I sat down on the porch to start working on the last chapter of В Пути, the Russia textbook that carried me through my second year of Russian. Тема 1 is about sports, and finishing the first section, I obediently followed the directive Complete exercise 12-1 in the Workbook. What I got was not an exercise about футбол (football) or шахматы (chess), but an audio file of a poem about cooking that I was supposed to transcribe.
Well, the last chapter was on cooking. Maybe this is a helpful review, I thought as I set about scribbling down words I knew and sounds I didn't. Transcriptions always take me a long time, and after I finished with this one, I was running out of steam. So I decided to switch gears and translate it into English.
Хозяйка однажды с базара пришла,
Хозяйка с базара домой принесла
Картошку, капусту, морковку, горох,
Петрушку и свеклу. Ох!
Накрытые крышкою, в душном горшке
Варились, варились в крутом кипятке
Картошка, капуста, морковка, горох,
Петрушка и свекла. Ох!
И суп овощной оказался неплох!
The missus one day from the market came back,
From the market she brought on the homeward track
Cabbage, potato, carrots and peas
Parsley and beets … oh, please.
Covered with a lid in a dark pot,
They cooked in water, boiling hot!
Cabbage, potato, carrots and peas
Parsley and beets … oh please.
But the vegetable soup did appease.
The poem is called « Овощи» ("Vegetables"), by Yulian Tuwim, translated from Polish into Russian by Marshak (Спасибо за информацию, Петр). Russophiles, what do you think of my translation? I really wanted to make it rhyme and scan at least a little, and since I don't know what Ох! means, I suppose I changed the feelings towards the vegetables. This made me appreciate the terseness of Russian -- I had to add all kinds of articles, and expand prefixes into compound verbs. Lame.
Russian vocab of the day:
болеть чем-либо: to be ill, be down with something
болеть за кого-либо: to root for, be a fan of
Days until I get on a plane: 36.
