Friday,
November 18, 2005. Issue 3298. Page 8.
Have
a Happy, er, You Know What I Mean
By
Michelle A. Berdy
Поздравляю!:
Congratulations (ironic or sincere)
Holiday
greetings and congratulations are much simpler in Russian than in English. You
take the basic verb
поздравлять
(to congratulate), add the appropriate pronoun вас or
тебя (you, either formally or informally) and then the
occasion: с днём
рождения (on your birthday),
с праздником
(on the holiday), с
наградой (on your award),
с защитой диплома
(on defending your thesis), с
новосельем (on your
new home). You can also throw in a selection of adverbs or adverbial phrases:
горячо (warmly),
искренне (sincerely),
сердечно (with all my heart),
от всего
сердца (from the bottom of my heart). Any
kind of anniversary or birthday is
годовщина or
юбилей. Dates are nicely made into nouns
like
десятилетие
(10th anniversary). The celebrant is
юбиляр. Life's a dream -- until you start to
translate.
Your
colleague tells a business associate: Мы от
всей души
поздравляем
вас с десятилетием
фирмы. And you translate: We congratulate you in
a heartfelt way on the 10th year of your company's existence. Hmm -- that can't
be right. In English we don't use "congratulate" like the Russian
поздравлять.
How about: Please accept our heartfelt congratulations on your company's 10th
anniversary.
Поздравляем
вас с
рождением
сына could be either Congratulations on the birth of
your son or, more commonly, Congratulations! You've got a son!
Поздравляю с
Рождеством
Христовым becomes Merry
Christmas. С
праздником
Победы could be Happy Victory Day, but in
formal correspondence you'd be more likely to say: Accept our best wishes on
Victory Day.
Юбиляр
is also a problem in English. For anyone under the age of 12, this is a
birthday girl/boy, but you really can't say that of, say, Maya Plisetskaya on
her 80th birthday. If someone were to say поздравляем
юбиляра и
желаем ... (literally "We congratulate
the birthday girl and wish her ... "), try putting in the name and cut to
the chase: On her birthday we'd like to wish Ms. Plisetskaya ...
And
then there's the ironic use of
поздравлять.
Say it's your birthday, and following that dreadful Russian tradition in which
the юбиляр is responsible for the party,
you have just spent two days shopping, cleaning and cooking. Exhausted, you are
carrying a four-layer cake you spent all day making into the dining room, when
you trip over the cat and the cake ends up on the ceiling. Your significant
other will watch this and say with deadly irony:
Поздравляю! In
English this might be: Nice going, butterfingers!
After
you scrape the cake off the ceiling and receive your guests, your Russian
friends will start a sentence with Желаю
тебе (I wish you). At this point you can sit back and
enjoy a long, touching and creative list of good things meant especially for
you. Желаю тебе
крепкого
здоровья (I wish you good
health), успехов во
всех
начинаниях (success
in everything you do), радости (joy),
счастья (happiness). Sometimes you
will be wished
творческих
успехов -- professional success in
the sense of creative productivity. I suppose you could wish an accountant
творческих
успехов, but be careful not to
translate this as "creative accounting."
If
you are a woman, somewhere in the list of good wishes will inevitably be the
phrase женского
счастья (woman's happiness), which I
have been seeking to define for decades now. It seems to be a combination of
having a loving spouse (who doesn't drink too much and washes his own socks), a
healthy and happy extended family, and a comfortable home. In Georgia my query
once elicited a 15-minute story -- that is, a long Georgian toast -- about a
woman whose husband cheated on her constantly, but whom she loved with slavish
devotion, suggesting that for that speaker "woman's happiness" was
synonymous with "full frontal lobotomy." In any case, as far as I can
tell, you could wish a man мужского
счастья (man's happiness), but it
probably would not mean having a loving spouse and happy, healthy children. It
may, however, involve a paradise where no man washes his socks ever again.
Michelle
A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.