After the red-yellow days winter will begin and end
I was driving home from work a few days ago (or rather I was driving to the grocery store to pick up bread after work on my mom’s request) and Red-Yellow Days by Kino came on ytmusic shuffle. As I was listening I remembered the phrase “горе ты моё от ума” always sounded like “горе ты моё туман ” to me, which made roughly as much sense in context as the actual phrase. And then I thought, well, what does горе от ума mean anyway?
Instinctively, I think of it as the inverse of “ignorance is bliss”. So, “the misery of knowledge”?
I was thinking about this and then when I pulled into the parking lot I googled it and learned the phrase was made up for the title of a very old play and then became a popular phrase and not the other way around. It’s usually translated to English as “woe from wit” or “wit’s end”.
So the Kino line as I misheard it would’ve been something like “misery of mine, dear fog”, and correctly, “my dearest woe from wit”?
The reason there’s a dozen English translations for every popular Kino song is because Tsoi’s lyrics are SO HARD to translate! Every word every line has multiple layers of meaning, complicated structures that seem simple on the surface but never have direct English equivalents and never sound good translated directly!
Like a few lines later in the same song: А мне приснилось миром правит мечта.
Contextually, the last word should be “a dream” because мечта is closer to that than the directed specificity of “a wish” BUT in English “dream” as in “what you have when you sleep” and “dream” as in “abstract desire” are THE SAME WORD so while the most accurate translation of this sentence would be “And I had a dream the world was ruled by a dream” THAT SOUNDS WEIRD AND CONFUSING!
So I had a dream the world was ruled by a wish.
Горе ты моё от ума is untranslatable because it combines two set phrases, горе ты моё and горе от ума, and English has direct equivalents for neither of them. The full effect is lost, no matter how you localize it.
This doesn’t make English inherently more limited than Russian, though. There’s plenty of stuff that’s hard to translate in the other direction as well, plenty of concepts and phrases that don’t have direct Russian equivalents as well. I was frustrated English didn’t have distinct words for the two senses of dreams, but writers in English can lean into that ambiguity to add layers of meaning and power to their own lyrics, like in the song Dreams by the Cranberries where it’s ambiguous what kind of dreams are never what they seem.
It’s interesting to me how much of a language is now is shaped by things people happened to think of centuries ago.