The thing about злой

I suppose I’m fixating a bit on this now, though that seems perfectly appropriate for when one translates such a fixating book, but this злой really is a nasty thing. I now am seeing two sets of words, mostly “moral” on one side (as in Pevear’s dichotomy noted in post number 1, though it now seems too categoric), mostly “psychological” on the other. And so there is wicked, malevolent, and evil; and then there is mean, petty, nasty, and spiteful. I suppose vengeful might also work, though I don’t quite see “angry,” which Jessie Coulson offers in the famous first English line: “I am a sick man… I am an angry man.” Really, the state of being “angry” for the quality or attribuite of being “zloi” just doesn’t work for me. If someone else sees how this can work, I would really like to hear about it. I am thinking that the best adjective to capture all this is probably “bad,” and J.C. does indeed have “bad” in the later phrase, “I was a bad civil servant.” This is the same adjective, in one case “angry,” in the other “bad.” Bad is good here because of its wide semantic range: wicked is bad, and nasty, mean, and spiteful are bad, so if zloi = bad, the reader gets to choose in the same way that a reader of the Russian text would get to choose what zloi means.

Until we come to what appears to be the noun from which this adjective has been derived, which in this case is злость (zlost’), as specified when the narrator makes clear that he did all this stuff со злости, meaning “out of zlost’.” Here “wickedness” or “evil” seem just too willful an interpetation on the translators’ part, since there is a common word зло (zlo), which is the acknowledged opposite of good(ness), while злость is somehow narrower, more specific. Злость practically forces one to grimace and crinkle one’s nose in disgust when one pronounces it. Зло could conceivably be grand à la Milton’s Satan, but not злость. Зло could also be abstract, evil in principle, part of a philosophical discussion about the world. Злость puts principle in the flesh. Earthy, smelly flesh.

I am now leaning towards maliciousness or perhaps malice as the noun in question. He did X out of malice evokes a personality and an attitude, maybe even a facial expression. We’ll see if this sticks. I hope it doesn’t leave a scar.