Vote for Meow

Good news everyone ©.

My one-drawing-per-day challenge, from 14 March to 11 May 2020, is out as a full-colour book, Vote for Meow (ISBN 979-8-6667-1099-9). It includes some unpublished drawings and some interesting, I hope, non-drawing extras.

It’s kinda cute, even if I say so myself. And it is available from your nearest Amazon store.

The book is named after my post from 23 April.

We (I and Kirill) had fun putting it together.

I hope you have fun reading it.

Une dette est belle par son paiement

Une dette est belle par son paiement // Долг платежом красен

Today’s prompt is “payment”, paiement.

I had difficulties with this one. Now we are sitting at home, with no ways of generating income, thoughts of various payments that are due are looming menacingly, making it difficult to stay positive and draw something positive, too.

So, here is not-so-positive pic. The cat will be fine though, if he owns anything to anybody, he owns it to me, and I am not going to claim anything off him. He is a good cat.

The quote of today is a Russian proverb. As usual, I couldn’t identify the original immediately, but at least I could do it eventually in this case. The literal meaning is “The debt is good by its payment”. Originally coined by merchants to underscore the practice of lending with interest, so that the debt is made “good” by giving back more when you borrowed, now it is used more or less to say “you get what you give”.

оттяжник

Кот оттягивается // The cat is having fun

Let’s take a short break from French, shall we?

«Митьки» (Mitki; plural of митёк mityok) are an art group formed in St. Petersburg in the 1980s. I doubt it would ever become famous if not for a book of the same name by a Russian artist Vladimir Shinkarev. (I would call the book “eponymous” if it was named after the art group; in reality, the group was named after the book.) This seminal work contains a short lexicon of the most common words and expressions of Mitki. I’ll give you two.

оттягиваться	заняться чем-либо приятным, чтобы забыть о тяготах жизни митька, чаще всего означает напиться.	to do something pleasant in order to forget the hardships of mityok’s life, typically to get drunk.
оттяжник	кто-либо, привлекший внимание митька, например, высоко прыгнувший кот.	anyone who caught the attention of a mityok, for example, a cat that jumped real high.

Now оттягиваться is a reflexive verb derived from оттягивать “to draw back”, “to pull aside”, “to weigh down”, “to delay”, “to put off” etc. which, in its turn, appears to be derived from an unprefixed verb тянуть “to pull”, “to draw ”, “to weigh”, “to delay” and so on. None of these meanings has anything to do with leisure though. So how the meaning “to do something pleasant” came about?

Well, Shinkarev provides us with a clue in the very definition: тяготы, “hardships”. Thus оттягиваться is to pull oneself away from those hardships. Sure, alcohol helps, but a jumping cat (оттяжник) also can make mityok to forget about his problems. Moreover, our cat is having fun himself, so we can unhesitatingly say «кот оттягивается».

Cri de bonheur

Cri de bonheur // Возглас счастья // Cry of joy

Famous, if rather depressive “Не выходи из комнаты” // “Don’t leave the room” poem by Joseph Brodsky is all over Russian social networks right now. I found some translations online, didn’t like any of them particularly, but here is one, to save you a struggle with Google and its translator.

The first couple of phrases in French go something like this:

Ne sors pas de la pièce, ne commets pas une erreur
Pourquoi as-tu besoin du soleil?

But. I have a pic of a very pleased cat here, obviously. So, let’s forget the depressing poetry, and concentrate on Cri de bonheur // Возглас счастья // Cry of joy. It is only mentioned in the poem in passing, but it is important to remember that joy exists.

* The cat was drawn for a different reason, of which later. I just like to connect some unconnectables here.

Update: here is the reason why the cat was drawn — an illustration to a meme of a subculture of Russian origin.

dans l'âge mûr

Dans l'enfance tous les hommes sont frères, dans l'âge mûr chacun tire de son bord // In childhood all men are brothers, in maturity everyone pulls at his side.

The last Inktober prompt this year is "ripe/mûr". I rather like less fruity meaning of both words, the one related to age. There is a difference, though - while in English "ripe age" asks for "old" to be inserted in the middle, in French, as far as I understand, it simply implies maturity.

When I found the quote in the caption, a Chinese proverb, I though oh! how lucky, there is a direct equivalent in English, "pull a blanket towards oneself". My search, however, didn't bring any convincing results, so now I think perhaps Russian expression "тянуть на себя одеяло" decided to disguise itself as an English proverb just to confuse me*. It means literally "to hog a blanket" and figuratively "to act selfishly". 

Here is the cat, acting very maturely, i.e. trying to pull a blanket towards himself. 

* do tell me if the expression does exist in some form though

Отмухиваться, portmanteau parfait

Кот отмухивается // The cat is waving away the flies

Today, let’s do something Russian for a change. Kirill wrote a nice article about Blends, Melds and Portmanteaux in his blog, where he mentioned the word отмухиваться, i.e. “wave away the flies”, all in one word (отмахиваться — wave away, мухи — flies).

I did read the book “От двух до пяти”, where it comes from, but I forgot this wonderful example completely.
So I felt compelled to illustrate it.

Pictures related to cats @ Shutterstock.

bavarde comme une pie

Elle est bavarde comme une pie. Peut-être que c'est parce qu'elle est une pie // She is as chatty as a magpie. Maybe it's because she is a magpie.

Today, we learned another expression which is very similar to something we'd say in Russian. Apparently, if you are a chatterbox, you are "as chatty as a magpie", "bavarde comme une pie". It corresponds very nicely to russian "трещит, как сорока" - "rattles like a magpie".

Note also the obvious connection between magpie and pie. Apparently the "Mag" bit come from a nickname for Margaret, that was used to denote a chatterer, and the "pie", predictably, from French.

Aren't languages fascinating?