« The world of mat is virtually inaccessible to foreigners studying Russian. It is too situational and semantically capricious, too dependent on ludic intonational subtleties. Mat is linguistic theatre, verbal performance art. It exploits the Russian language’s flexible range of suffixes and prefixes, and toys with phonetically similar words from the standard lexicon in order to generate anthropomorphic images. »
Invariably people ardently desire to learn bad words when encountering an immigrant who speaks a language they do not*. While one could surely write an essay arguing that the type of words used as expletives reveals something about the soul of the people in question (as a minimum, it’s a quick way to check what is considered more scandalous in that culture – genitals or religious terminology?), the allure of being able to say ‘fuck’ or whatever when it’s the only thing you can say in that language escapes me.
Idiomatic curses are another kettle of fish, a fascinating topic. Being the bearer of a language, one doesn’t often pause to think how weird a lot of sayings would sound to foreign ears. Russian cursing is quite popular in non-Slavic circles (see Elizabeth Olsen swearing at Conan in Russian on TBS…**), and its basic components are very straightforward (assorted body parts). However, there is considerable artistry involved in combining these blocks and spinning them into a scathing sentence that will inflict proper psychological damage to the target. This could be said about many cultures indeed, but I can confirm that the Slavs cherish their curse slang and go about using it with tender love and great gusto.
Journalist Elmira Kuznetsova and Canadian cartoonist and animator Jess Pollard have undertaken the charming task of (literally) translating and illustrating some choice Russian curses. I’ll quote from an article about this project:
« Jess is learning Russian and one night I was trying to translate to her the Russian curse “На хую я вертел.” The phrase translates as “I don’t care” but the literal meaning is “I spun it on my dick”. Just for laughs, Jess drew a sketch depicting random things being spun on male genitalia. We laughed so hard both at the image and at the absurdity of the literal translation, we decided to make more illustrations. This turned into a comic magazine that we called “An Illustrated Treasury of Russian Curses” that was printed in a batch of 50 copies and sold to our friends. »
Please consider the following as a sampler of A Treasury of Russian Curses (A selection of curses for community building, successful business, and ideal first dates) — I selected a few favourites from volumes I, II and III. Follow this project’s Instagram account, and support a cool idea by buying printed copies or PDFs over at Pollard’s website.
I give the highest recommendation to The unique power of Russia’s underground language, written by Victor Evrofeyev and published in The New Yorker (a beautifully translated version by Andrew Bromfield) on September 15, 2003. This post’s introductory paragraph is from it, but here are a few more quotes to whet your appetite:
« When I think of mat, I think of the monstrous energy field of that planet. Mat is a protean language in which archaic strata mix with modernity. It has a unique ability to break free of its erotic context and to characterize universal human feelings and conditions, to express admiration and contempt, ecstasy and catastrophe. »
« Although it retains its sense of blasphemy, mat, in its original form, was also a language of peasant revelry and the liberation of the flesh. In traditional folk culture, women sang obscene ditties as a challenge to their husbands or an invitation to their suitors. Pushkin’s bawdy early poem « Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters » describes a culture that has lost the cunt, or, rather, forty cunts: the Tsar dispatches his heralds in search of them and after arduous ordeals they are recovered. »
~ ds
* Life is full of such little repetitive ‘pleasures’, like having to tolerate jokes about magic mushrooms whenever talking about about how one likes to go mushroom picking…
** Why they’re both amused that a reference to the ‘female region’ can be used as a bad word in Russian is puzzling, as English easily offers ‘cunt’ as an equivalent.
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