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Наша честь song
10 September 2025 01:40 amI think this is about as good as my translation attempts at the Наша честь song ("Our Honour") are going to get; I haven't made any more changes for a week or so. So here it is.
It's a rather different challenge from Boyarsky's red horse song, partly because the metre (dactyl line endings) is just so beastly to write in English -- plus every single line is supposed to be either a rhyme or a half-rhyme -- and partly because it isn't even vaguely humorous. I need to try to get the elegaic but elevated and affirmative tone rather than sounding inadvertently like Byron's "Don Juan", and the metre really doesn't help in that respect. I have compromised and not attempted a full rhyme on any of the dactyl lines, but I have put a lot of effort into attempting at least an assonance on all of them; life would have been a good deal easier if I had not!
Original lyric (with very unsatisfactory translation): https://teksti-pesen.com/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
My attempt at a literal translation:( Read more... )
My attempted 'singing translation':( Read more... )
I made a conscious choice, after much agonizing over the issue, to change the translated title from the literal "Our Honour", because the song isn't *about* 'our honour' (and moreover that reiterated phrase doesn't actually occur anywhere in my version of the lyric, because it doesn't fit the scansion...) It's not a song about the possession of honour, as such; it's a song about honour being the one thing within our control in a world where we have no influence over the events that happen to us. So I went for the phrase that I did use at that same point in the chorus, the repetition in my case being of "ours" rather than of "our honour".
I am *still* not happy with the translation of the chorus as a whole, but have consistently struggled to do any better :-(
(I have also, of course, deliberately chosen to translate the Russian 'soul' with the more English concept of the heart
in the context of such idioms!)
Edit: here is a better text (albeit without translation) for the ангел-хранитель song, minus the couple of transcription errors that are on the above-cited Наша честь page: https://lyricsonline.ru/36293-igor-nadzhiev-moy-angel.html
It's a rather different challenge from Boyarsky's red horse song, partly because the metre (dactyl line endings) is just so beastly to write in English -- plus every single line is supposed to be either a rhyme or a half-rhyme -- and partly because it isn't even vaguely humorous. I need to try to get the elegaic but elevated and affirmative tone rather than sounding inadvertently like Byron's "Don Juan", and the metre really doesn't help in that respect. I have compromised and not attempted a full rhyme on any of the dactyl lines, but I have put a lot of effort into attempting at least an assonance on all of them; life would have been a good deal easier if I had not!
Original lyric (with very unsatisfactory translation): https://teksti-pesen.com/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
My attempt at a literal translation:( Read more... )
My attempted 'singing translation':( Read more... )
I made a conscious choice, after much agonizing over the issue, to change the translated title from the literal "Our Honour", because the song isn't *about* 'our honour' (and moreover that reiterated phrase doesn't actually occur anywhere in my version of the lyric, because it doesn't fit the scansion...) It's not a song about the possession of honour, as such; it's a song about honour being the one thing within our control in a world where we have no influence over the events that happen to us. So I went for the phrase that I did use at that same point in the chorus, the repetition in my case being of "ours" rather than of "our honour".
I am *still* not happy with the translation of the chorus as a whole, but have consistently struggled to do any better :-(
(I have also, of course, deliberately chosen to translate the Russian 'soul' with the more English concept of the heart
in the context of such idioms!)
Edit: here is a better text (albeit without translation) for the ангел-хранитель song, minus the couple of transcription errors that are on the above-cited Наша честь page: https://lyricsonline.ru/36293-igor-nadzhiev-moy-angel.html