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Comment by pandaman | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting book to translate to English. Glebsky is trying to determine the gender of Brune for the half of the book and this involves trying to make him/her to talk about oneself in the past. In Russian verbs are inflected with gender only in the past tense so somebody speaking about oneself in the past will have to inflect verbs with one's own gender but there is no gender specific grammar for the present and future. Did they do something clever in the translation or just dropped this plot line?

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I just finished reading the book. Although it does appear, the linguistic subtlety you mention is lost in translation and I'd have found that particular passage confusing if I hadn't read your comment first. In short, at one point Glebsky figures he can definitively discover Brun's gender by asking him/her a question such that the answer would be something like "I had a nibble" or "I wolfed down two sandwiches". In the text, it's left unclear how one could infer gender from such answers.

I see, thanks. The translator probably tried to replace this with the differences in male/female vocabulary.

In the original it is all through the book as, without knowing the gender, Glebsky is pretty limited in the ways he can speak to or about Brune and he reflects on this quite a lot.

I'm wondering about the translator too. Name: Josh Billings, who is a famous (sort of ) American jokester. Is this a real translation? Or someone pretending to be a pair of Russian brother writers?

How do you mean "pretending"?

Translator name is an alias; maybe that's a clue that they're not real. So what could they be? An author pretending to be a translator...

If by 'they' you mean Strugatsky brothers, then let me assure you that they are more than real.

(I'm russian and I've grown up reading their books.)

They were...

In some sense — they still are, maybe more then both of us.

That kind of immortality is one of the perks of being a great artist.

The Strugatzkis are among the most famous russian science fiction writers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Billings

The article mentions, by photo, two others of a trio of 19th century American humorists - Mark Twain and Petroleum V. Nasby. All three are pen names ...

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