Rounding out our list of senses that you can lose, both literally and metaphorically, is of course sight.
A blind person is слепой, and the process of going blind is ослепнуть. As in English, the verb can be used sarcastically to chide/ insult someone: Ты что, ослеп? Он прямо перед тобой! (What are you, blind? It’s/He’s right in front of you!)
The root of this verb can be used in compliments as well: Она была все так же ослепительно красива и завидно молода. Here Russians can use «blindingly beautiful», where we would choose a different adjective signifying physical incapacitation from beauty: She was still stunningly beautiful and enviably young.
Farther down on the scale of vision loss is nearsightedness, близо- рукость, I suppose because you can only see things close at hand? Far-sighted people are дально- зоркий, with зоркий as a separate adjective meaning both sharp-sighted and vigilant: Каждый пионер должен работать так же, как если бы за ним следил зоркий глаз Владимира Ильича. (Every pioneer should work as if he was under the sharp eye of Vladimir Ilyich.)
When it comes to talking about vision problems, Americans and Russians have the added difficulty of dealing with different systems of measurement. We have a system with 20/20 as perfect vision, while a nearsighted person may have 20/40 vision, as they need to be 20 feet away from something «normal» people only need to be 40 feet away from.
This necessitates different metaphors as well; where Americans would say «hindsight is 20/20», Russians might remark «задним умом крепок», literally, his «backwards, reverse» brain is strong.
There’s often some teasing of those with vision troubles at school – the Russian equivalent of «four-eyes» is очкарик; as you can see, it’s formed from the word очки, glasses. But while four-eyes is a taunt usually reserved for the schoolyard, очкарик can be used to refer in a mildly derogatory fashion to older people as well: Вы, наверное, себе представили толстенького, лысенького очкарика за пятьдесят и ошиблись. (You were probably imagining a fat, balding (four-eyes) over fifty – and you were wrong.) The fact that there’s and eyeglass store called Очкарик shows that it’s not a terrible name; the epithet очкастый sounds more insulting.
Another related colloquial epithet with the same suffix is глазастый. This one can be either positive or negative: you can describe a pretty girl with big eyes as глазастая, but it can also mean someone who’s bug-eyed.
Speaking of figurative language involving the animal world, those who are as blind as a bat in English can be as blind as a mole in Russian (слепой, как крот), as well as a uniquely Russian metaphor, слепая курица, although I’ve never heard before about chickens seeing particularly poorly. There’s even an eye disease, hemeralopia colloquially known as «chicken blindness» (куриная слепота). For these unfortunates that these phrases describe, we used to talk about people who had really bad vision as wearing «coke bottle glasses»; there’s no Russian equivalent, so you just have to go with «очки с толстыми стёклами».
Something else we don’t have a great equivalent for in Russian is squinting at the page because your eyesight is bad – yes, you can say «кто-то прищурил- ся», but this verb usually indicates trying to narrow your eyes to avoid something too bright.
Moving on from actual vision problems, there are some useful words and expressions related to blindness. For one, if you do something without looking, you can use the adverb вслепую, «blindly». There are a lot of wellworn jokes about the main character from a Russian film series, «17 Moments of Spring», many of which involve puns. Here’s one playing on this adverb: Штирлиц стрелял вслепую – слепая бегала и кричала. So, to totally kill the joke with over-explanation, the idea is that «слепая» is a blind woman, and if you shot at a blind woman, you would «стрелять в слепую», which sounds the same as the adverb вслепую.
More figuratively, if you want to say that someone is turning a blind eye to a situation, you can say in Russian that he or she is «closing his/her eyes» to it: Нель- зя закрывать глаза на то, что про- исходит в Северной Осетии, reads a recent newspaper headline. If you want to get fancy about a difficult situation, you can always remark: Среди слепых и одноглазый – король. (In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.)
Now, if you’ve reached a point of total exhaustion with some activity, say, thinking about vocabulary related to blindness, you might say that you’re so tired, you’re seeing double: Голова трещит, руки дрожат и в глазах двоится. (My head is splitting, my hands are shaking, and I’m seeing double.)
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
The Russian Tongue: Hair today, Chavez tomorrow
The Russian Tongue: What drives Russians round the bend
The Russian Tongue: Bookworms and bestsellers
The Russian Tongue: Baby talk and Russian gangsters
The Russian Tongue: Werewolves in epaulettes (and other bloodsuckers)
The Russian Tongue: Is there a doctorate in the house?
The Russian Tongue: Down ‘n’ dirty in the springtime
The Russian Tongue: How to lose friends and annoy people
The Russian Tongue: When sorry is the hardest word
The Russian Tongue: Minding your Russian Ps and Qs
The Russian Tongue: Bombing your way around Moscow
The Russian Tongue: Making merry with Father Frost
The Russian Tongue: The big freeze
The Russian Tongue: Talking Tolstoy
The Russian Tongue: Let me hear your body talk
The Russian Tongue: There is nothing like a dame
The Russian Tongue: Babes and babushkas
*
Learning Russian but finding the lessons too formal? In her entertaining column The Russian Tongue, Sara Buzadzhi gives practical informal tips on everything from dealing with traffic cops to flirting in the grocery store. Sara’s columns are published with permission of www.themoscownews.com, where they appear every two weeks.
Sara Buzadzhi is an English teacher and translator in Moscow.
