Read the Whole Book Dork Diaries Not So Perfect Pet Sitter

Mary Hobson: It took me about two years [to read 'State of war and Peace']. I read it like a poem, a sentence at a fourth dimension.

Yelena Bozhkova

English writer and translator Mary Hobson decided to larn Russian at the age 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" by Griboyedov, and has won the Griboyedov Prize and Pushkin Medal for her work. RBTH visited Hobson at home in London to ask near her inspiring experience.

RBTH: Learning Russian is difficult at any age, and you lot were 56. How did the idea starting time come to your mind?

Mary Hobson: I was having a foot operation, and I had to stay in bed for two weeks in infirmary. My daughter Emma brought me a large fat translation of War and Peace. "Mum, yous'll never get a amend gamble to read it", she said.

I'd never read Russian literature before. I got absolutely hooked on information technology, I simply got then absorbed! I read like a starving man eats. The paperback didn't take maps of the boxing of Borodino, I was making maps trying to understand what was happening. This was the all-time novel ever written. Tolstoy creates the whole world, and while you lot read information technology, you believe in information technology.

I woke upwardly in the hospital three days later on I finished reading and suddenly realized: "I oasis't read it at all. I've read a translation. I would have to learn Russian."

RBTH: Did y'all read War and Peace in the original language eventually?

M.H.: Yeah, it was the first affair I read in Russian. I bought a fatty Russian dictionary and off I went. It took me about two years. I read information technology like a poem, a sentence at a time. I learned such a lot, I withal remember where I first found some words. "Betwixt," for case. Most a tertiary of the way down the page.

RBTH: Do you remember your start steps in learning Russian?

One thousand.H.: I had a programme to study the Russian language in evening classes, but my Russian friend said: "Don't do that, I'll teach y'all." We sabbatum in the garden and she helped me to remember the Cyrillic script. I was 56 at this fourth dimension, and I constitute it very tiring reading in Cyrillic. I couldn't do information technology in the evening because I simply wouldn't exist able to slumber. And Russian grammar is fascinating.

RBTH: You became an undergraduate for the first time in your sixties. How did you lot feel about studying with young students?

One thousand.H.: I need to explain beginning why I didn't have any career earlier my fifties. My hubby had a very serious illness, a cognitive abscess, and he became then disabled. I was merely looking afterwards him. And nosotros had 4 children. After 28 years I could not practise it whatsoever longer, I had break downs, depressions. I finally realized I would have to leave. Otherwise I would simply go down with him. There 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. And so I picked up a phone and rang the number my friend had long since given me, that of the School of Slavonic and Due east European Studies, London University. "Exercise you accept mature students?" I asked. "Of sixty-two?" They did.

When the outset twenty-four hours of term arrived, I was absolutely terrified. I went twice effectually Russel square before daring to get in. The only thing that persuaded me to practise it was that I got offered the place and if I didn't do it, the children would be then ashamed of me. My group mates looked a petty fleck surprised at first but so we were very quickly writing the same essays, reading the same stuff, having to do the same translations.

RBTH: You spent x months in Moscow as role of your course. How did you experience in Russia?

M.H.: I hardly dared open my mouth, because I thought I got it wrong. It lasted about a week similar this, hardly daring to speak. And so I thought – I'm hither only for 10 months. I shall die if I don't communicate. I just have to take chances information technology. Then I started bumbling stuff. I said things I didn't at all mean. I merely said anything. The near dangerous thing was to make jokes. People looked at me as I was mad.

I hate to say it, just in 1991 the Russian ruble absolutely complanate and for the first and last fourth dimension in my life I was a wealthy adult female. I bought over 200 books in Russian, ten "Complete Collected Works" of my favorite 19th-century authors. Then it was a problem how to get them home. Seventy-five of them were brought to London by a visiting group of schoolchildren. They took three books each.

RBTH: You're jubilant your 90th birthday in July. What's the secret of your longevity?

M.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. Information technology keeps your mind active, it keeps yous physically agile. It affects everything. Learning Russian has given me a whole new life. A whole circle of friends, a whole new manner of living. For me it was the near 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