On Animal Farm, Part I

Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm shows how a revolution could lead to the rise of opportunists, power struggles, infighting, fake news, and ultimately a new breed of authoritarians. Even though Orwell was looking at the rise of Joseph Stalin in post-revolution Russia as the model for his animal farm, we would later see the same sequence of events in Communist Cuba, Chairman Mao’s China, and other places. In this episode, my cohost Su and I discuss Thakin Ba Thaung’s translation of Animal Farm, titled ခြေလေးချောင်းတော်လှန်ရေး (The Four-Legged Revolution), and how some of the chapters are chillingly similar to what has happened, and is still happening in present day Burma, our homeland. Along the way, we give you the Burmese words and phrases you can use to talk about dictator pigs and dogs in the book, and in the world we live in. (Music courtesy of Pixabay)

Vocabulary

ဂန္ထဝင် classic

သခင်ဘသောင်း Thakhin Ba Thaung, a Burmese translator of Animal Farm

ခြေလေးချောင်းတော်လှန်ရေး The Four-Legged Revolution, name of a Burmese translation of Animal Farm

လေရူးသုန်သုန် Wild Gust Blowing, Burmese name for a translation of Gone with the Wind

ဘာသာပြန်တယ် to translate

လက်ထောက်ပုလိပ်အုပ် assistant superintendent of police

မူရင်း original

အနှစ်သာရ essence

အဓိကဖြစ်ရပ် main events

အာဏာရှင်စနစ် authoritarianism 

ဖိနှိပ်တယ် to oppress

အာဏာယစ်မူးတယ် to be drunk with power

အာခံတယ် to defy

သုတ်သင်တယ် to execute, to eliminate 

လူတန်းစားခွဲခြားတယ် to discriminate by class

စည်းရုံးတယ် to persuade others to join

ပင်မဇာတ်ကောင် main characters

မျက်မှောက်ကာလ current age

ခေတ်ပြိုင်ကာလ contemporary era

စင်ပြိုင်ပါတီ rival party

ဗန္ဓုလ Bandoola, name of a historical general, also the Burmese name for Napoleon in the Burmese version of Animal Farm 

သံကြောင် squeaky voice, name of the character Squealer in a Burmese translation of Animal Farm

အသံပြာပြာနဲ့ with scratchy, raspy voice

ဝါဒဖြန့်တယ် to spread propaganda 

ကိုယ်စားပြုတယ် to embody

လူမှုကွန်ရက် social media 

ဝါဒမှိုင်းမိတယ် to be swept up in propaganda 

ခို pigeon

သာတူညီမျှ to be equal

ဘုရားမြှောက်တယ် to turn someone into a God

ပဋိညာဉ် pledge, oath, agreement

သားရေကွင်းဥပဒေ rubber band regulation, meaning it bends to serve a group

ကျုံ့တယ် to shrink

ဆန့်တယ် to expand 

အခွင့်ထူးခံလူတန်းစား the privileged class

ဇာတ်ကွက် dramatic scene

သစ္စာဖေါက် traitor 

သွေးညှီနံ့ the stench of blood

လက်နက်ကိုင် armed, weapon carrying