What is the meaning of "pole of time" here?

Question

In the translation of a story by Daniil Kharms, I see the following sentence:> Thirty-five poles of time elapsed and mine host brought Ivan Ivanovich his entrecote on a round wooden platter.Two phrases are not clear to me in this context.The first one is "poles of time". Does that mean "units of time"? If so, the sentence starts with "Thirty-five units of time elapsed..." which is not an unusual expression for a Kharms story (but, I suppose, an unusual one in general).The second phrase is "mine host". Here, "host" is the host of a hostelry. Is this an old saying/ phrase that's used when telling stories?The full text of the story can be found at http://chneukirchen.org/tmp/www.geocities.com/Athens/8926/Kharms/Incidences.html towards the end of the page.

Answer 1

In the original Russian, the third sentence of "A Historical Episode" in Daniil Kharms' Incidences (1939) reads "Прошло 35 колов времени, и хозяин принес Ивану Ивановичу антрекот на круглой деревянной дощечке." At least according to multitran.com, my go-to Russian literary dictionary, кол времеми is not a set phrase or idiom in Russian, meaning it also doesn't have a set translation.

So let's look at another translator's version. In Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (2009), Matvei Yankelevich translates the title of Kharms' story collection as Events and the chapter in question as "An Episode from History." The third sentence reads, "Thirty-five notches of time passed, and the tavern keeper brought Ivan Ivanovich the steak on a round wooden board." You're right to infer the phrase means something close to unit of time, although it's a nonstandard unit, which suits the absurdist style in which Kharms writes. It takes longer than thirty-five seconds but less than thirty-five minutes to cook a steak, so we are left wondering what unit of time the narrator means by notch.

The second phrase you indicate, mine host, is an affectation of the other translator (whose name I can't verify) that they use to sound satirically old-fashioned. The word хозяин literally means landlord or proprietor, but the original Russian doesn't use any possessive adjective (which might translate to my or mine). Google Dictionary says that mine host is a humorous phrase meaning "the landlord or landlady of a pub," which, while technically applicable to this passage, is trying too hard stylistically. Kharms' narrator doesn't intend to be funny: He's reporting the ridiculous situation as it is, a hallmark of absurdism. In contrast, Yankelevich faithfully renders the word as the tavern keeper, which better suits the matter-of-fact tone of the story.