SoundCzech A bear’s service
Hello and welcome to another edition of SoundCzech, Radio Prague’s Czech language course, helping you learn new idioms and key phrases through song lyrics. Today we’re listening to a song by Hana Hegerová – the Czech queen of chanson sometimes referred to as this country’s answer to Edith Piaf. The tune is called ‘Potměšilý host’ (which you could translate as ‘the wily guest’) and the phrase to listen out for comes nearly halfway through the song. It goes “slouží službu medvědí”:
‘Sloužit medvědí službu’ translates literally as ‘to
do a
bear’s service’, and actually means to - with the best of intentions -
do more harm than good, or to set out to help someone and actually end up
doing harm to that person. Here at Radio Prague we couldn’t think of any
neat English translation for ‘sloužit medvědí službu’
– the
closest idiomatic equivalent we could muster was ‘the road to hell is
paved with good intentions’. But that doesn’t quite fit, because the
infernal overtones of the English phrase make it sound quite a lot
stronger
than the Czech ‘bear’s service’. Maybe you can help us – if you
can
think of a better translation of ‘sloužit medvědí
službu’, then
write to us. Here’s the phrase again to stimulate your imagination.
Some more ursine idioms now: people who are clumsy, or slow and heavy in
their movements, are sometimes compared to bears (medvědi) in
Czech. If
someone lumbers about the place, then you can say ‘valí se jako
medvěd’ – ‘he moves like a bear’. Or you can call a rather
ham-fisted individual ‘neohrabaný jako medvěd’ – ‘as
clumsy as a
bear’. And this isn’t all that common, but if you are exhausted and
plan to have a good long sleep, in Czech you can say ‘budu spát
jako
medvěd’ – ‘I’m going to sleep like a bear’. I hope this
hasn’t
been more Czech than you can bear, and with that awful pun, I bid you
goodbye, na shledanou!
