Our honour, almost
13 August 2025 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeAfter over two weeks of burrowing away at it (feels like longer...) I finally have more-or-less usable translations in singable verse for all the various sections of Наша честь, which is something I've had the vaguely-acknowledged ambition to tackle since I first located the Russian lyrics in April, and the frankly pretty bad translation on that page.
However I've just belatedly found a rather better -- probably made by a human rather than a computer! -- literal translation on another page, thanks to the brainwave of searching for the word 'translation' itself in Russian: https://teksti-pesen.ru/9/Igor-Nadjiev/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest#translate
What is somewhat worrying is that both these translations render the start of the second verse, with which I struggled mightily (the word времечко appears to be incredibly colloquial/archaic and only showed up in a handful of set phrases, not helped by the fact that it was the title of a popular TV programme which dominated search results) as variants on "we still have time", whereas I'd ended up interpreting it as more or less a reiteration of the first verse, where it says something along the lines of "This era fell to our lot as being really something else" [i.e. really bad] or "This era bequeathed bad things to us"
I had assumed that времечко was an *adverb*, with the neuter verb-form in the same line being just an abstract statement without a subject; it hadn't occurred to me to interpret the mystery word as a neuter diminutive noun ("a little [more] time has fallen to our lot" as opposed to "With the passing of time something worse has befallen us"), but in fact the set phrases make more sense that way... which of course very much changes the meaning of that opening line and hence of the required versification :-(
выпасть does literally mean 'to fall *out*', but is clearly not literal here (nor referring to the falling of snow out of the sky!)
Soundtrack auto-translation of those lines: "It depends on our timing and what else/God knows there will be more" (with the proviso that this is clearly unreliable, since it proceeds immediately afterwards to render 'treasure' (sokrovishche, from sokrovenniy, 'concealed') as 'bloodshed' thanks to a missed initial syllable (apparently krovishcha is a diminutive of krov', blood...)
But then some of the line-by line 'literal' translations even in the better version seem to me pretty clearly not right. I'm fairly sure that "Victory pipes are also possible/And give money to pennies" or "Perhaps the pipes are victorious/And give the money to a penny" is a misconstruing of the 'and... and' construction that would apply the verb 'to give out/away' across both lines, to both the 'pipes' (trubi in the context of victory are pretty definitely 'trumpets' and not pipes) and the 'pennies'. So the first line is not "The victory trumpets are possible" but "It is possible to part with the trumpets of victory"/"and with every last penny" (especially since the following couplet is about the corresponding impossibility of parting with one's honour!)
Edit: here's *another* 'translation' that's possibly even worse...
https://911pesni.pro/9/Igor-Nadjiev/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
"On the ball this summer/With whom can not jump/Era that still got to us"...
"Perhaps the pipe and victorious/And the money to pay a penny/But with honor to the last breath/Can not leave the shower."
Cannot leave the shower? Seriously? :-D
It hadn't even occurred to me that the (imported) word for 'shower' resembles the native word for 'soul', given that the latter is infinitely more common in poetry -- or that the word for 'flying' begins with the same letters as the word for 'summer' :-p
However I've just belatedly found a rather better -- probably made by a human rather than a computer! -- literal translation on another page, thanks to the brainwave of searching for the word 'translation' itself in Russian: https://teksti-pesen.ru/9/Igor-Nadjiev/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest#translate
What is somewhat worrying is that both these translations render the start of the second verse, with which I struggled mightily (the word времечко appears to be incredibly colloquial/archaic and only showed up in a handful of set phrases, not helped by the fact that it was the title of a popular TV programme which dominated search results) as variants on "we still have time", whereas I'd ended up interpreting it as more or less a reiteration of the first verse, where it says something along the lines of "This era fell to our lot as being really something else" [i.e. really bad] or "This era bequeathed bad things to us"
I had assumed that времечко was an *adverb*, with the neuter verb-form in the same line being just an abstract statement without a subject; it hadn't occurred to me to interpret the mystery word as a neuter diminutive noun ("a little [more] time has fallen to our lot" as opposed to "With the passing of time something worse has befallen us"), but in fact the set phrases make more sense that way... which of course very much changes the meaning of that opening line and hence of the required versification :-(
выпасть does literally mean 'to fall *out*', but is clearly not literal here (nor referring to the falling of snow out of the sky!)
Soundtrack auto-translation of those lines: "It depends on our timing and what else/God knows there will be more" (with the proviso that this is clearly unreliable, since it proceeds immediately afterwards to render 'treasure' (sokrovishche, from sokrovenniy, 'concealed') as 'bloodshed' thanks to a missed initial syllable (apparently krovishcha is a diminutive of krov', blood...)
But then some of the line-by line 'literal' translations even in the better version seem to me pretty clearly not right. I'm fairly sure that "Victory pipes are also possible/And give money to pennies" or "Perhaps the pipes are victorious/And give the money to a penny" is a misconstruing of the 'and... and' construction that would apply the verb 'to give out/away' across both lines, to both the 'pipes' (trubi in the context of victory are pretty definitely 'trumpets' and not pipes) and the 'pennies'. So the first line is not "The victory trumpets are possible" but "It is possible to part with the trumpets of victory"/"and with every last penny" (especially since the following couplet is about the corresponding impossibility of parting with one's honour!)
Edit: here's *another* 'translation' that's possibly even worse...
https://911pesni.pro/9/Igor-Nadjiev/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
"On the ball this summer/With whom can not jump/Era that still got to us"...
"Perhaps the pipe and victorious/And the money to pay a penny/But with honor to the last breath/Can not leave the shower."
Cannot leave the shower? Seriously? :-D
It hadn't even occurred to me that the (imported) word for 'shower' resembles the native word for 'soul', given that the latter is infinitely more common in poetry -- or that the word for 'flying' begins with the same letters as the word for 'summer' :-p