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So signor Christoforo is doomed…” the old man burst out.

I did not want to tell you this, teacher, - the young man muttered.

And to think that these hands sent the unfortunate man to his death,

Colombo! - Paolo Toscanelli, the pride of the geographical science of the XV century, dropped his head on a wide table littered with maps.

Maybe we can check again? the young man asked timidly.

What for? You were right. We calculated everything exactly. India is not a thousand or two thousand Roman leagues, but at least five. Five thousand leagues! And what will His Catholic Majesty, the King of Spain, and His most Christian Majesty, the King of France, and Henry of England, and His Holiness, say about my art? What a disgrace!

The young man looked at the teacher with a sad and proud smile. Sad - because he felt sorry for both the great Toscanelli and the unfortunate Genoese adventurer who is now lost in the vast expanses

Atlantic Ocean. Proud - because today he finally proved to the master himself, which of the two of them is wrong. Yes, on the map that ten years ago the teacher sent to Signor Colombo, India was very close to Spain. Signor Paolo believed that the circumference of the Earth at the equator was only about 7 thousand leagues, and moreover, 240 degrees out of 360 that make up the circle stretched the great continent of Europe and Asia.

He, Giuseppe Bracciolo, proved to the teacher that Eratosthenes was right, according to whose calculations the length of the equator is more than 8 thousand leagues. He, Giuseppe Bracciolo, determined that the mainland occupies at most 150 degrees.

The man who won the geographical dispute of Toscanelli himself can hope that his name will not sink into oblivion.

And Don Christopher Columbus - now Giuseppe did not want to think of him as a countryman and even recognize him as an Italian - was just another sacrifice made to the truth.

Signor Toscanelli straightened up in his chair.

One can only hope that the sailors will force this accursed Spanish Genoese to turn the ship in time. After all, no one can withstand many months of sailing away from the coast. But Signor Christoforo is as stubborn as a herd of mules. He would rather let himself be hung on a yardarm. And I'll be the one to blame!

Letter from Castile! - proclaimed the servant, opening the door. - Sent by courier.

The old man's fingers hastily tore off the lead seals.

Colombo is back from India!

Can't be! Giuseppe called out. - After all, he was gone only about six months. He wouldn't even be able to swim there, let alone back.

Here is an unbelieving Thomas! Signor Paolo laughed merrily. - He brought Indian gold and the Indians themselves. And I had to swim only a thousand stadia.

There's some mistake here! After all, you and I calculated everything so accurately ... Maybe it's some other continent or island?

The old man's face became stern.

I see, Giuseppe, that I was too gentle with you. A real scientist should be able to admit his mistakes. India has been reached! What is there to argue about now?

The vulgar idea that outrages are being created because the authorities (the owner, the dean, the tsar-priest) are poorly informed is not so far from the truth.

Of course, bad will also plays a role. But an information gap is formed even among the villains, who assure the public, and most importantly, themselves, that they wanted the best. Nero seriously saw himself as a great actor.

The intermediate cases are even more interesting.

In the old joke, Khrushchev, a despot-demagogue, but also a rogue-simpleton, demands more and more fantastic promises from the chairman of the collective farm to increase milk yields. At the end, he asks: “Can I also double it?” - "Yes, you can, only this, Nikita Sergeevich, there will be only water!"

I also recall a literary parable about a king who decided to do good. Seeing from the window that no one is helping the knocked-down old woman, he gives the Prime Minister a corresponding humane order, which, having reached the ordinary policemen by the damaged phone, leads to the arrest of the old woman.

Highbrow analogies with the uncertainty principle are possible here - the impact of the measuring apparatus on the object. But even without them, it is clear that in order to receive false information, it is not necessary to be a terrible despot. We are all a little despots, each of us is a despot in his own way.

Our conceptions of things are woefully inadequate. But not because there is not enough information, but because it is under the jurisdiction of culture, that is, a complex apparatus of recoding and, therefore, distortions.

We live in a world of signs, stereotypes, myths. According to Heidegger, we do not speak the language, but the language speaks us, and this is also true for languages ​​in a figurative sense - the languages ​​of art, culture, era, etc. Myths are an inevitable shell of our existence. You cannot completely get rid of them, but it is desirable to at least understand what myth you live in, what game you play. The choice made at each step depends on it. Having learned about the failures of a friend, the choice-centric American will sum up understandingly: Wrong choices!(“Wrong Choices/Decisions”).

Let's start with a simple case - literary translation. In selecting examples from the Russian classics for my English-language book, I was struck by how rarely the effect for which the citation was used was present in the English version. It turned out that the foreign reader is not dealing with Lermontov, Gogol and Chekhov, but, so to speak, with Marlinsky, Odoevsky and Potapenko.

My favorite remark of Svidrigailov: “If you are convinced that you can’t eavesdrop at the door, and you can peel the old woman with anything, at your pleasure ...”, in a respectable academic publication it sounds something like this: “If you are sure that you can’t listen at the door, but any old woman you like can be knocked on the head ... ”(“ If you are so sure that one can "t listen at doors, but any old woman you like can be knocked on the head ..."). In the preface it is reported that the translation of so-and-so (I generously omit the surname) is quite adequate and readable.(Fortunately, there is a new, more accurate translation: "... can go around whacking old crones with whatever comes to hand, to you heart's content.. .").

As a result, Dostoevsky appears as a philosopher gloomy to tears, without a hint of humor. Paradoxically, this not only impoverishes the text, but also, as it were, enriches it - raises it in literary rank.

Many distortions are on the conscience of lazy and incurious translators. But the language barrier is real. The famous Gogol phrase: “From now on ... as if he was not alone, but some nice friend of life agreed walk the path of life with him, and this girlfriend was none other than the same overcoat on thick cotton wool...”, inevitably loses in English translation (“From that time it was... as if he were not alone, but some pleasant companion of life had agreed to travel the road of life with him - and this companion was none other than that self-same overcoat with thick quilting...") their Freudian overtones - due to the absence of the category of gender like a greatcoat = overcoat, and a friend = companion. It is not for nothing that Americans are so easily given political correctness: they replaced he, “he”, with s / he, “he / a”, and that’s it, nothing needs to be agreed upon.

American first-year students studying the Russian short story in translation wonder for a long time about the sexual orientation of the characters in Panteleimon Romanov's Without Bird Cherry (1927). In the original, the gender of the narrator and her seducer is obvious from the first lines: “It hurts me ... it’s like I’m something the only one in life did not at all... I will courageous and tell you everything. Recently I have met With one comrade from another faculty. I far away from all sentiments he likes talk...". In the English translation, gender differences are leveled, and students are able to see here an early example of blue prose. Gotta be disappointing.

As Robert Frost famously said, "Poetry is what is lost in translation." As you can see, much is lost in prose as well.

The paradox of "prestigious impoverishment / enrichment" (comprehending Dostoevsky) is a common phenomenon. Losses are especially drastic when translating from a specific language of a certain type of art (poetry, painting, music) into a general cultural one. The work thus falls into the hands of "benevolent outsiders" - institutions in charge of supporting, disseminating, teaching and canonizing art, but usually deaf to its own artistic nature. The projection into the social sphere highlights ideological aspects in it, co-optation in popular culture- plot, film adaptation - spectacular, teaching - discursive, etc.

Characteristic is the story told by an eyewitness about the return of the Georgian dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani from the Bolshoi Theater to the Tbilisi stage (late 1950s). Theatre. Rustaveli was crowded every evening. Fans stood in the aisles, the foyer, the stairs, the lobby, and the street, spreading the word of another phenomenal step by word of mouth. This translation of ballet movements into the language of distant perception, reduced to a poor repertoire of exclamations, is characteristic. In its crystal clear form, it represents the phenomenon of the canonization of the artist - the issuance of one of the approving labels.

Mass consumption tends to drag everything new and generally special from the cothurns back into the common rut. Such lubrication of the subtleties of the original clearly demonstrates what exactly the originality of the author consisted of. I remember how, in studying Okudzhava's poetry, I was helped by the ear-piercing difference between the bizarre softness of his own performance and that cheerful, forged, march-like, like a tourist, with which my friends, dissident hikers, sang it. “You hear boots rattling…” was sung, paced and judged from the point of view of boots, although, God knows, the whole point of Okudzhava is precisely in the Christianizing replacement of military-patriotic heroism with quiet love, rattling boots - with an old jacket.

Alas, a distorting translation from a specific language into a common cultural one is inevitable.

Once I had to defend my analysis of the life-creating image of Akhmatova in front of her physicist admirer. For a long time I could not explain to him the mythology of his reactions. What does the notorious "mythology" prevent, he wondered, if his ideas about Akhmatova are consistent? Fortunately, the controversy was not far to go. Guessing that he considers Akhmatova Gumilyov's widow, I said that although this is closer to the truth than the appointment of the old Bolshevik Fotieva (whom Stalin threatened with the Krupskaya obstinacy) to the role of Lenin's widow, it still does not represent a legal fact (having divorced Akhmatova according to her initiative in 1918, Gumilyov married A. N. Engelhardt), and that's exactly the myth. Being a truth-seeker of the sixties and a connoisseur of evidence, my interlocutor gave up. But another in his place would have persisted, saying that in the highest sense, Akhmatova was still the widow of Gumilyov (as well as Blok and Pushkin), and in general, so much the better for the myth-makers and worse for the facts.

In the new "Film about Anna Akhmatova", Anatoly Naiman, who at one time was closely acquainted with her, pathetically tells that "her husband was shot." It's like a French pun: "Il est roux et sot, mais pas un Rousseau!" - "He is ru and co, but by no means RUSSO!" Gumilyov was Akhmatova's husband, and he was shot, but not "at her place." Nyman knows this very well, but, as they say, who cares?! Myth - and good intentions - dictate their own.

An article by my colleague.

“If the facts contradict the theory, the theory should be thrown out, not the facts.” A. Sklyarov

No one is left indifferent and the magnificent stone vases of the Hermitage forever conquer with their beauty and fantastic performance. Jasper, granite, malachite - the variety of materials and colors is impressive. And the solid dimensions of the vases, unusually complex elements and perfect surface polishing raise many questions about the technologies of that time. Let's go from the halls of the Hermitage to the production workshops and see how it was possible to produce such perfect products with a rather narrow range of production materials and technical solutions.

For this purpose I specially went to the Hermitage. Carefully, once again, I examined the exhibits, and also found signs about the "manufacturer". So it is written: "Ekaterinburg cutting factory". Stop! What's with the granite?

Granile is (from Italian graniglia - crumb, granules)

the general name of glasses of a special composition crushed to a certain size. Granite is used for decorating ceramic tiles, ceramic granite. Granite can be shiny and matte, transparent, muted, white or colored, with chandelier or metallic effects, etc. They can be used both to create a visual effect and to impart certain properties. What's with the glass? I will talk about this sometime later, in another article.

And the official history says that lapidary and faceted are the same root words. And even more - they have the same meaning! Well, so be it, they studied this in special institutions, among them there are doctors and professors of historical and other sciences. And we are simple people.

So, next. It turns out that at that time there were three cutting and grinding factories. In Yekaterinburg, in Kolyvan in Altai and in Peterhof near St. Petersburg. You can read about these factories on the Internet. The grinding machines were driven by water mills. I couldn't find any information about grinding wheels. We do not know from what and how abrasives for polishing such hard materials were created. But they also made columns and vases! So they made abrasives. But it is surprising that for such industries a lot of such consumables are needed, moreover, of different grain sizes. And for this, in turn, you need a separate considerable production and ownership of technology. After all, abrasive materials (those that are ground and polished) must be harder. And their processing is not an easy task. And there is no mention of it anywhere. Let's close our eyes to this.

After the revolution of 1917, the Kolyvan and Yekaterinburg factories ceased production, only the Peterhof factory remained, which after 1947 was heavily modernized. Even, more correctly, a new one was built! Water was supplied through a cast-iron pipe, there were 2 turbines of 15 horsepower each, and so on. What was the production like before? To do this, you need to visit the museum at the Kolyvan factory. There's even a mockup of grinders!

Let's take a look at this layout.

So this is the progenitor of the lathe! This is how the official story explains the creation of columns for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and even for St. Isaac's Cathedral! Everything is easy and simple!

The water mill turns the gears, they drive the shaft with a belt drive, and that, in turn, the axis of the progenitor of the lathe. But engineering calculations bring their fly in the ointment into this sweet barrel of honey. The columns for the Cathedral of Christ the Savior were more than three meters long, and for St. Isaac's Cathedral even more. And when calculating the weight of the blanks, we get a problem - each blank is at least more than 2 tons. The blank is already installed on the layout. How does such a heavy block of stone hold a wooden axis? On modern lathes, a very powerful device for fastening a part (chuck) is used, and not only compressing the workpiece at the ends, but also wrapping it around with “fingers” like an octopus!

Lathe chuck

Clamped part

And on the layout, it is simply pressed on both sides by a wooden axis. Let's not quibble, it's just a layout, let's close our eyes to this. Let's close our eyes to the fact that one of the clamping axes should move horizontally. How would you first "move off", and after installing the workpiece, "squeeze" it.

And on the layout we are shown a rigid, already with a fixed part, grinder. Let's not find fault with the diameter of the axles either. There used to be other trees, strong ones. God bless them, with these errors. But what strength of materials and engineering does not forgive is a miscalculation in friction. Belt drive in this case must rotate a workpiece weighing from 2 tons! And all at the expense of a water mill. Without taking into account the fact that wooden surfaces will be polished themselves from the impact of the belt, the already low efficiency will drop even more. But it can be assumed that, if necessary, both the shaft and the belts were changed in time. But the main miscalculation of this layout (and, consequently, of the entire proposed technology) is the axes on which the workpiece rotated! Under the weight of the workpiece, in the places where the axes rotate, the friction is so great that titanic efforts are needed to make them rotate. If we make a gap between the axis and the vertical column to facilitate the rotational moment, then the axis will no longer hold the workpiece and it will fall out. And if we make it rotate, then the wooden axles will work for a meager time from the load (according to preliminary estimates - no more than 10 minutes). It follows that this grinder could not work. And, therefore, it was on this grinding machine that the columns for all these cathedrals were not made.

Now consider another grinder.

Small shafts, fixed in suspended wooden pendulums, rotated from a large shaft by a belt drive, and transmitting torque to the grinding wheel. Again, everything is easy and simple? Not!

To transmit rotation, the belt must always be kept in a taut position. And then it turns out that we can only grind at a distance of a stretched belt. And we are obliged to ensure the tension of the belt with our hands. At the same time, ensure that the grinding wheel is pressed against the workpiece. The speed of rotation of the water mill was on average from 60 to 150 revolutions per minute! A modern tool is about 1000. I don’t even find fault with the way the rotation is transmitted to the second grinding wheel (which is held by the figure in the red shirt) - the scheme for turning the belt 90 degrees is not shown (and this requires a special device, but leading to additional loss of efficiency) . Grinding with this device is at the very least possible. But only in a straight line. And constantly moving the workpiece back and forth. And the polishing process involves at least 10 successive passes of different abrasive grains! And now the question! How to polish a vase? Spin, rotate and tilt? That is, it turns out that the products, sometimes reaching several tons, moved in space as the master wanted? Therefore, this grinder could not polish vases from the Hermitage!

Preliminary calculations were carried out using special engineering programs. These programs are used to create high-tech modern mechanisms. All simulated situations of using these grinders gave a negative answer. In addition, when studying the mechanism of these grinders, many shortcomings were not taken into account (and always in favor of the official history!). And some of them, such as the lack of production of abrasive materials, the hardness of some processed materials is close in hardness to granite (and this is already a very big problem!), the technological impossibility of polishing and grinding complex elements of vases (convex edging, grooves, petals) generally reduces to there is no workability of this technology in this matter. This technology can be safely called "Munchausen's fairy tale". Museum visitors who are not versed in technical details obliviously listen to the colorful stories of guides. It’s easier to believe “it was done with ease” and silently move on to the next exhibit than to object and be afraid of sidelong glances and conversations, such as how dare you object - everyone believes, but you are so smart here?

Here is how we are told about the delivery of a 19-ton tsar vase from a Kolyvan grinding vase to St. Petersburg:

“On February 19, 1843, a train of horses harnessed to a special sleigh (from 154 to 180, depending on the terrain) took the bowl from Kolyvan to Barnaul, then to the Utkinskaya pier of the Chusovaya River. We loaded the bowl piece by piece onto rafts and headed along the Chusovaya River to the Kama River, from the Kama River to the Volga River, along the Volga River with barge haulers, then along the bypass canal to the Neva River.

First, they made a special sleigh (they saved time, effort, materials) and dragged the entire team of 150-180 horses. With so many horses, we get the problem of synchronicity. And then, having arrived at the river, they dismantled the bowl into its component parts and took it disassembled on rafts. Where is the logic??? We roll square, we wear round. Why, as children, we doubted the veracity of the stories of Baron Munchausen, and when we grow up we believe in such nonsense? If the vase was collapsible, why break off a monolith of more than 30 tons, drag it through the mountains and ravines, and then make not a whole vase, but from parts ???

“Work began in February 1828. With the help of 230 workers, the stone was pulled to the stone shed and raised to a meter height. About 100 craftsmen were engaged in the primary processing of the monolith, after which in 1830 the stone was laid on firewood and manually, by the forces of 567 people, the block was moved 30 miles to Kolyvan.

567 people dragged the monolith, so that later, already at the factory, they would split it into pieces. FIVE HUNDRED SIXTY SEVEN PEOPLE!!! They dragged a rock. HUNDRED AND EIGHTY HORSE!!! They carried a vase. How does it sound?! Believable! And then, after such efforts, they disassembled into parts and loaded onto rafts ...

That's all. All health and bright mind!

So much the worse for the facts

On Good Intentions, Translation Difficulties, and Satisfaction Because of the Coffin

The vulgar idea that outrages are being created because the authorities (the owner, the dean, the tsar-priest) are poorly informed is not so far from the truth.

Of course, bad will also plays a role. But the information gap is formed even among the villains - assuring the public, and most importantly, themselves, that they wanted the best. Nero seriously saw himself as a great actor.

The intermediate cases are even more interesting.

In an old anecdote, Khrushchev, a demagogue despot but also a rogue dupe, demands more and more fantastic promises from the collective farm chairman to increase milk yields. At the end, he asks: “Can I also double it?” - “Yes, you can, only this, Nikita Sergeevich, there will be only water!”

I also recall a literary parable about a king who decided to do good. Seeing from the window that no one is helping the knocked-down old woman, he gives the Prime Minister a corresponding humane order, which, having reached the ordinary policemen by the damaged phone, leads to the arrest of the old woman.

Highbrow analogies with the uncertainty principle are possible here - the impact of the measuring apparatus on the object. But even without them, it is clear that in order to receive false information, it is not necessary to be a terrible despot. We are all a little despots, each of us is a despot in his own way.

Our conceptions of things are woefully inadequate. But not because there is not enough information, but because it is under the jurisdiction of culture, that is, a complex apparatus of recoding and, therefore, distortions.

Let's start with a simple case - literary translation. In selecting examples from the Russian classics for my English-language book, I was struck by how rarely the effect for which the citation was used was present in the English version. It turned out that the foreign reader is not dealing with Lermontov, Gogol and Chekhov, but, so to speak, with Marlinsky, Odoevsky and Potapenko.

My favorite remark of Svidrigailov: “If you are convinced that you can’t eavesdrop at the door, and you can peel the old woman with anything, at your pleasure ...”, in a respectable academic publication it sounds something like this: “If you are sure that you can’t listen at the door, but any any old woman you like can be knocked on the head…” (“If you are so sure that one can’t listen at doors, but any old woman you like can be knocked on the head…”). The preface states that the translation of such and such (I generously omit the last name) is quite adequate and readable. (Fortunately, there is a new, more accurate translation: "...can go around whacking old crones with whatever comes to hand, to you heart's content...")

As a result, Dostoevsky appears as a philosopher gloomy to tears, without a hint of humor. Paradoxically, this not only impoverishes the text, but also, as it were, enriches it - raises it in literary rank.

Many distortions are on the conscience of lazy and incurious translators. But the language barrier is real. The famous Gogol phrase: “From now on ... as if he was not alone, but some pleasant friend of life agreed with him to walk the road of life together - and this friend was no one else, like the same overcoat on thick cotton wool ...”, inevitably loses in English translation (“From that time it was… as if he were not alone, but some pleasant companion of life had agreed to travel the road of life with him – and this companion was none other than that selfsame overcoat with thick quilting ...") their Freudian overtones - due to the absence of the category of gender, as in overcoats = overcoat, and girlfriends = companion. It is not for nothing that Americans are so easily given political correctness: they replaced he, “he”, with s / he, “he / a”, and that’s it - nothing needs to be agreed upon.

American first-year students studying the Russian short story in translation wonder for a long time about the sexual orientation of the characters in Panteleimon Romanov's Without Bird Cherry (1927). In the original, the gender of the narrator and her seducer is obvious from the first lines: “It hurts me ... it’s like I’m something the only one in life did not at all…”, but in the English translation the gender differences are leveled, and students get the opportunity to see here an early example of blue prose.

As Robert Frost famously said, "Poetry is what is lost in translation." As you can see, something is missing in prose as well.

The paradox of “prestigious impoverishment/enrichment” (perceiving Dostoevsky) is a common phenomenon. Losses are especially drastic when translating from a specific language of a certain type of art (poetry, painting, music) into a general cultural one. In this case, the work falls into the hands of "outsiders" - institutions in charge of supporting, disseminating, teaching and canonizing art, benevolent, but usually deaf to its own artistic nature. Projection into the social sphere highlights ideological aspects in it, co-optation into mass culture - plot, screen adaptation - spectacular, teaching - discursive, etc.

Characteristic is the story told by an eyewitness about the return of the Georgian dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani from the Bolshoi Theater to the Tbilisi stage (late 1950s). Theatre. Rustaveli was crowded every evening. Fans stood in the aisles, the foyer, the stairs, the lobby, and the street, spreading the word of another phenomenal step by word of mouth. This translation of ballet movements into the language of distant perception, reduced to a poor repertoire of exclamations, is characteristic. In its crystal clear form, it represents the phenomenon of the canonization of the artist - the issuance of one of the approving labels.

Mass consumption tends to drag everything new and generally special from the cothurns back into the common rut. Such lubrication of the subtleties of the original clearly demonstrates what exactly the originality of the author consisted of. I remember how, in studying Okudzhava's poetry, I was helped by the ear-piercing difference between the bizarre softness of his own performance and that cheerful, forged, march-like, like a tourist, with which my friends, dissident hikers, sang it. “You hear boots rattling…” was sung, paced and judged from the point of view of boots, although, God knows, the whole point of Okudzhava is precisely in the Christianizing replacement of military-patriotic heroism with quiet love, rattling boots - with an old jacket.

Alas, a distorting translation from a specific language into a common cultural one is inevitable.

Once I had to defend my demythologising analysis of Akhmatova's life-creating image in front of her physicist admirer. For a long time I could not explain to him the mythology of his reactions. What does the notorious "mythology" prevent, he wondered, if his ideas about Akhmatova are consistent? Fortunately, the controversy was not far to go. Guessing that he considers Akhmatova Gumilyov's widow, I said that although this is closer to the truth than the appointment of the old Bolshevik Fotieva (whom Stalin threatened with the Krupskaya obstinacy) to the role of Lenin's widow, it still does not represent a legal fact (having divorced Akhmatova according to her initiative in 1918, Gumilyov married A. N. Engelhardt), and, that's it, a myth. Being a truth-seeker of the sixties and a connoisseur of evidence, my interlocutor gave up. But another in his place would have persisted, saying that in the highest sense, Akhmatova was still the widow of Gumilyov (as well as Blok and Pushkin), and in general, so much the better for the myth-makers and worse for the facts.

In the new "Film about Anna Akhmatova", Anatoly Naiman, who at one time was closely acquainted with her, pathetically tells that "her husband was shot." It's like a French pun: "Il est roux et sot, mais pas un Rousseau!" - "He RU["redhead"] and co[“stupid”], but by no means not Rousseau!"Gumilyov was Akhmatova's husband, and he was shot, but not "at her place." Nyman knows this very well, but, as they say, who cares?! Myth - and good intentions - dictate their own.