>I would
>suggest (and it's been years since I read GORKY
PARK
>and I've never read the sequels) that if we
knew
>Russian, and we could hear Renko speaking in
Russian
>(rather than an English that pretends to be
translated
>Russian but is really just plain English), we'd
be
>hearing colloquial Russian.
>JIM DOHERTY
the narrator in "Gorky Park" comments that one of the most
common phrases in "tough" everyday spoken Russian is, loosely
translated, "f*** your mother". Renko doesn't say this quite
as often as his more streetwise sidekick, but i'd be very
surprised if he doesn't say it. hard to get more colloquial
than that. (BTW, apparently this really is such a common
phrase that when I took Russian in college, we were counseled
always to use the informal "mama" rather than the proper
"mat'" to mean mother because the latter is used almost
exclusively in profanity. the profs never told us what the
actual phrase was and my Russian friends all claimed not to
know what i was talking about or said that they wouldn't
teach me any cusswords because a foreign woman using them in
public would amount to either a sexual proposition or an
invitation to an asskicking.)
carrie
-
He got thirty years for lovin' her/ from some Oklahoma
governor,/ who said
"everything this doughboy does is wrong" - Tom Waits
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