not
being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something
else. They had no licence for selling
liquor, but there was no law against prodding [продать, to sell] some of the new veshches [вещь, thing] which they used to put into
the old moloko [молоко,
milk], so you could peet [пить
, to drink] it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom [three words here for
drugs made up, not Russian] or one or two other veshches which would give you a
nice quiet horrorshow [хорошо,
good; adverb used consistently throughout the novel as an adjective] fifteen
minutes admiring Bog [Бог,
God] And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting
all over your mozg [мозг,
brain]. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this
would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and
that was what we were peeting [drinking; third time used already; by now the
reader has learned the Russian word “to drink”: пить] this evening I’m starting off the story with.
Our
pockets were full of deng [truncated version of деньги, money], so there was no real need from the point of view of
crasting [красть, to steal]
any more pretty polly [Cockney rhyming slang for money] to tolchok [толчок, push; a noun; throughout
the novel Burgess uses it as a verb, meaning hit, strike, attack] some old veck
[no such word in Russian; Burgess arrives at it by truncating the word человек (man, person); at other
points in the novel he uses the word un-truncated, spelling it ‘chelloveck’] in
an alley and viddy [видеть,
to see] him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four,
nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry [старый, old] grey-haired ptitsa [птица, bird] in a shop and go
smecking [смех, laughter, a noun;
throughout the novel Burgess uses it as a verb] off with the till’s guts. But,
as they say, money isn’t everything.
SUMMING UP: I count twenty
Russian words in the brief passage above.
Did Burgess really expect that non-speakers of Russian could cope with
such an onslaught of unfamiliar terms? And yet they did cope, and they read the
novel, which remains his most popular. Of course, nowadays I suspect that the
Kubrick film--featuring far fewer Russian words-- is watched much more
frequently than the Burgess novel is read.
