smarts
For reasons I cannot quite explain to myself, I was reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a Town (which they, with some cleverness, call Foolsburg). It is an amusing and somewhat mean-spirited novel; like many political novels, it loses something in being read outside of its time (or outside of the reader stewing in the remnants of that time like an unfortunate marinade). I have nothing much to say about it, and certainly nothing intelligent, but a little passage early in the book did draw my attention:
The inhabitants exulted; not having seen the newly appointed superior yet with their own eyes, they were already telling anecdotes about him, calling him “a good-looker” and a “smarty.” (p. 28)
‘Good-looker’ is an oddity, but it was ‘smarty’ that yanked me out of the crowd of Glupovites awaiting their new mayor. Natural language translation is, naturally, a challenge, and the ignorant should perhaps not find fault with what they do not know or understand (but I will not, here, let that stop me). The unseen mayor is красавчик и умница, so the learned may think what they like about the conveyance of meaning, but I couldn’t help thinking of a another sort of ‘smarty’, which added a different twist to the scene:
