Lost in translation of Frank Herbert

In my recent reply to Enrique Dans’ opinion about second coming of Trump as the new Gilded Age (actually, the Gilded Age of Information has already started long before the first Trump’s victory, and today we’re simply rollbacking to the track), I noted that I set before well-worn aphorism by Santayana a corollary to it, kindly provided by Frank Herbert:

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.

Herbert wrote thus in the opening epigraph to Chapterhouse: Dune, the last novel of his published within his lifetime, also one of the best (second best in sequence for me, immediately after Dune itself).

As a Moscow-born person, I, of course, first read Chapterhouse: Dune in my early childhood in Russian translation. Now I recalled how among many faults of Russian translations of Herbert’s works sits also an error in this very epigraph, but, more interestingly, this mistake provides something alike hidden bottom to his already witty remark.

In Russian translation, named Капитул Дюны (yet another blunder right out of the stargate, for in back-translation to English it would mean Chapterhouse of Dune, while all life and cities on Arrakis at that moment of Herbert’s future history have been already razed to the ground), we read:

Те, кто желает повторения прошлого, должны преподавать историю.

Which in back-translation would be equal to

Those who would repeat the past must teach the history.

Easy to see how the sense is changing.

Moreover, in 1990s, when the translation had been done (and since has been republished many times), such an advice would have evoked a fit of bitter laughter from Russian reader: teachers of history across the former USSR often depended then, essentially, on lawn-and-garden farming for subsistence. Today they receive higher salaries, but not by much.

Ditto medics; that’s why, by the way, medics’ children from across the former USSR in America often blushed when pen-friends in America whistled with respect (at the power of imaginable salary) after having heard where their parents were working…

That said, it looks like current baby boomers at the rudders of power in the US and Russia, busy waging flowery proxy-WWIII in Ukraine, were too lazy to study the history, limiting themselves with desire to fully control the teaching.

That was a bad mistake.

Though the very fact of that mistake seems to have been lost in translation.