Photos from the "old days"

[DLD]

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A "Hall of Shame" board at a Pyatigorsk drunk tank, with their Top 15. The winner is one Valeriy Khachaturian with 135 arrests; #2 is with 48, #3 is with 45

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Late Soviet era seafood store. Huge discounts are everywhere.

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Breakfast is served.

Photo by Vladimir Sokolayev, 1970's.

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Actor, singer, songwriter, screenwriter and, generally speaking, the most brilliant man in the universe, Vladimir Vyssotsky with his mid-1970's Mercedes Benz, presumably the only one in the USSR.

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Vyssotsky had a drinking problem, on top of a drug addiction, and promptly crashed the vehicle into something or other. No repairs could be carried out.

The performer died in 1980 at the age of 42, having written about 600 songs (most of which was banned in the USSR at the time of his death and were copied from one tape recorder to another)

[NorBro]

I saw someone similar the other day but he wasn't as good. Something about war.

The guy above is probably better.

[DLD]

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]

lol, it was in the music thread.

[DLD]

lol, it was in the music thread.

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]

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.

[DLD]

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.

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

[NorBro]

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.

[DLD]

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 ...

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Russian dark rye bread ... yummy ...

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Some lady decided to take a drive through Moscow. 1987.

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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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