?A clockwork orange? by Anthony Burgess was one of the books that were not allowed to read in USSR. After perestrojka began it had been published in a literary magazine and I had a chance to enjoy it, which I did. Here is something I wanted to ask native English speakers since I red the book..


As you remember, repulsive youngsters in the book speak Nadsat, the fictional slang. The slang has some Russian words in it like ?malchik? or ?bolshij?. In Russian translation these words were just left as in the book - in Latin alphabet but it was easy to guess what they mean. I wonder whether it was easy for English speakers to understand them or they (you) simply skip over them?

Well, it was A Clockwork Orange. But as to to your question, I had had the advantage of a couple of years of Russian, but my girlfriend at the time (gosh she's probably a grandmother now!) was unable to follow the movie because she kept getting hung up on the quasi-Russian slang.

I seem to remember we were at a drive-in and I was having trouble following the movie, but for other reasons!

Those of us who love that sort of thing were fascinated by the challenge. If translating it to Russian I might pick some third language, one from a country that has the same meaning for Russians that mid to late 20th century Russia did for the West.

Some of the Russian words were changed quite quite a bit, e.g., horrorshow from Russian khorosho. The effect on native English speakers that this particular choice had might be hard to translate.

Hello vika. Enjoyed your post on A Clockwork Orange. It's been awhile since I read it, but I am pretty sure that my copy had a glossary in the back of the book. The Russian-derived slang terms were left untranslated, and you could flip to the glossary to viddy the definition for yourself if you wanted to.

Singing in the rain....just singing in the rain

I remember being about ten years old, and finding a book(with pictures!) in the library about A Clockwork Orange and being totally freaked out that something like that could exist. still have never seen the movie, but I have images from that book burned into my memory 30 years later...

I'd read the book long before the movie came out - my father was an Anthony Burgess fan and had all of his books. I never did get the impression of sheer menace from the movie that the book imparted. Something to do with my imagination, I guess. The edition I had also had a glossary, but I've forgotten most of the slang.

Must read it again. It's in one of the twenty-odd cartons of books still loitering in our gar-idge after 13 months here ... I must admit, it reads better if you have the movie soundtrack playing! The rape scene in the theatre with "Queen Mary's Funeral" playing on the soundtrack was about the freakiest part of the movie.

BTW, if you want top Anthony Burgess, I recommend "Any Old Iron".

Hi, Alex.
What does viddy mean?

I loved Burgess's book, The End of the World News. Of course, I had to have the title pun splained to me, but that was when I was younger and not yet so acquainted with Brit and Oz thangs.

See http://wso.williams.edu/~mhacker/clockglossary.html for full information on Nadsat ...

thanks for everybody who pointed out that the real name of the book is, of course, A Clockwork Orange and not A clockwise orange. it was a stupid mistake to made but may be you excuse me because the post was made after a workday and my head felt like something rather wooden

This choodesny chellovek thinks that there's a mort of bezoomny chepooka on this horrorshow board. All you droogies, both malchicks and devotchkas, should get a jeezny!

Well, I understood about half of that, Cap.

A Clockwork Orange was one of the drivers behind the early punk movement. If you remember, the early punkers wore neat - if extremely unusually - dressed with highly polished boots and clean clothes. Didn't stop their amorality, forced or otherwise, but they were more-or-less conscious copies of Alex and his droogs. It was only later that the Sid Vicious/filth/Vivian the Young Ones punk style took over. Like most "movements", the origins were quickly forgotten in the day-to-day reality of punkdom.

I read an article in the early 1970s in something (could have been an English newspaper) which interviewed some (not well-known) punkers, who claimed that Anthony Burgess was their godfather and that A Clockwork Orange was their Bible. I remember being doubtful, from their barely coherent responses to the interviewer's questions, that any of them had actually read it all the way through ... page 1. Sounds like the usual relationship most Christians have with the Bible, doesn't it?

I've had a quick trawl through the A Clockwork Orange sites, and while all of them laud Burgess' good/evil process plot, none of them look more than cursorily under the bonnet. Some of the underlying implications of the book (Russian-style socialism and a Politburo-style government, apparatchik-style bureaucracy and, of course, the heavily Russian-influenced Nadsat counter-culture jargon) are pretty much ignored in most analyses. Burgess wrote the book in 1962 when he believed he was on borrowed time - he'd been diagnosed with a brain tumour which, in the end, completely failed to kill him - and A Clockwork Orange was one of several books he wrote that year. He believed, I think, that the Russians would eventually triumph over the West. I think that in reality, and although it was never stated by Burgess, A Clockwork Orange was set (lightly, I will admit) in a post-conquest communist England.

That satisfactorily explains Nadsat and the other Russian influences as no other explanation is likely to be able to do. Of course, the Minister for the Interior looked and sounded a lot like - well, Tony Blair does today.

Oh well, FWIW.

One year around Halloween the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show had a costume contest for all the people who liked to dress as one of the flamboyant characters in the film. The decision was based on applause from the crowd. My friend Ray dressed as "Alex" from A Clockwork Orange and he had a very complete costume with the false eyelashes on one eye, bowler hat, maybe even the codpiece. Anyway, he looked the part. There were so many of us there who knew him that our wild cheers won him the prize, much to the confusion of the cast of Rocky Horror transvestites, half of whom had no idea just who Ray was supposed to be.


http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/pix/clockwork-orange2.jpg

vika,
When I read A Clockwork Orange I didn't know any Russian, and I'm pretty sure my edition of the book didn't have translations at the back. So basically I just picked up on all the Nadsat by context, as I would any new language where I had no explicit dictionary (or as with "learning by ear").

It worked well, in that I'd gathered the meaning of practically every new term by the end of the book. Sometimes this meant I had to refer back, and pick up on a further level of meaning in what I'd already read. Not a problem.

The use of Nadsat also provided for the "feel" of the book, imparting an air of the surreal, sort of drug-infused. This may have made some of the violence more readable (even acceptable, for want of a better term) - helping maintain a degree of empathy with Alex. You don't just switch off and dismiss him as a more or less featureless psychopath. That's important. What's also important is that the film (recently shown on British TV for the first time) didn't maintain the surreal air quite as well. Indeed it couldn't.

I could do with re-reading the book, but the film struck me as hugely prophetic in some ways - particularly in the amoral political wheeling and dealing, "spin" and whatnot.


As an aside, I recall that my first reading of A Clockwork Orange was around the same time as a musical (play) version was released.. I think with music by some members of U2.

in fact, I liked the movie - Steven Spielberg at his best - and its screening in UK promted me to ask the question. may be I liked the movie because I forgot the book (I red it 10 years ago) or because of the translation, where the wordplay was inevitably lost

I think Faldage had a brilliant idea that in Russian the translation of slang words should have been in a third language. I am not sure what exactly mid to late 20th century Russia did for the Westbut I would have used German, probably

In reply to:

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in fact, I liked the movie - Steven Spielberg at his best

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Also known as Stanley Kubrick...

I am not sure what exactly mid to late 20th century Russia did for the West

I think the significant thing is that there was an incredible lack of knowledge of anything that happened behind the "Iron Curtain" - and hardly anyone knew any Russian. The USSR was peopled exclusively by shadows and stereotypes. It still isn't a lot better, but at least you can learn Russian without immediately becoming suspicious.

Hard to replicate that sort of perspective for any other country, and even for any other time, I think. What slang/language would Burgess pick if he were writing the book now, I wonder?

in fact, I liked the movie - Steven Spielberg at his best



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Also known as Stanley Kubrick...

I've done it again! I am not writing after 7 pm anymore

My "mor-far" (Hi satin) said that 7 pm was the ealiest hour in which he could take a drink... [crossthreading-e]

btw, the movie was in the list of 100 best American thrillers nominated by the members of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences