bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), p. 4
Dear Editor,
I continue to read bout de papier with great interest and admiration. It reflects very well on the Canadian Foreign Service and I hope it is reaching a wide audience across the country.
In this letter I would like to comment on David Levy’s article “Russian and Russians are No Enigma When You Know Both”. I’m not sure the proposition in the title is entirely valid, but his plea for a greater effort on the part of Canadians to learn the Russian language I can endorse without reserve.
In 1954, when I was Head of the European Division, which in those days encompassed all of Europe plus Africa and the Middle East, Lester Pearson, who was External Affairs Minister, asked me if I would chair an inter-departmental committee to find ways of encouraging the study of Russian in Canadian schools and universities on the basis of “knowing the enemy”. I agreed and the Committee had some effect. But interest gradually diminished partly because of lack of funds, lack of Russian language teachers, and lack of enthusiasm by students to tackle a very difficult discipline.
It did, however, help towards the decision taken at the end of the fifties to require diplomatic and military personnel proceeding to the Embassy in Moscow to spend a year studying Russian before posting. As a result, our Embassy was relatively well equipped and certainly better prepared to cope than some larger missions such as the French and Italian. The need of a knowledge of Russian was obvious in dealing with the Soviets, in analysing the press, in observing the Soviet scene and, of course, in making life in Moscow more interesting and rewarding.
However, I disagree with David Levy about the language itself. It is indeed a very rich and beautiful language and, as I said in my introduction to my volume of translations of Russian poetry, the best language for poetry after English. And the alphabet is perfectly adapted to the sounds of the Russian tongue.
But there must be no illusion. It is a difficult language for the English or French speaker. The vocabulary is largely unfamiliar and the grammar complicated and highly inficted with six cases on three genders.
The Russians feel strongly about the lack of interest in their language on the part of Westerners. I recall a senior Soviet official once complaining to me that, although Russian was one of the five official languages of the U.N., nobody spoke it. I agreed, but explained why:
First, the favourite slogan of the Soviets at the time was “peaceful coexistence”, easily recognisable in French and Spanish but in Russian “MIRNOYE COSKSHEST- VOVANYE”. ’. Second, the word for “ICE” in Russian is “LYOD”. To say “WITHICE” becomes “SALDOM”. To say “ON ICE” becomes “NALDU”. My interlocuter looked startled and then laughingly had to agree.
To conclude, there is a little foot-note to the eternal Canadian language dispute. When Mr. Pearson proposed setting up the Committee to encourage the study of Russian, I asked if he did not think we should start with a higher priority, a Committee to encourage anglophone Canadians to speak French. He reflected a moment and then said he believed it would be unconstitutional to use federal funds for the encouragement of the use of one of our official languages.
Robert A.D. Ford
Editor’s Note: Mr. Ford was Canadian Ambassador in Moscow from 1964 to 1980. Now retired, Mr. Ford lives near Vichy, France. He has recently written a book Our Man in Moscow, A Diplomat’s Reflection on the Soviet Union, published February 1989, by University of Toronto Press.
Dear Editor,
I have a comment on an article on pages 14/15 Vol. 6 No. 3 entitled “Waldheim Fooled Canada Too” by Sidney Freifeld.
I just do not believe that a professional foreign service needs to print such a vindictive article on a current head of state, particularly an ally of Canada. It was simply not in good taste.
An avid reader and member,
Max Reid Councellor (Commercial) Canadian Embassy, Washington, DC
Dear Editor,
All foreign services officers owe you a debt of gratitude for the tributes to John Holmes in the last issue of bout de papier (Vol. 6, No. 3). We need to be reminded that we follow in such footsteps.
Out of fairness to Mr. Holmes, I should point out that his lecture, as published by you, contains a number of errors not of his making. In the final paragraph, the first of the two couplets from William Blake should have read “Do what you will, this Life’s Fiction/ And is made up of Contradiction”. The second couplet should have read “If the Sun and Moon should doubt,/They’d immediately go out”. Mr. Holmes was not known for misquotation and Blake was not given to slopply metre. The errors in question are attributable in part to my own lapses in quoting the couplets to Mr. Holmes from memory, and in part (I suspect) to the usual typographical gremlins.
L.H. Legault Minister (Economic)
Deputy Head of Mission Washington, DC
CORRECTION: We apologize that, due to an editing error, the final paragraph of Keith Greenaway’s review of J. Honderich’s Arctic Imperative (Vol. 6 No. 3 pages 44/45) did not make complete sense. The sentence, “This is unfortunate, but such errors do not detract from the book’s message, although they may be annoying to readers” should have been deleted.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1989), p. 4. Read the rest of this issue →
