Translating Vladimir Vysotsky

 

Singer-songwriter and poet Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980) is one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century. Some talk of him as the Russian Bob Dylan, or Jacques Brel, but that doesn’t really convey how much he was loved and revered across the Soviet Union.

Remarkably, very few of his hundreds of songs were officially recorded, or even bought on record. Instead, countless people heard his songs on scratchy reel-to-reel tape recordings passed on from friend to friend. In Soviet cities of the time, summer evenings were often filled with the latest crackly sound of a new Vysotsky song filtering through an open window.

When Vysotsky died, tragically young at just 42 in 1980, he was mourned by tens of millions. It was the time of the Moscow Olympics, and the KGB were anxious to keep this uncomfortable voice out of the news. Even so, over 30,000 gathered in Moscow to pay tribute, despite a KGB ban. “Volodya” was, for them, the voice of truth. “You understood what our lives are like – work, work, hellish work and nothing else,” wrote one mourner, while another said: “We’re here because he spoke the truth, not the half-truths we hear all the time – he wrote about our life.”

His impact spilled into the next generation, and his language was absorbed into Russian culture. I have a cleaner from Bulgaria, Zhivka Hristova, who must have been very young when Vysotsky died. When she saw a book of Vysotsky’s songs on my table, she at once burst into tears. Her sister Lydia wrote this note to explain why: “They say Jesus spoke parables to his contemporaries. For the people of my generation, Vysotsky was like him – he taught us his songs. Whatever happened, we said: on this occasion, in one of his songs, Vysotsky says the following… He was our banner in those times!”

A recent opinion poll in Russia put Vysotsky as the second most important Russian popular figure of the twentieth century after only the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, while some consider him Russia’s most important poet since Alexander Pushkin. And yet he is almost unknown to people in the West. Even Russophiles in the English world, steeped in Tolstoy and Akhmatova, Chekhov and Brodsky, are often almost entirely ignorant of the work of Vysotsky.

A New York Times article, published a year after his death, attempted to explain why this was: “because his ballads rarely dealt explicitly with politics, because the street language he used with such effect is almost untranslatable and because the life he sang about is so alien to the West.”

And yet to me, it still seems remarkable that the work of such a towering poet, songwriter and cultural icon has not yet been translated into English, beyond countless scattered attempts online by Russian fans. That’s why I, maybe foolishly, embarked on this collection...

As well as a singer-songwriter, Vysotsky was a brilliant actor, famed for his legendary Hamlet with the equally legendary Taganka Theatre, and his songs and performances draw heavily on his theatrical life. In his songs, he tells stories and creates characters, often so powerfully that listeners believed he must have been one of the soldiers or gangsters he sang about.

He wrote songs in a genre of the “author-song,” which is a very distinctive feature of post-war Russia. “Generally speaking,” Vysotsky explained in an interview, “they are not songs even but poems on a rhythmical base...” He accompanied them on guitar alone because of its simplicity. “Author’s songs give me a chance to tell you what worries me, what is of concern to me, that sort of thing.” But that modest explanation belies the extraordinary power of his storytelling, his complex use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and, of course, his unforgettable, gravelly voice which can switch from an intimate whisper to an epic crescendo in moments.

He explained in the same interview how author-song writers are criticised for their simple “primitive” melodies. But his answer was this: “I believe that nothing should interfere with the perception of the text, the meaning... I wanted the songs to enter not only the ears, but the souls right from the beginning.”

Particular themes crop up again and again in his songs, and people often divide them into types like his “street songs” and his “mountain songs.” His theatrical background is clear, because unlike many western singer-songwriters he rarely sings personal confessions but as a character, whether it is a sleazy thug, or a lonely soldier.

He sings so often, and so believably, of war that people often insisted he must have been a soldier himself. He explained that he writes about “men who look death in the face, men in extreme situations.” Nowhere is this better illustrated than in one of his most famous songs, “Stubborn Horses” which opens with the lines: “Along the edge of a rocky ledge,/ A steep precipice on hell’s abyss...” But of course he also wrote the tenderest, most intimate love songs.

Translating Vysotsky’s lyrics is perhaps the most challenging translation task I have ever undertaken, and I must express my deep thanks to Olga Nakston, who has been my co-translator, providing me with literal translations of all the song. I have translated Pushkin and Lermontov, Abai and Pessoa, and each presents unique challenges, but recreating Vysotsky’s words into English was the biggest challenge of all.

First of all, it was crucial that my English words are lyrics, not poetry. They are there for English people to sing, not simply read on the page, or for readers to read as they listen to Vysotsky himself singing. So the English words must match the melody and rhythm, pacing and intonation, with the kind of precision that is almost never demanded in translating written poetry. Many of the translations have been tested by a great singer friend of mine Anthony Cable, who has sung these songs in English for the first time – and this showed that I cannot afford even the slightest looseness, since it makes the words unsingable.

I am lucky to be a songwriter myself, as well as a poet and translator, so I know how lyrics need to work with the melody – how the melody often dictates the flow of words, and vice versa. Moreover, the rhythms in songs are very different from the rhythms in written poetry, and that presents an entirely new challenge for the translator.

Secondly, Vysotsky is an absolute master of the Russian language. His lyrics are dense and linguistically inventive in a way few Russian poets can match. He uses consonants, for instance, in brilliant staccato volleys of words which, combined with his unique voice and delivery, create an extraordinary energy that is genuinely thrilling for Russian listeners. The sound of the English language is very different, and it’s almost impossible to recreate these verbal fireworks exactly, so I have had to work hard to find equivalent effects in English, but I urge you to listen to Vysotsky singing himself while reading to hear the full effect – even if you don’t speak Russian.

Thirdly, many of the characters and situations in Vysotsky’s songs were instantly identifiable to people in the Soviet Union of the time, but entirely alien to English readers, as the New York Times article quoted above suggested. Bridging the gap is a real challenge, but Vysotsky is a man of the theatre, and his characters have distinctive voices, so it seemed to me that the way to transfer these characters into English was to give them a voice that would help English people identify.

My brilliant editor, Ksenia Papazova, who knows and loves Vysotsky, pointed out Vysotsky hardly used swear words, and his genius was to stay within the literary canon while appealing to people in all walks of life. In just two places, I have used the word “fuckit” and “fucked,” breaking with Vysotsky, but this, I felt, was important to give the songs the “voice” and impact that would be identifiable instantly in English.

Finally, I’d like to stress that these are mostly lyrics, not poetry. I hope you will be able to appreciate Vysotsky’s unique genius simply by reading on the page. But I would also urge you to listen to the songs. You can hear recordings of Vysotsky singing the songs, in the original Russian of course, on YouTube, and the publisher’s website has links to many of these, although they are constantly changing. Anthony Cable and I hope to record English versions of many of the songs, too – but maybe you’d like to try singing them in English yourself. It was always Vysotsky’s aim, and was one reason he kept melodies simple. “I wanted the person who would care to sing them for himself to be able to do so easily.”

Just a week before, he died, Vysotsky wrote an incredibly poignant poem “Ice above and Ice Below” to his French wife Marina Vlady – separated from her by visa restrictions, and maybe the KGB. The last verse is a fitting epitaph:

I’m under half a century – barely forty.

I am kept alive by God, and by you.

But I will sing when I stand before the Almighty;

And I’ll have my songs to see me through.

John Farndon

London, June 2021

A Song about Reincarnation

Some believe in Mahomet, some in Allah, some in Christ.

Some don’t believe in anything, even hell to spite us all,

But the Hindus have an answer, a religious code that’s nice –

That when we kick the bucket, we really don’t die at all.

If your soul strives and you aim high,

You’ll be born with a dream once more,

But if you lived like a pig in a sty

Then like a pig you’ll stay as before.

Let them give you strange looks: get used to their disdain.

It’s annoying but when you’re born again you can taunt them back.

And if death seemed your enemy in this life of pain,

In the next you’ll find all the faith and insight that you lack.

So keep on with your normal life.

Be happy: ignore your loss:

For it may happen all your strife

Will vanish when you’re the boss!

So what if you’re labourer, you’ll be born the factory head,

And then from factory head you’ll be a head of state.

But if you’re dumb like a tree, you’ll be a baobab instead

And for death a baobab tree has a thousand years to wait.

Yes, it’s a shame to be a parrot,

Or a viper whose life extends...

Living well now has its merits

If you’re a good human in the end.

And who is who and who was who, we’ll never know, I guess.

Genetics went rather crazy with genes and chromosomes.

Maybe that scraggy cat in a past life was an evil murderess

And this sweet girl here was surely once a gentle dog at home.

I am bursting out with delight.

I’ve escaped being a novice.

The Hindus have shown the light

With their great religious service.

1969

From: Vladimir Vysotsky: Selected Works