Dan Guralnik
on translating Vladimir Vysotskii
My translations grow out of a deep dissatisfaction with available translations of Vysotsky’s work into English. The better ones are so academic they remind me of a quote from Milos Forman’s Amadeus: “Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn’t rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus…people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!” On one hand, knowing Russian as a mother tongue and having been raised on stories about the USSR — good and bad — and knowing scores of Vysotsky’s songs by heart makes it hard to believe that Vysotsky would ever approve of such haut-couture translations. On the other hand, Vysotsky’s gift for juggling the Russian language and harnessing its cultural references that span centuries of human experience make most fan-made translations too banal and discolored despite the earnest attempt to convey his emotional range.
My goal was to translate the poem while preserving its emotional range, rhythm, and measure, so it could be sung in English as a song to the same melody as the original and understood by my American friends and family. My solution was to make use of colloquial language, as you may have well noticed. Here are some notes/examples:
The chorus is still too academic. I’d love to see something simpler replace the “transpire”–“desire” pair, even more so when I think of the corresponding pair in the original (sbyvaets’a/prorochits’a – hochets’a), which is a simpler rhyme, based on the repetition of a ubiquitous suffix.
A few details in the song, such as those relating to the experience of boarding a long-range train in Russia (one aboard which you’re about to spend days to weeks, where you will require towels and linen, and you’d like those to be clean…), have been replaced with analogous, more contemporary, symbols of comfort that are also more available and/or relevant on this side of the Atlantic. Just one line (the fourth line of the second verse) is given for conveying the train experience, with Vysotsky counting on the listener to conjure up their own memories thereof; in the US, I think, it is easier to ask you to recall how much leg room you had on your latest flight…
Similarly, the phrase kakoj-to tip, which could have been treated in standard English as a general reference to “some stranger” (and usually is, as a brief online search for translations of this song will demonstrate), is better conveyed by “some dude,” because the latter does carry with it the necessary modicum of repulsion/disrespect.
I am certain that better, much better, translations are possible. Perhaps my conclusion from working on this one should be that translation is not merely about rewriting sentences in another language: it is about the communication of whole experiences. In the case of Vladimir Vysotsky, who dedicated his writing to the experience of life by less fortunate people, and who finds his roots in the study of song in Russian criminal culture (blatnye pesni), translating his work into English may be better served by the loose and laden language of the American Midwest than by the standard, literary English language. My sincere thanks to the editorial team of DoubleSpeak for a very helpful discussion!
about the author
Vladimir Vysotskii (1938–1980) was an accomplished actor and one of the famous singer-songwriters of post-WWII Soviet culture who survived the blockade of Leningrad as a child and was greatly influenced by the societal and cultural effects of the Second World War. Having witnessed the crash of patriotic Stalinism as a teenager, the “warming” (ottepel’) of Khruschev times and finally, the “stagnation” (zastoj) during Brezhnev, Vysotskii, in his poetry and song, casts a wide net of empathy over the “simple folk” (prostoj narod) mocked by the Soviet intellectual elites, the homeless war orphans forced into crime, the millions of wounded and bereaved WWII soldiers, and the oppressed non-conformists (inakomysl’aschij) who were tortured and disposed of by a regime whose ends justified all means. Love, death, and the love and beauty of life are themes woven intricately into every poem written by Vysotskii, with his song renditions of these poems so emotionally overwhelming – even in his comical writing – that his resulting popularity made it impossible for the Soviet regime to suppress his concerts (which started out as unofficial “evenings with friends”) or even his calling out the most vile practices of Brezhnev’s regime, such as imprisonment of political foes in psychiatric wards (see, e.g., the song Oshibka Vyshla). What made him still acceptable in the Soviet regime may have been a deeper, non-trivial side of his longing for true freedom for his people, its young culture, and its ideals. The Soviet regime had made it impossible for him to look up to the West, in whose political culture he could see other, no less powerful, patterns of oppression (see songs Temnota, Misteriya Hippi and the most overt Pesnya o mistere McKinley).
about the translator
My name is Dan Guralnik. I am a mathematician working on geometric/topological methods for knowledge representation at Kod*Lab (Penn ESE) and am with Robert Ghrist’s group at the department of mathematics. I was born in Israel in 1975, raised by my Russian-Jewish parents, who introduced me to Vysotskii when I was about nine (or was it ten?) years old. He was a hero to them.
I moved to the US at the age of thirty, my first six years spent in the “Bible Belt” (specifically Vanderbilt and the University of Oklahoma), where I learned many new things about English. This weekend is yet another anniversary of my dad’s passing (11/17/1939–10/20/2001) of lung cancer. Like every cool dude in his days (Vladimir Vysotskii included), Dad used to smoke a lot. The song I’ve attempted to translate here is the song I played for the small gathering at his funeral – a song celebrating life in what seems a singularly Russian way, painting heaven as the best of all worlds, save one: ours.
