24 June 2016. Leopold the Cat on the Unity of Holy Rus

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Leopold the Cat is one of the most beloved Sov-era multifilm characters. He’s as much a part of Russian visual culture as Taz and Bugs Bunny are in the USA. The original text used the word дпужно (druzhno), which has strong overtones of “friendship”, as “together” and “friendship” in Russian have common building-blocks. That is, дпужно implies much more than “togetherness” to a Russian, it brings up images of fraternity and brotherhood, due to its similarity to the word for “friendship”. So, it’s not “let’s live together”… it’s closer to “let’s live as one”, so that’s the rendering I chose to bring the meaning home to an English-speaker.

BMD

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