Verse translation
12 July 2025 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'm busy translating Mikhail Boyarsky's "Рыжий конь" (or to be more accurate, the Dobrynin/Derbenov song that happened to be a hit for Boyarsky in 1986) -- backwards, for no entirely good reason other than that I not only started with the chorus but then translated the last verse first :-) (And what *is* it about Russians and running barefoot over the grass? Is it some kind of atavistic folk-memory? At least I now recognise the phrase in question...!)
Naturally one does tend to translate rhyming couplets backwards, because there is no point in getting the perfect rendition of the first half only to then realise that there is no earthly way of getting anything to rhyme with that... But it is very satisfying when a nicely idiomatic version of a phrase just happens to match up perfectly with the hopefully-open rhyme scheme previously put in place for the end of the verse ;-)
(As always with rhymes, if you're going to have a weak and/or slightly forced ending then it is far better not to have it at the conclusion, because that sticks out a mile -- so you write the second half *first*, then fiddle round with possibilities to lead up to that...)
Four more lines to go. Now I remember why I didn't start with the first verse; this is the one where I don't actually know what any of the words mean and shall have to go away and research them first. (My motoring vocabulary is sorely lacking, even if I do know two different words for 'horse' and two for 'sword' respectively :-D)
Weirdly, there doesn't seem to be an English translation of the lyrics anywhere on the Internet, even a non-singing one. There is, however, a *French* singing translation, very nicely done (so far as I can judge), which was sufficient to tell me what the song was about and to act as a crib for most of the Russian version. (Although he has understandably cheated by rendering "прадед" -- "before-grandfather" -- as "grand-père", since "arrière-grand-père" is even more impossible in terms of scansion than the English equivalent!)
However, since I don't have any car-vocabulary to speak of in French either, I can't draw the parallels with this verse and shall have to look practically every word up from scratch to determine its function in the sentence :-p To be fair, thanks to Russian's highly inflected nature -- a Read-Only language! -- I can actually tell what is a verb and what is an adjective even if I haven't any idea of what they mean. The problem comes when you get things like participles which are functionally indistinguishable from adjectives -- I literally cannot see any verb in that first phrase at all. At that point I'm afraid I rely on looking up the meaning of the root-words in order to guess at the grammar, which works provided that one doesn't get hold of the wrong end of the stick and jump to a completely inaccurate conclusion about who is doing what to whom!
The woes of trying to do translation when all you have going for you is a really good command of English and just enough of another language to scratch out the meaning...
Since I now have two long and narrow empty margarine tubs suitable to balance on my windowsill, I have tried planting up some of the kale and beetroot that went to seed, to see if it will grow (and eat as 'baby leaves' if it does). The kale is nice little round black seeds in dry white pods; the beetroot is pretty much invisible among the general black muck in the bottom of the paper bag, if there is any actual seed in there at all. However I did get unexpected germination from my previous attempts to plant from this collected seed-spike...
I also sowed some more mesembryanthemums (probably -- again, the seed is invisible), since they haven't been doing well, and the large one that I transplanted appears to have died completely. I haven't actually succeeded in getting any decent seedheads for some time, though I got a lot of self-sown mesembryanthemums in with the tomatoes last year. They flower all right, but they don't seem to get big enough to produce seed (like the 'starved' field poppies where the pepperpots ripen but prove to be empty).
Naturally one does tend to translate rhyming couplets backwards, because there is no point in getting the perfect rendition of the first half only to then realise that there is no earthly way of getting anything to rhyme with that... But it is very satisfying when a nicely idiomatic version of a phrase just happens to match up perfectly with the hopefully-open rhyme scheme previously put in place for the end of the verse ;-)
(As always with rhymes, if you're going to have a weak and/or slightly forced ending then it is far better not to have it at the conclusion, because that sticks out a mile -- so you write the second half *first*, then fiddle round with possibilities to lead up to that...)
Four more lines to go. Now I remember why I didn't start with the first verse; this is the one where I don't actually know what any of the words mean and shall have to go away and research them first. (My motoring vocabulary is sorely lacking, even if I do know two different words for 'horse' and two for 'sword' respectively :-D)
Weirdly, there doesn't seem to be an English translation of the lyrics anywhere on the Internet, even a non-singing one. There is, however, a *French* singing translation, very nicely done (so far as I can judge), which was sufficient to tell me what the song was about and to act as a crib for most of the Russian version. (Although he has understandably cheated by rendering "прадед" -- "before-grandfather" -- as "grand-père", since "arrière-grand-père" is even more impossible in terms of scansion than the English equivalent!)
However, since I don't have any car-vocabulary to speak of in French either, I can't draw the parallels with this verse and shall have to look practically every word up from scratch to determine its function in the sentence :-p To be fair, thanks to Russian's highly inflected nature -- a Read-Only language! -- I can actually tell what is a verb and what is an adjective even if I haven't any idea of what they mean. The problem comes when you get things like participles which are functionally indistinguishable from adjectives -- I literally cannot see any verb in that first phrase at all. At that point I'm afraid I rely on looking up the meaning of the root-words in order to guess at the grammar, which works provided that one doesn't get hold of the wrong end of the stick and jump to a completely inaccurate conclusion about who is doing what to whom!
The woes of trying to do translation when all you have going for you is a really good command of English and just enough of another language to scratch out the meaning...
Since I now have two long and narrow empty margarine tubs suitable to balance on my windowsill, I have tried planting up some of the kale and beetroot that went to seed, to see if it will grow (and eat as 'baby leaves' if it does). The kale is nice little round black seeds in dry white pods; the beetroot is pretty much invisible among the general black muck in the bottom of the paper bag, if there is any actual seed in there at all. However I did get unexpected germination from my previous attempts to plant from this collected seed-spike...
I also sowed some more mesembryanthemums (probably -- again, the seed is invisible), since they haven't been doing well, and the large one that I transplanted appears to have died completely. I haven't actually succeeded in getting any decent seedheads for some time, though I got a lot of self-sown mesembryanthemums in with the tomatoes last year. They flower all right, but they don't seem to get big enough to produce seed (like the 'starved' field poppies where the pepperpots ripen but prove to be empty).
no subject
Date: 2025-07-12 04:49 pm (UTC)All right, I think I now have some idea of what is going on with those first two lines, and it's pretty much the opposite of what I'd guessed (i.e. a straight open road and not a traffic jam!)
But most of those words were simply not in my small dictionary (and some are not in my larger Soviet dictionary), and I still can't make out how the grammar is intended to function, so it wasn't just me being lacking in motoring vocabulary -- the opening of this song is seriously difficult and poetic in form, despite the subject matter. Soviet popular culture seems to have been pretty ambitious in its literary scope; see also the impossibility of a literal translation of the "Pora-pora-pora song", which is why I haven't even attempted it, although I'm still potentially intrigued by the idea of having a stab at Наша честь (more or less the equivalent 'theme song' for "Twenty Years After", and pretty literary/poetic in terms of its lyrics† -- but in a way that is less extremely abbreviated and makes more internal sense... )
† The opening lines are 'on this flying sphere off which it is impossible to leap', e.g. the Earth -- not quite the start of your average 1990s pop song!