Tuesday, September 21, 2021

For what possible reason to know?

We try here to bring what is, try to cut through the white noise, try to sort out fact from fiction, precisely what the self-styled global overloads do not wish us plebs to do.  We try to, humans can combine when under imminent threat, the bulls of Bashan breathing down our necks.

The old tactic was always to round up the intellectuals and poets and send them to the gulag, the new way is to turn the college professors into a state resource, indoctrinating kids in compliance with their own demise.  Very clever.  The cabal learns.  And the govt sends out forms to parents, too late to stop their intervention. Very clever.

Gruppa Chaif’s name ‘is derived from the word chai, meaning tea, and kaif (slang word), meaning pleasure’.  Formed in 1984, they were one of the classic, revered groups from soviet times, with a different message to that of the authorities.  You’ll see from the song how they cut across generations, even in 2004, one of the first groups the kids played me after I arrived. This seems their anniversary concert:



Mainly a hard rock group, they did do softer songs of gentle protest, of which ‘Poplach’ is one.  It uses the word ‘za chem’ quite often, machine modified as ‘why?’ but I prefer, in English, the straight ‘for what?’, as it adds that sense of ‘for what good reason?’, ‘for what possible benefit?’, which is the theme of the song.  

For what reason to know?  For what reason to come to a blog for a daily dose of exasperation and depression?  Why not be like the village idiot?  Remember, Klaus has told you not to think, to just accept you’ll have nothing … and you’ll be happy.  Altering human brains does that to you [One Flew Over]?  As an added poetic touch, I’m kneeling on the floor typing this as the back gave out overnight, adding the zest of a bit of pain to the mix, quite poetic would you not say?

Not going to translate it all, just a few lines:

Зачем тебе знать, когда он уйдет, зачем тебе знать, о чем он поет. 
Зачем тебе знать то, чего не знает он сам. 
Зачем тебе знать, кого он любил, зачем тебе знать, о чем он просил. 
Зачем тебе знать то, о чем он молчит. 

Translated with the 'why': 
‘Why do you need to know when he is gone, why do you need to know what he is singing about. Why do you need to know what he does not know himself. Why do you need to know whom he loved, why do you need to know what he asked for. Why do you need to know what he is silent about?’  
The song is about a young man no longer returning from the war, the eternal war, which we cannot ever seem to be without.

Поплачь о нем, пока он живой. 
Люби его, таким, какой он есть.
‘Cry for him whilst he’s [still] alive [and still with you], love him for what he is [now].’
At one point, he calls out, ‘Pa yom,’ meaning, ‘We sing [together]’  It’s the third verse which they sing more quietly which touches me most:

Тихое утро, над городом смог, майская зелень, энцефалит. 
Там хорошо, где нас с тобой нет.
‘Quiet morning, smog over the city, the greenery of May, encephalitis.  There [where you are] is fine where we are with you not.’  
I deliberately left it direct, not machine modified, as it has more literary effect that way in English.  My Russian mate might not like me saying it but no one does melancholy and pathos quite like the Russian poets, the notion of helplessness at the hands of the ruling cabal, Ripper’s ‘dot’.

A hypothetical conversation:
Do you love your country, are you patriotic? Yes, yes. Then get over there and kill, kill, kill! Yes yes they say.
[He goes back to the drawing room and pours another fine whisky, eats more caviar, phones his counterpart ‘over there’, says, ‘They’re on their way.’]

One last line from the song - ‘Today a person dies, tomorrow they call him a poet.’

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