"We Will Bury You"

December 4, 2023 @ 11:42 am · Filed by under Translation

« previous post | next post »

By chance, while I was looking for something else about a supposed Russian mistranslation, I came upon this famous example:

“We Will Bury You” — How A Mistranslation Almost Started WW3

And the story of the man behind those fateful words

A Renaissance Writer
Exploring History

Medium (Jul 14, 2020)

Although this happened nearly seven decades ago, I still remember the electrifying impact Khrushchev's words had on the world.  Furthermore, from time to time during the interim between then and now, I heard echoes of this sensational, ominous warning on the part of the Soviet leader, but sometimes also allegations that it was the result of a mistranslation.

Since I write for Language Log and am hopefully in a position — with the help of Language Log readers — to set the record straight (or at least straighter than it was before), I thought that I had better read the Medium article carefully and seek additional confirmatory and contradictory evidence.

Here's the beginning and crux of the Medium article:

On November 18th, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev uttered the words that would set relations between the Soviet Union and the United States back a decade. At the Polish embassy in Moscow, to a room full of western diplomats, he proclaimed “we will bury you”.

Several NATO member nation envoys and the Israeli envoy left the room in protest and across the world, the spectre of nuclear war seemed to loom larger, while the doomsday clock ticked away ominously in the background. What many didn’t know at the time though was that “we will bury you” was, at best a misinterpretation, and at worst a complete mistranslation.

Viktor Sukhodrev, often dubbed the king of interpreters, is largely the man responsible for the words “we will bury you”. The Russian to English interpreter for Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev, Sukhodrev was raised in London and his fluent grasp of English would see him become the mouthpiece of Soviet leaders on the world stage.

He is visible in many official photos of the era, as well as holding the distinction of having met serval US presidents, from Eisenhower to George H W Bush.

Sukhodrev was certainly a master of his craft, but he was not infallible. Khrushchev was a particularly challenging individual to translate according to Sukhodrev. He could be an inflammatory speaker, he liked to tell jokes and relied heavily on proverbs to get his point across, many of which Sukhodrev had never heard before. This has often been put down to the fact that Khrushchev was brought up so close to the Russian Ukrainian border, and while we remember the USSR as one block, there were still great differences between even neighbour countries like Russia and Ukraine.

Though Khrushchev was reportedly his favourite boss to translate because he enjoyed the challenge, Sukhodrev is reported as saying of the man: “I worked with Khrushchev for many years, he was an uneducated person and he also didn’t like to read pre-edited texts. He liked to improvise, spoke plainly, and was fond of discussions and arguments.”

It is interesting to learn all of this vital information about the linguistic qualifications of Viktor Sukhodrev and the language characteristics of Nikita Khrushchev, but the simple fact remains:  did Viktor Sukhodrev mistranslate those fatal words spoken by Nikita Khrushchev on November 18th, 1956 at the Polish embassy in Moscow?

A Renaissance Writer, the author of the Medium article under discussion, continues their analysis of Khrushchev's words and Sukhodrev's translation of them:

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what Khrushchev meant when he said, “my vas pokhoronim”. Google translate will tell you it means “we bury you”, a less refined version of Sukhodrev’s “we will bury you.”

Many argue that he interpreted it too literally, however. “My vas pokhoronim” can be interpreted as several things such as: “we will live to see you buried”, “we shall be present at your funeral”, “we shall outlive you” and “we shall outlast you”, all of which, while certainly provocative statements, lack the open threat of “we will bury you”.

Sukhodrev disagreed though and stood by his translation, calling it an ‘exact interpretation’. When taking the full quote in context, his interpretation again loses some of the overtones of threat.

    “Whether you like it or not, we are on the right side of history. We will bury you.” — Nikita Khrushchev

The current GT translation of “My vas pokhoronim” is "We will bury you."  I think all of those less than literal translations mentioned above amount to so much waffling.  As a sometime translator and interpreter, I believe it is the duty of the practitioner of  those arts to provide an accurate, faithful, literal rendering and let his auditors / readers make of it what they will, just as the auditors and readers of the original language would do.

Here are some pertinent comments from Don Keyser, a former high-ranking Foreign Service officer:

For what it's worth, this presentation [by A Renaissance Writer] corresponds to my own understanding/sense of Khrushchev's meaning.  Of course, the Russian literally DOES mean "we will bury you."  But the Russians are as able as others, e.g., Americans, to speak figuratively, bombastically, in metaphors.  When we say "I'm going to crush you" or "I'm going to tie you up in knots like a pretzel" or "This Sunday our team is going to annihilate yours" etc etc etc … We don't mean this literally.  Most of us, anyway.
 
As for Xi, he is of course no Khrushchev in style or spontaneity.  Still, the same thought is there, at least when speaking to the party faithful. e.g., his internal speech, subsequently released, to the Central Committee in January 2013:
 
Some people think that communism can be aspired to but never reached, or even think that it cannot be hoped for, cannot be envisioned, and is a complete illusion. . . . Facts have repeatedly told us that Marx and Engels’s analysis of the basic contradiction of capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph outdated. This is the irreversible overall trend of social and historical development, but the road is winding. The ultimate demise of capitalism, and ultimate triumph of socialism, will inevitably be a long historical process.
 
And Xi of course is associated with the contemporary mantra: "The East is rising, the West is declining."  Whether or not he authored it, he arguably popularized it by intoning it publicly in 2021.  He seems to have first expressed the idea in 2014, and even then it was a case of borrowing from the more colorful Mao — "the East wind is prevailing over the West wind." 
 
On the perils of interpreting, the stories are of course legion.  There has been the long debate over whether JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" referred to the citizens of Berlin or a donut favored by them.  Germans come down on both sides, but everybody understood what he meant.  Then there was the famous Jimmy Carter episode in 1977 when, some say, his Polish-born, American interpreter rendered Carter's intended "I have love in my heart for the Polish people" as "I have lust in my heart for the Polish people."  There, too, nobody in Poland misunderstood what Carter was saying, but the choice of verb was an antiquated one commonly used for "to love" (not carnally) when the interpreter was young … but which by 1977 was most often used in the carnal sense.
 
I did two years of Chinese full-time at the Stanford Center in Taiwan as a graduate student.  A half-dozen years later I was "trained" as an interpreter for a year in Taichung at the Foreign Service Institute Chinese Language Field School there.  The most taxing exercises were those involving impromptu remarks by US Ambassador to the ROC Walter McConaughy.  McConaughy was well educated, of course, and no Khrushchev, but … he hailed from Montevallo, Alabama and his natural speaking style was replete with localisms of his youth as a southern boy.  Those raised as far "north" as Baltimore, as I was, had to guess what he meant sometimes.  I imagine that interpreters for the exceedingly colorful and colloquial LBJ had to struggle from time to time.
(Not, I stress, that I was ever in the same league with "real" professional interpreters.  To put it mildly.)

From Mark Metcalf:

Assuming that Khruschev was a hard-core Marxist, I would support the interpretation of his remarks as his assertion of the inevitability of Marxist/Socialist victory – "We'll watch capitalism get lowered into its inevitable grave."

Similarly, if Khruschev wanted to threaten the West, I'd argue that he would have said "Мы тебя прохороним!" – using the familiar case of the pronoun to add insult to injury. (or, possibly, тебе – after 4 decades, pronoun declensions are difficult to remember)

From:  Valery Tsimmerman:

This is what he said in Russian:

«Нравится вам или нет, но история на нашей стороне. Мы вас похороним»

Russian is my first language and I translate it as follows:

'Like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you"

Google translates it as follows:

'Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.'

Sukhodrev's translation was absolutely accurate. Saying it otherwise is an attempt to whitewash Soviet militarism.

 

Conclusion

In my estimation, Sukhodrev's "We will bury you" was a correct translation.  It was not, as claimed by A Renaissance Writer and many others, "at best a misinterpretation, and at worst a complete mistranslation."  Given an accurate translation, people are free to interpret it metaphorically as they wish.

 

Selected readings

 

Afterword

Somebody else can comment on the verisimilitude of the translated exchanges during the famous kitchen debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.

 

[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer and Daniel Waugh]

December 4, 2023 @ 11:42 am · Filed by under Translation


23 Comments

  1. F said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 1:38 pm

    The English word refers to any kind of shoveling dirt over someone, and the Russian word means something like "perform a funeral", vs "закопаем" which would be the more literal physical act. As a native speaker of both languages (more or less) they feel different to me. The translation is accurate but may activate somewhat different ganglia in speakers of the two languages because the English word is more blunt and physical.

  2. David Marjanović said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 3:09 pm

    the open threat of “we will bury you”

    Open threat? As if murderers usually buried their victims!

    Similarly, if Khruschev wanted to threaten the West, I'd argue that he would have said "Мы тебя прохороним!" – using the familiar case of the pronoun to add insult to injury.

    That works only in the singular. (If then.) As in French, the polite 2nd-person pronoun is the plural 2nd-person pronoun.

  3. David Marjanović said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 3:58 pm

    Khrushchev was brought up so close to the Russian Ukrainian border

    I forgot to mention that this was noticeable enough to give rise to numerous jokes. The one I know is: Khrushchev was supposed to give a speech on agricultural policy. It contained the word "pesticides", pestitsidy. So he rehearsed it; but in his Ukrainian accent, that word consistently came out as pizditsydy, which is obscene (like… utterly unprintable), so eventually the decision was made to talk about "herbicides" instead. And so, Soviet agriculture was set back by however many decades.

  4. Jonathan Smith said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 6:04 pm

    “we shall be present at your funeral”
    HAHhaa OK I have to imagine this would have been taken equally poorly

  5. Daniel Barkalow said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 6:25 pm

    The discussion seems to be largely about whether the Russian "My vas pokhoronim" means something other than, literally, "we will bury you". But I think the real issue is that the English "we will bury you" means something other than, literally, "we will bury you". If you're discussing funeral arrangements with a loved one, that's not a phrasing you'd use, even if it's literally the action you're planning, because it's so prominent in an inappropriate and disrespectful figurative sense. In particular, it means something like "we will cause you to need to be buried" (usually as an exaggeration). Perhaps Khrushchev meant something more like "It's your funeral" (that is, "I think your behavior puts your life at risk", which would make sense in context), and these statements don't have much literal difference.

  6. Sergey said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 6:32 pm

    +1 on the correct translation. Though usually and in that context the meaning of the phrase is not "we will kill you" as such but "we will outlive you and see you dead".

    As for pizditsydy, the Russian word for it is ядохимикаты (yadokhimikaty), literally "poison chemicals" which includes both pesticides and herbicides. So Ш think this story is completely apocryphal. Though there is another apocryphal story about a research institute named "Research institute for chemical fertilizers and poison chemicals" – "Научно-Исследовательский Институт Химических Удобрений и Ядохимикатов", with the indecent acronym НИИХУЯ.

  7. Philip Anderson said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 6:36 pm

    @David Marjanović
    I could imagine a gangster both threatening and doing that, although in concrete rather than earth.

  8. Peter B. Golden said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 7:27 pm

    The actual line said was: «Нравится вам или нет, но история на нашей стороне. Мы вас похороним» (Whether you like it or not, but history is on our side. We will bury you). By that, it was later explained, Khrushchev meant that History was on the side of Communism and that it would eventually emerge triumphant. Capitalism would give way to Socialism/Communism. Khrushchev was a Southern Russian, whose native dialect had a number of phonological features that were close to Ukrainian (e.g. "g" became "h"). He also was party boss of Ukraine for a number of crucial years before and after WWII.
    Ukrainian and Belarusian share that same sound change (g>h) in words common to the three Eastern Slavic languages. Brezhnev, an ethnic Russian, but born in Ukraine had an accent that was similar. Even Gorbachov, from a region east of Ukraine, periodically pronounced "h" for "g". Khrushchev, so relatives told me, was considered "uncultured" (некультурный), which is stronger in Russian than in English. I hadn't heard the pizditsydy story – a real gem.

  9. Seth said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 8:04 pm

    @Daniel Barkalow – maybe the sensibility is closer to the English expression "We will dance on your grave".

    On JFK/Berliner, I've read that while the statement could literally be parsed as referring to a donut, it's on the level of the joke about asking genie "Make me a sandwich" and the genie responds by transforming you into a sandwich.

  10. Richard said,

    December 4, 2023 @ 11:59 pm

    I do not have any formal training in Russian, but I am a fluent (second-language) speaker. To get immediately to the point: translating the phrase as "we will bury you" is a good translation.

    Some of your correspondents seem to be thinking about it a bit too much, attempting to translate the subtext of the phrase directly into English, rather than the phrase itself, despite that both the literal Russian ("Мы вас похороним") and the literal English translation ("we will bury you") have the same subtext, make the same metaphor, and are just as aggressive-sounding as one another, to within a rounding error.

    The note from Mark Metcalf in particular is puzzling to me on two points:

    1. I absolutely disagree that a Russian speaker would use тебя in that context for the whole of the West, as he suggests. It is simply non-idiomatic in any register of Russian, whether he was trying to be rude or not. Regardless of whether he is addressing the West in general or simply the diplomats in attendance, it is natural to say вас and only вас.

    2. To translate the phrase as "We'll watch capitalism get lowered into its inevitable grave" is an extraordinarily "artful" translation, to say the least. I have a lot of problems with that translation, but in short: translating a (completely legible) non-literal phrasing into а prolix explication of the metaphor is not good translation, specifically because it changes the subtext. In this case, it strips the phrase of its aggressive tone, which is what carries almost all the meaning.

    The single quibble I would have with "we will bury you" is that it sounds very slightly more active in English than Russian, as if the speaker is threatening the listener a touch more directly, but considering the context in which the phrase is spoken, both phrases "feel" very much the same. It's a sort of posturing – it's not a specific threat against the West, so it makes little sense to translate the funeral metaphor with overt specificity either. It's meant to convey an attitude toward the West, which both "we will bury you" and the original Russian do to essentially the same degree in the same way.

  11. Easterly said,

    December 5, 2023 @ 2:34 am

    @David Marjanović
    Personal experience shows that for non-native speakers of Serbian, differentiating between
    спољнотрговинско предузеће
    (spoljnotrgovinsko preduzece)
    (company for international trade)
    and
    сполнотрговинско предузеће
    (spolnotrgovinsko preduzece)
    (company for trade in sex)
    presents a similar challenge to Krushchev's problem with pestitsidy.

  12. bks said,

    December 5, 2023 @ 7:29 am

    Why does Google Translate care about periods after words?
    НИИХУЯ. -> Now
    НИИХУЯ -> Fucking

  13. Rube said,

    December 5, 2023 @ 8:05 am

    Somehow this got me thinking about the old Louis Armstrong song "I'll be glad when you're dead (you rascal you)". The singer is not directly threatening to kill his adversary, but there's no way that the message can be taken as anything but hostile.

  14. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 5, 2023 @ 8:08 am

    Note that we do use "bury" in English semi-metaphorically in phrases like "so-and-so buried his father last year," just meaning he outlived his father and presumably had some significant role in arranging as well as merely attending the funeral. It need not mean he literally dug the grave and/or refilled it with dirt after the coffin had been deposited therein.

    I tend to agree with the points above that a translation like "we will preside at your funeral" would not come off with a less threatening vibe to the Anglophone ear. Perhaps one nuance is that Khrushchev at least theoretically was a good Marxist who believed in so-called scientific materialism etc. and therefore thought the ultimate triumph of Communism was historically inevitable. If the end-state is inevitable, because Science, then predicting it out loud may or may not be impolitic but perhaps it doesn't feel like a "threat" feels to someone sufficiently committed to free will and/or unpredictably to think that there are multiple possible futures.

  15. Chester Draws said,

    December 5, 2023 @ 8:55 pm

    As a sometime translator and interpreter, I believe it is the duty of the practitioner of those arts to provide an accurate, faithful, literal rendering and let his auditors / readers make of it what they will, just as the auditors and readers of the original language would do.

    So you think all idioms should be translated literally? That would be weird, to the point of oddity. Surely the point of translation is to convey meaning, not words. I don't want to know what someone said, I want to know what message they were attempting to convey.

    If you are translating the French "les chiens ne font pas des chats" would you actually write "dogs don't make cats"? I would suggest, the correct translation is "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree". So much so, that I would suggest it is the literal translation.

    So even if Khrushchev said "We will bury you", the correct translation is "We will outlive you". That is what it literally means, even if it isn't what he literally said.

  16. Philip Taylor said,

    December 6, 2023 @ 7:43 am

    I think that it is necessary to distinguish between translation and interpretation, Chester. It is most certainly the task of an interpreter to convey the meaning of what the speaker has said (or what he is currently saying, in the context of simultaneous interpretation), but I believe that a translator’s task is to translate the given text faithfully and not to attempt to interpret it (in either or both senses of "interpret").

  17. martin schwartz said,

    December 6, 2023 @ 11:13 pm

    Everyone seems to be beating around the bush, as it were, re
    pizditsidy, but far be it from me overtly to decipher such an unprintable piece of utter vulvarity. On a very tangentially
    related matter, I rememeber barbershops had a disinfectant
    called Barbicide™–I see it's still going strong–despite
    its etymological sense of 'beard-killer'.
    Martin Schwartz

  18. Mike Maxwell said,

    December 7, 2023 @ 1:45 pm

    F said "The English word refers to any kind of shoveling dirt over someone…" That's one sense. There are other senses. Indeed one can speak of burying a close relative, meaning that one outlived that person (and probably attended their funeral), even if you didn't shovel any dirt, or if the deceased was cremated. Or you can bury some inconvenient truth in a pile of fact(oid)s, or you can bury yourself in your books/ work/ chores. And of course there are idioms like to "bury [your] differences".

    And most obviously, even in the sense of shoveling, it needn't be *someone*, you can bury a pipe or a treasure or a land mine.

  19. Josh R. said,

    December 7, 2023 @ 7:18 pm

    "There has been the long debate over whether JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" referred to the citizens of Berlin or a donut favored by them. Germans come down on both sides, but everybody understood what he meant."

    There has been no "debate." There's the truth, which is that Kennedy spoke perfectly idiomatic German provided to him by a native German speaker, which was immediately and perfectly understood by all the German-speakers in attendance, and then there's the urban legend that sprung up in the English speaking world long afterwards, and continually spread by those who only have a smattering of Travel German.

    This article gives the best breakdown of the linguistic question and history of the myth.
    https://www.berlinestates.co/en/news/the-truth-behind-the-jfk-jelly-doughnut-myth/360
    (See Eichhoff's original article if you have access to academic journals.)

    But since this is a language blog, I should probably give the linguistic specifics.

    The misunderstanding arises from people learning not to use the indefinite article "ein" when stating their place of origin or profession. Thus, if you ask someone from Berlin where in Germany they are from, they will say, "Ich bin Berliner."

    So, the unwary student of German perceives that Kennedy said, "Ich bin ein Berliner", not that Berliner is also a name of a pastry, and assume that Kennedy used imperfect German. Perhaps largely understood, but mistaken nonetheless.

    But actually, it would have been unidiomatic for Kennedy to use "Ich bin Berliner," because he was speaking figuratively, not literally. If you want to say, I'm from Berlin, you say, "Ich bin Berliner," but if you want to say you have the qualities of someone from Berlin, you say "Ich bin ein Berliner." If you are pointing to an professional teacher, you can say, "Er ist Lehrer." If you are pointing to someone who's like a teacher, you say, "Er ist ein Lehrer."

    In the German Wikipedia article of the incident, there is no mention of Kennedy misspeaking, but the whole "jelly donut" question is dealt with in a section called "Missverständnis im englischsprachigen Raum" — Misunderstanding in the Anglosphere.

    I bring this up only because it is a shame that this moving speech, which brought such succor to the beleaguered citizens of Berlin at the time, and remains admired in Germany today, has been reduced to a joke in America, if not the entire English-speaking world.

  20. JoshR said,

    December 7, 2023 @ 7:20 pm

    "not that Berliner is also a name of a pastry" -> "note that Berliner is also the name of a pastry

  21. Philip Taylor said,

    December 8, 2023 @ 6:51 am

    "it is a shame that this moving speech, which brought such succor to the beleaguered citizens of Berlin at the time, and remains admired in Germany today, has been reduced to a joke in America, if not the entire English-speaking world" — perhaps not the entire world. Until reading this thread, I had never thought for one second that Kennedy said "I am a doughnut" — rather, he affirmed his identity with, and total support for, the people of Berlin. I suspect (but have no evidence as yet) that most Britons believe the same.

  22. David Marjanović said,

    December 8, 2023 @ 5:23 pm

    НИИХУЯ

    Day saved.

    Why does Google Translate care about periods after words?

    It can't find the word in the dictionary, so it grasps at straws. The word is нихуя with one и and translates pretty well as "fuck-all" – "nothing", but obscene.

    far be it from me overtly to decipher such an unprintable piece of utter vulvarity

    I see what you did there.

    (In this thread I'm trying to imitate Soviet prudery.)

    But actually, it would have been unidiomatic for Kennedy to use "Ich bin Berliner," because he was speaking figuratively, not literally. If you want to say, I'm from Berlin, you say, "Ich bin Berliner," but if you want to say you have the qualities of someone from Berlin, you say "Ich bin ein Berliner." If you are pointing to an professional teacher, you can say, "Er ist Lehrer." If you are pointing to someone who's like a teacher, you say, "Er ist ein Lehrer."

    Nonsense, all nonsense, if I may say so as a native speaker. Whether the article is used or not is simply regional variation within German, to some extent even within Standard German.

    But yes, everybody understood JFK just fine, and some may have thought his source was a bit uneducated but most probably didn't notice.

    And of course the pastry (which is like a donut except it doesn't have a hole) isn't called Berliner in Berlin. In Berlin, it's called Pfannkuchen. (And pancakes are called Eierkuchen.)

  23. Philip Taylor said,

    December 9, 2023 @ 11:24 am

    "the pastry (which is like a donut except it doesn't have a hole)" — intriguing , because it means that all of the pastries which I purchase as "doughnuts" cannot therefore be doughnuts because they too lack a hole. To explain, in Britain we have "doughnuts" (with no hole, usually filled with raspberry jam) and "ring doughnuts" (usually filled with nothing other than dough, but including a hole). So perhaps Pfannkuchen/Berliner ARE doughnuts after all, even though they lack a hole …

RSS feed for comments on this post