pilfered_words

Я с детства мечтал, что трубач затрубит,

И город проснется под цокот копыт,

И все прояснится открытой борьбой:

Враги - пред тобой, а друзья - за тобой.

И вот самолеты взревели в ночи,

И вот протрубили опять трубачи,

Тачанки и пушки прошли через грязь,

Проснулось геройство, и кровь пролилась.

Но в громе и славе решительных лет

Мне все ж не хватало заметных примет.

Я думал, что вижу, не видя ни зги,

А между друзьями сновали враги.

И были они среди наших колонн,

Подчас знаменосцами наших знамен.

Жизнь бьет меня часто. Сплеча. Сгоряча.

Но все же я жду своего трубача.

Ведь правда не меркнет, и совесть - не спит.

Но годы уходят, а он - не трубит.

И старость подходит. И хватит ли сил

До смерти мечтать, чтоб трубач затрубил?

А может, самим надрываться во мгле?

Ведь нет, кроме нас, трубачей на земле.

- Наум Коржавин

Anyone know a less pretentious word for “memoir”?

(Context: trying to translate the Russian word “воспоминания”, as in “воспоминания автора о своей жизни”.)

anonymous asked: Self-biography? Memories?

Ehhhhh… Self-biography and autobiography mean “the entire story of the author’s life,” usually. I need something more like “stories that happened to the author at some point.”

Memoir is the closest, except that it’s mostly used to mean “Very Important things that happened to the author, who is a Very Important kind of person, and you need to know everything about them.”

bewareofitalics replied to your post: Self-biography? Memories?
Autobiographical anecdotes?

That could work, though the sentence I’m trying to translate is already stupidly complicated, so I was hoping someone would suggest a single word that has the right nuance. But at this point, I’m pretty sure that word just doesn’t exist.

I can also just… split the sentence in two. That’s a thing I am capable of doing.

I’ve ranted before about how much I hate it when people put badly translated Russian in their fics. It turns out this is particularly frustrating when the Russian text is trying to say “I speak Russian very well.” No, actually, you don’t.

(Responding to this post about Google knowing what keyboard you meant to type on)

Pretty sure that’s exactly what happened. Accidentally typing in Russian does the same thing. Though it’s hard for me to check properly, since I use a translit Russian keyboard, so typing an English word without switching is usually just transliterating it into Russian. Not when it has a ‘th’ or ‘ch’, though. :)

And I think it weighs the probability that you meant what you said as opposed to the English version, presumably by comparing the number of searches or results for both. Since there are (apparently) actually people using ‘тво товерс’ (’two towers’), google doesn’t correct that. ‘lord of the rings’, on the other hand, is apparently significantly more popular than ‘лорд оф тхе рингс’, so that’s what google brings me. My guess is that if it’s actually gibberish, and not the half legible result I get, google will be a lot more certain it does need to correct it.

So, basically, we’re teaching robots to talk. The robot apocalypse is nigh.

(Responding to this post about similar-looking words with very different meanings)

Russian doesn’t use diacritics, but that doesn’t stop us! There is a pair of verbs, both spelled писать (pisat’), that differ only in which syllable is stressed.

писАть (pisAt’), with the stress on the second syllable, means to write.

пИсать (pIsat’), with the stress on the first syllable means to pee.

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