Imagery in Translation. — Не тужи, Фатима, мы им рога обломаем, будь по­койна

— Не тужи, Фатима, мы им рога обломаем, будь по­койна. Что за комитет? Мыслимое ли дело? Уголовный эле­мент скрывается, сомнительная нравственность живет без прописки. Мы этим по шапке, а выберем другой. Я тебя в управдомши проведу, ты только не брыкайся.

Дворничиха взмолилась, чтобы председательница это­го не делала, но та не стала и слушать.

Translated by Max Hay ward:

MOSCOW BIVOUAC (from DOCTOR ZHIVAGO)

One by one, the tenants, muffled up in shawls and fur coats, had returned to the unheated basement which had once been a warehouse for eggs and was now used by the house committee as its board room.

An office desk and several chairs stood at one end of it. As there were not enough chairs, old empty wooden egg crates, turned upside-down, had been placed in a row to form a bench. A pile of them as high as the ceiling towered at the far end of the room. In the corner there was a heap of shavings stuck into lumps with frozen yolk which had dripped from the broken eggs. Rats bus­tled noisily inside the heap, making an occasional sortie into the middle of the stone floor and darting back.

Each time this happened a fat woman tenant climbed, squealing, on to a crate; daintily holding up her skirt and drum­ming with the heels of her fashionable boots, she shouted in a deliberately hoarse tipsy voice.

"Olya, Olya, you've got rats all over the place. Get away, you filthy brutes. Ai-ai-ai! look at them, they understand, the hor­rors, look at how they snap their wicked teeth. Ai-ai-ai! it's trying to climb up, it'll get under my skirt, I'm so frightened! Look the other way, gentlemen. Sorry, I forgot, you're comrade citizens nowadays, not gentlemen."

Her astrakhan cape hung open over the three quaking lay­ers of her double chin and rich, silk-swathed bosom and stomach.

7 Зак.№5П 193

Практикум по художественному переводу

She had once been the belle of her circle of small tradesmen and shop clerks, but now her small pig eyes were hardly more that slits between her swollen eyelids. A rival had once tried to splash her with vitriol but had missed, and only a drop or two had ploughed traces, so slight as to be almost becoming, on her cheek and at the corner of her mouth.

"Stop yelling, Khrapugina. How can we get on with our work?" said the woman delegate of the Borough Soviet, who had been elected chairman and was sitting behind the desk.

The delegate had known the house and many of the lodg­ers all her life. Before the meeting she had had an unofficial talk with Aunt Fatima, the caretaker, who had once lived with her husband and children in a corner of the filthy basement, but who now had only her daughter with her and had been moved into two light rooms on the first floor.

"Well, Fatima, how are things going?" the delegate asked. Fatima complained that she could not cope with such a big house and so many lodgers all by herself, and that she got no help be­cause, although each family was supposed to take it in turn to clean the stairs and the door steps, not one of them did it.

"Don't worry, Fatima, we'll show them. What kind of a house committee is this anyway? They're hopeless. Criminal el­ements are given shelter, people of doubtful morals stay on un­registered. We'll get rid of them and elect another. I'll make you house-manageress, only don't make a fuss."

Aunt Fatima begged to be lefoff, but the delegate refused to listen.

EXERCISES FOR COMPARISON

• Read both texts and compare semantic and stylistic val­
ues of the italicised words.

• Analyse different forms of description, e. g., the passage
«В одном конце комнаты... ящики из-под яиц.»

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