Which Composer Mentioned in Your Reading Lived to Be 77 Yrs Old?
Mary Hobson: It took me about two years [to read 'War and Peace']. I read it like a verse form, a judgement at a time.
Yelena Bozhkova
English author and translator Mary Hobson decided to acquire Russian at the historic period of 56, graduating in her sixties and completing a PhD aged 74. Now fluent in Russian, Hobson has translated "Eugene Onegin" and other poems by Pushkin, "Woe from Wit" past Griboyedov, and has won the Griboyedov Prize and Pushkin Medal for her work. RBTH visited Hobson at home in London to ask about her inspiring experience.
RBTH: Learning Russian is difficult at whatsoever historic period, and yous were 56. How did the idea first come to your mind?
Mary Hobson: I was having a human foot operation, and I had to stay in bed for 2 weeks in hospital. My daughter Emma brought me a large fatty translation of War and Peace. "Mum, you'll never become a better chance to read it", she said.
I'd never read Russian literature before. I got absolutely hooked on it, I just got then absorbed! I read like a starving human being eats. The paperback didn't have maps of the boxing of Borodino, I was making maps trying to understand what was happening. This was the best novel e'er written. Tolstoy creates the whole world, and while you read it, you believe in information technology.
I woke up in the hospital three days after I finished reading and of a sudden realized: "I haven't read it at all. I've read a translation. I would take to learn Russian."
RBTH: Did you read War and Peace in the original language eventually?
G.H.: Yes, it was the first affair I read in Russian. I bought a fatty Russian dictionary and off I went. It took me virtually two years. I read it similar a poem, a judgement at a fourth dimension. I learned such a lot, I however remember where I offset institute some words. "Betwixt," for instance. About a third of the way down the page.
RBTH: Do you lot recall your first steps in learning Russian?
M.H.: I had a plan to report the Russian linguistic communication in evening classes, but my Russian friend said: "Don't exercise that, I'll teach you." Nosotros sat in the garden and she helped me to call up the Cyrillic script. I was 56 at this time, and I found it very tiring reading in Cyrillic. I couldn't practice it in the evening because I only wouldn't be able to sleep. And Russian grammer is fascinating.
RBTH: You became an undergraduate for the first time in your sixties. How did you experience about studying with young students?
M.H.: I demand to explicate beginning why I didn't have any career before my fifties. My husband had a very serious disease, a cerebral abscess, and he became so disabled. I was just looking after him. And we had four children. Afterward 28 years I could not practise information technology any longer, I had suspension downs, depressions. I finally realized I would accept to leave. Otherwise I would merely go down with him. At that place was a life out there I hadn't lived. It was time to go out and to live it.
I left him. I've been on my own for three years in a limbo of quilt and depression. Then I picked upwards a phone and rang the number my friend had long since given me, that of the Schoolhouse of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University. "Practise yous accept mature students?" I asked. "Of sixty-ii?" They did.
When the first twenty-four hours of term arrived, I was admittedly terrified. I went twice around Russel square before daring to go in. The merely thing that persuaded me to do information technology was that I got offered the place and if I didn't do information technology, the children would be so aback of me. My group mates looked a niggling bit surprised at first merely then we were very chop-chop writing the same essays, reading the same stuff, having to exercise the aforementioned translations.
RBTH: You spent 10 months in Moscow as part of your course. How did you lot feel in Russia?
M.H.: I hardly dared open my mouth, considering I idea I got information technology wrong. Information technology lasted about a week like this, hardly daring to speak. Then I idea – I'g here only for x months. I shall dice if I don't communicate. I only have to chance it. Then I started bumbling stuff. I said things I didn't at all mean. I just said anything. The virtually dangerous thing was to make jokes. People looked at me as I was mad.
I hate to say it, but in 1991 the Russian ruble admittedly collapsed and for the first and last time in my life I was a wealthy adult female. I bought over 200 books in Russian, 10 "Consummate Collected Works" of my favorite 19th-century authors. Then it was a problem how to get them dwelling. Seventy-five of them were brought to London by a visiting grouping of schoolchildren. They took 3 books each.
RBTH: You're jubilant your 90th altogether in July. What's the secret of your longevity?
Yard.H.: If I had non gone to university, if I had given up and stopped learning Russian, I don't think I'd take lived this long. It keeps your heed agile, it keeps you physically active. Information technology affects everything. Learning Russian has given me a whole new life. A whole circumvolve of friends, a whole new fashion of living. For me information technology was the most enormous opening out to a new life.
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Source: https://www.rbth.com/arts/literature/2016/04/22/learning-russian-has-given-me-a-whole-new-life_587093
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