LOVE'S LAST SHIFT
LUBIN, PETER
LOVE'S LAST SHIFT by Peter Lubin THERE IS BOTH PROFIT AND PLEASURE to be derived from what may be called the poetry of mistake. Colley Cibber, perhaps the least talented of England's poet...
...Attempting to correct a non-existent error by assuming "firth" was a printer's error, the hapless translator ended with a folly of 5 percent, instead of east of Edinburgh...
...I once knew a graduate student in Russian who, preparing for his Ph.D...
...I imagined the compiler consulting over telephone static, in bad old Soviet days, with a fellow lexicographer...
...Thus God instructs the Hebrews: "Thou shalt commit adultery...
...Still, few will resist the chance to scoop up the latest grist for the gossip mill about the girl from the "curvaceous slopes of California" who made her bends adorings...
...Mumble, mumble...
...The student, furiously translating the English back into Russian, referred to the story as Plashch—which is to say "The Raincoat...
...Scotland's Firth of Forth was translated by another Frenchman as la cinquième de la quatrième...
...oral examination, decided to cut corners by reading a few works in English instead of the originals, as required...
...affairs of state alone perdure...
...What forgettable or immortal work of world literature a certain palpable miss provided, along with lovelac-ing embraces, to her ithy-phallic flimflam man, is undoubtedly of less moment, in the grand scheme of things, then the Balka-nization of the Balkans, or frantic attempts to swat the millennium bug, or eternal verities about Vishnuland that took flight in the stipe of a mushroom cloud...
...Neither The Virgin Unmasked, by Henry Fielding, nor The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, quite fit her bill, but just then, on the verge of coming away empty-handed, she spotted a copy—I have it on impeachable author-ity—of innocent Oliver Goldsmith's inoffensive farce, She Stoops to Conquer, and changed her mind...
...We might even imagine a reprint of Barker and Lucas being quietly substituted, in certain motel rooms, for the more demanding King James version distributed by the wandering tribe of Gideonites...
...Peter Lubin is a professor at Southern New England School of Law...
...How do I translate polnolunie into English...
...Colley Cibber, perhaps the least talented of England's poet laureates, saw his play Love's Last Shift translated into French as La dernière chemise de l'amour...
...At the exam, the profes-sor—an elderly native speaker who had seen Mayakovsky and Lili Brik plain—asked him to list, in Russian, Gogol's major works, including the Petersburg Tales...
...Scandal is ephemeral, the insect of an hour...
...Among the books he studied in this fashion was Gogol's most famous story, "The Greatcoat" (in Russian, Shinel...
...Which brings us to The News the Whole World Has Been Waiting For, and one more of those misunderstandings that life occasionally sends along to cheer us up...
...Readers of the time were not amused (indeed, Barker and Lucas, having blotted their copybook, were fined and temporarily banned from the printing trade), but the wayzgoose lapse amuses us now...
...She went, sans moeurs et sans reproches, to closedmouthed Kramerbooks, and there, amidst shelves devoted to eighteenth-century English drama, sought one of those inconvenient works "to be read," as Rousseau remarks, "with only one hand," as a drury for her intermittent darling...
...Fool moon...
...Mumble, mumble...
...Ah, I see...
...And into the dictionary it went...
...Sometimes a printer's error will change the entire meaning of a sentence...
...In one of the standard Russian-English dictionaries, i came across the word polnolunie, which means "full moon," rendered as "fool moon...
...Academic errors can be funny when not fatal...
...I tell the tale I heard told...
...But we are glad to have these mistakes: Something has been found in translation...
...The Adulterous or Wicked Bible, published in London by Barker and Lucas in 1631, takes its name from the fact that a "not" was left out of the Seventh Commandment...
...What did you say, Felix Edmundovich...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 47
