44 Give Me a Minute to Fix the World

Дайте мне минуточку…

Saint-Pétersbourg |

Russia

Russian

Behind the scenes

This text came to me the day after a lively evening about thirty years ago in Saint Petersburg. As is often the case in such moments, wherever they take place, a few drinks are enough to turn an ordinary conversation into a passionate debate about the biggest questions in the world… or the most absurd ideas.

In those moments, discussions can take unexpected turns: sentences follow one another without logic, reasoning becomes extravagant, and everyone suddenly feels capable of proposing their own way to reshape society.

I wanted to preserve this slightly surreal tone, where improbable ideas emerge amid laughter and imagination. In that particular memory, the intoxication simply made the scene joyfully absurd.

Echoes of the world

The text plays with the musicality and humour of the Russian language. In the sentence Как узнать бабушку-бабочку, если у неё бабочки нет? (Kak uznat babushku babochku, yesli u neyo babochki net?), which can be translated as “How can you recognize a grandmother-butterfly if she doesn’t have a bow tie?”, several nearly identical words echo one another.

Бабушка (babushka) means “grandmother.”
Бабочка (babochka) can refer both to a butterfly and to a bow tie.

These words share very similar sounds, making it possible to construct a deliberately absurd sentence, almost like an impossible riddle.

Another playful detail appears when I introduce myself as Кристоф Жакович (Christophe Jakovich). In Russian, many names include a patronymic derived from the father’s first name, often with the ending -ovich. Here, this patronymic is invented from a foreign name, Jacques, which gives it a slightly burlesque tone.

Listen to an audio excerpt of the text