Ilf & Petrov's Excellent Adventure
Aug. 16th, 2019 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerComrades! Through the magic of interlibrary loan, I recently acquired two different American versions of Ilf & Petrov’s American travelogue, written when the two Soviet humorists drove across America in 1935 in a Ford.
These two American books have different titles, neither of which is an actual translation of the Russian title, which would be One-Storied America in English - a reference to the fact that most American towns at the time consisted of one- and two-story buildings, a sharp contrast to the prevailing view in the Soviet Union at the time, which was that America was basically New York City and maybe some cowboys.
Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip is actually not a translation of One-Storied America, but of the photo-essays serialized in the magazine Ogonek (the editors describe this as being the Soviet Union’s answer to Life). Much of the text was incorporated into the book, but the photos weren’t included in the first (1937) edition, so I’m going to have to revise some bits in Honeytrap, unless Gennady’s family hoarded old issues of Ogonek for some reason.
Little Golden America (the title is a play on Ilf & Petrov’s comic novel Little Golden Calf, although frankly I feel that the American editors may have just found the title One-Storied America a blow to their amour propre) is a translation, sans photographs, but with a wealth of detail that didn’t fit in the photo essays. I haven’t finished reading it yet, although once I do you will be getting some choice quotes.
I’ve already zoomed through Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (which I keep wanting to call Ilf and Petrov’s Excellent Adventure, so enjoy some quotes from that for now!
“In California, roadside kiosks that sell orange juice are built to look like oranges. The enormous orange fruit beckons, promising a cool atmosphere, a lot of coolness and a lot of vitamins. Americans have gone a little crazy over vitamins. They don’t care about the taste of the food they eat, they care about how many vitamins it has.”
(They complain about American food a lot. Apparently bland tasteless tomatoes picked unripe that supposedly “ripened” on their journey but actually just turned red without developing any flavor already bedeviled American cuisine in 1935.)
“Yes, you can fall in love with New York. The way Desdemona fell in love with Othello. You can fall in love with it for the pain it lives in, for the mighty struggle against death from starvation which is fought here every hour of every day by millions of people.”
“Having a good time, according to the American conceptualization of it, means noise and light.”
Or this comment about American movies: “The plot is always the same: love, uninteresting monotonous American love with strictly timed kisses (in Hollywood, the censors only allow kisses of a certain length.)”
Do I need to give Gennady an opportunity to scoff at “uninteresting monotonous American love”? ABSOLUTELY YES.
These two American books have different titles, neither of which is an actual translation of the Russian title, which would be One-Storied America in English - a reference to the fact that most American towns at the time consisted of one- and two-story buildings, a sharp contrast to the prevailing view in the Soviet Union at the time, which was that America was basically New York City and maybe some cowboys.
Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip is actually not a translation of One-Storied America, but of the photo-essays serialized in the magazine Ogonek (the editors describe this as being the Soviet Union’s answer to Life). Much of the text was incorporated into the book, but the photos weren’t included in the first (1937) edition, so I’m going to have to revise some bits in Honeytrap, unless Gennady’s family hoarded old issues of Ogonek for some reason.
Little Golden America (the title is a play on Ilf & Petrov’s comic novel Little Golden Calf, although frankly I feel that the American editors may have just found the title One-Storied America a blow to their amour propre) is a translation, sans photographs, but with a wealth of detail that didn’t fit in the photo essays. I haven’t finished reading it yet, although once I do you will be getting some choice quotes.
I’ve already zoomed through Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (which I keep wanting to call Ilf and Petrov’s Excellent Adventure, so enjoy some quotes from that for now!
“In California, roadside kiosks that sell orange juice are built to look like oranges. The enormous orange fruit beckons, promising a cool atmosphere, a lot of coolness and a lot of vitamins. Americans have gone a little crazy over vitamins. They don’t care about the taste of the food they eat, they care about how many vitamins it has.”
(They complain about American food a lot. Apparently bland tasteless tomatoes picked unripe that supposedly “ripened” on their journey but actually just turned red without developing any flavor already bedeviled American cuisine in 1935.)
“Yes, you can fall in love with New York. The way Desdemona fell in love with Othello. You can fall in love with it for the pain it lives in, for the mighty struggle against death from starvation which is fought here every hour of every day by millions of people.”
“Having a good time, according to the American conceptualization of it, means noise and light.”
Or this comment about American movies: “The plot is always the same: love, uninteresting monotonous American love with strictly timed kisses (in Hollywood, the censors only allow kisses of a certain length.)”
Do I need to give Gennady an opportunity to scoff at “uninteresting monotonous American love”? ABSOLUTELY YES.
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Date: 2019-08-16 08:19 pm (UTC)OH MY GOD. This sounds AMAZING.
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