And the funny thing is, these Russian patriots don’t have any love for their own language. The author I’m translating uses the expression “под покровом ночи” completely seriously. It’s like saying “since the dawn of humanity” in English but worse. We are talking about a sarcastic, unsentimental language. You can’t do “под покровом ночи” and “запечатлел поцелуй на ее устах” unironically.

Think about really bad clichés in English. This author uses every one she can think of in Russian.

Ah, here we go. Paragraph two of my translation. A graphic description of a Ukrainian child being raped by a Russian soldier.

The novel was written before February 24. The author is a middle-aged, very educated Russian woman. And what does she choose to do in her free time? Fantasize about Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian children, of course. What makes the story particularly cute is that the word “Ukrainian” is never mentioned. It’s obvious from geographic names where the action takes place but the existence of Ukrainians is too traumatic for the Russian writer to mention even in passing.

I started this translation ten minutes ago, and there’s already all this. Putin, schmutin. This woman doesn’t live in Putin’s Russia. She lives in Montreal. There’s something badly wrong with these people completely independent of Putin.

One of my father’s obligations I’ve taken over is translating a novel from Russian into English. He translated about two thirds, and now I get to finish it. The author is a Russian woman, so obviously, the novel is about the glorious Russian troops. It’s set during World War I, and the very first paragraph I have to translate is about Russian troops murdering civilians and raping women in Western Ukraine. The soldiers are portrayed as poor miserable victims, driven to this behavior by bad leadership. Because that’s how it always works in Russia.

This is pretty much the last thing I want to be translating right now but duty calls. I’ll also be translating poetry because there are poems in this novel.

I have no dog in the gun control fight but I do dislike specious, fake arguments. “Why not ban just the AR-15?” is such an argument. Nobody can possibly take it seriously since it comes from the same people who said “it’s just gay marriage” but then put male rapists into female prisons.

The same people also said “two weeks to flatten the curve” and then locked us up for two years and trashed our standard of living.

I used to believe these liars. “It’s just referring to somebody with a name they chose, what’s the big deal?” Then, almost instantaneously, it turned into “let’s imprison parents who refuse to castrate their children.”

These are people who always pretend to be for some reasonable, moderate measure but the second you compromise with them, they go for the most outlandish, winner-takes-all feast of extreme radicalism.

The gun violence problem in the US is the problem of gangs. Anybody who forgets to mention gangs in a discussion of gun violence is a liar. And of course it’s the same liars who pretended that COVID is dangerous to children and Officer Sicknick was murdered with a trash can by Trump supporters. (Or five million other lies).

We have terrible gun violence in our Democrat-run city of St Louis. The last time a Republican was a mayor was in 1945. We also have terrible gun violence in Chicago. The last time Chicago had a Republican mayor was in 1931. The sky-high murder rate in these cities owes entirely to the gangs. Almost a century of uninterrupted Democrat rule of these cities created the conditions for the existence and dominance of these gangs.

Constantly, I see and hear devastating news about people of all ages, good, peaceful, innocent people, being gunned down here in St Louis. Or upstate in Chicago. We are expecting a very bloody Memorial Day, as usual. These victims are a direct result of the failed policies of the Democrats. What these cities need is somebody like Rudy Giuliani but we’ll never get one.

I feel very strongly on the subject of gun violence in St Louis and Chicago. And the indifference with which the BLMing anti-gunners react to it makes me sick.