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The context for this week’s lesson was this: Before his trip to Moscow, U.S. President Barack Obama said that he thought “Putin had one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new.” Putin responded with his “nonliterary” (read: not quite fit to print) phrase: Мы враскорячку не умеем стоять.”
Some news agencies apparently didn’t know what to make of this phrase and seemed to follow the principle: When in doubt, leave it out. But other English-language media gave it a go, translating it variously as: “We don’t stand bow-legged,” “Russians don’t know how to stand so awkwardly with their legs apart,” and “We do not assume strange postures.” So which is right?
Well, all of them — more or less.
The word раскорячка is derived from a root that means “to be crooked” or “to bend over.” It can be used alone to refer to someone who is bow-legged. The phrase стоять в раскорячку describes an awkward stance in which a person is in a half-crouch and his legs are splayed at odd angles — as if he just got off a horse after riding for four days through uneven terrain. Hence the “strange posture, bow-legged, awkward stance with legs apart.”
Ходить враскорячку would be to walk in a bow-legged gait. I also learned from my dictionaries that враскорячку can be combined with two other verbs: сидеть¸ (to sit) and лежать¸ (to lie). I asked a group of Russian friends to demonstrate and got something that looked like a game of Twister played after a couple of bottles of vodka. As far as I could tell — after I stopped howling with laughter — we might say in English: “He sat with his legs splayed awkwardly” or “He was lying with his legs stuck out at odd angles.”
In any case, стоять враскорячку is an unsteady, half-crouching, awkward stance. In Putin’s comments, this contrasted nicely with his assertion of the way Russians do stand: “Мы твердо стоим на ногах и всегда смотрим в будущее” (We stand solidly on our feet and always look to the future).
So far, so good. What I couldn’t figure out, however, was all the winking and smirking over this phrase. One publication teased: Переводчикам Обамы будет трудно точно перевести эту фразу (Obama’s translators are going to have a hard time translating this phrase exactly). In a comment in The Moscow Times, columnist Yevgeny Kiselyov wrote, “Even the best English translation cannot capture the familiarity of Putin’s remark … this is an inappropriate vocabulary for a prime minister.”
Bow-legged — inappropriate? Gosh. Kiselyov seems to have mighty high standards for his leaders’ public announcements. Puzzled, I asked around, but my cultured and educated informants were no help.
So then I took the low road: the Internet. After about five pages of Putin quotes I hit pay dirt. It turns out that there is another usage of the phrase: same stance, only a sexual setting. Got it? Let me put it this way: The phrase враскорячку can be combined with other, far more interesting verbs.
If you still don’t get it, you’ve led an even more sheltered life than I have.
I have got to get out more.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
