Photos from the "old days"

I did a non-literal translation of the "Mass Graves" earlier in this thread. A word-by-word can be tranlated by without the concurrent rhyme.

here's the literal : (with my minor corrections and other liberties)

No crosses are placed on mass graves, and widows do not weep for their (loved ones), A stranger brings bouquets of flowers to them, And the eternal flame is provided. This ground may have been set ablaze before but now it's just slabs of granite. There is not a single personal destiny here - All destinies are merged on the summit. And gazing into the Eternal Flame, we see burning tanks on horizon, the burnout out huts, burning remnants of Reichstag, Mass graves do not welcome widows in tears - it's for men of a stronger complexion, No crosses are placed on mass graves anymore, But this doesn't make suffering fiction. (I added the last for the rhyme).
 
NorBro said:
lol, it was in the music thread.
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I think I also did it in some other thread ... but not the same song ... on the "Vyssotsky in other languages" site, this one has for different versions by four different amateur translators ... back around 2004, I "met" one of my old high school classmates on it ... we left the USSR one and a half months apart in the fall of 1978... crossed paths in Italy, 1979, as well ... at the end of the translated text, it said, "send your comments to XYZ" ... so I wrote, "Are you the same XYZ who went to School #19 in Minsk, 1976-1978?" ... and he was ...
 
NorBro said:
Same song...post #2760 in the listening thread.

https://www.dvxuser.com/forum/off-to...84#post5673643

I was trolling you because you love this guy, lol.
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I did the "Soldiers of the Army Group Center" in a translation related thread.

As to Vyssotsky, who's unknown in the West aside of a 1978 "60 Minutes" profile, I do think he's a single greatest creative person in the 20th Century, above the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Pablo Picasso and so on.

Texts are brief (and the translators don't want copy &paste)


https://wysotsky.com/1033.htm?565 English text, not literal.


https://wysotsky.com/1033.htm?512


https://wysotsky.com/1033.htm?537
 
In the link I posted above where you translated the lyrics, why'd you spelled him as Vyssotskij? (Just wondering.)

As far as his talent, I'm not sure if you're joking...but I think you're serious...either way, cool.
 
I am serious ... the sheer volume of his work is bewildering ... as a writer, not only did he write the music, he delivered a story like structure to his songs, adding phenomenal phrasing, references and rhyme, all while describing an everyday life of an average Soviet citizen as an observational comedian ... and that's in the country where acute observations could lead you to a lot of trouble ...

as to the spelling and pronunciations ... "Vyssotsky" in Russian has a single 's", but then it'd be pronounced "Vai" rather than <Vy> (with a hard short "I") in English... then there's a "ц", which is pronounced as "ts" (hots for teacher) ... (side story - I typed "ts" on a Russian language FB page and people began to wonder where I came from ... I am using a Cyrillic page but type on a QWERTY keyboard and I make the transliteration mistakes all the time)

... finally, I screwed up on the ending ... kind of ... in Russian it's a semi-vowel "й" sound like "gh" in "highway" but there's no corresponding spelling in English ... maybe Vyssotskiy is the closest ... so I took a bit of liberty and used the Germanic "j" for "й" as in "Iljitsch"... but the Germans can skip this sound entirely too as at the end of Tschaikowski, who also has an "й" in the Cyrillic spelling of his name - Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский ...
 
Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio (he's Dutch born, she's an American, they live in California, have four children) embarked on a project of taking a photo of an "average" family across the globe. At first, I thought this was a painting. It is not. This is how Russia looked in the early/mid 1990's. According to a statistician. And a photographer.

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FWIW, the above photo was taken in Vancouver, Canada, in 1971. The Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin is being made an honorary chief of some tribe. Kosygin was famous for detesting phoniness and looks the opposite of being amused.

And, to throw a bit of history into it, Kosygin was a successful businessman in the 1920's and a top reformer in the 1960's-1970's USSR, who was largely responsible for the economic restructuring that took place several years after his passing in 1980.
 
December, 18th, 1963. A protest on the Red Square, following the death of an an African "exchange student".

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From left to right - Nicolai Podgorny (Chairman of the Soviet Presidium), Leonid Brezhnev and his daughter Galina. This must be from 1977, as Podgorny was removed from his job later that year. Galina didn't care about politics. She liked to party.

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August, 19th, 1991 was the beginning of the coup by the CPSU "hardliners" against Mikhail Gorbachev and the era of glasnost and perestroika. A Taman tank division was ordered into Moscow but the city residents filled the streets and there were only a few casualties. Eventually, the head of what was then the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin was brave enough to make a personal appearance against the coup. And this was the end of the USSR.

In the photo, Yeltsin, his security chief and a de facto chief of staff Alexander Korzhakov signal a seminal moment in history. Behind Korshakov is Victor Zolotov, the current head of the Russian Guard. Korzhakov thought Zolotov was mentally disabled.

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The Taman Guards tank crews join the coup protesters on the streets of Moscow. August, 1991. The Moscow State University is in the background.

developments-of-1991-august-putsch-in-moscow-BPCA3C.jpg
 
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