English translation

The original Russian text is beautifully evocative yet simple, as is always the case with Kino’s songs. It’s hard to do it justice, but I have tried to preserve the meaning as far as possible, whilst being mindful of the meter, rhyme, melodic rhythm and flow. To that effect, some liberties had to be taken in regards the original text, i.e. “pocket“ was rendered as “jeans“, however, the resulting lyrics can be sung to the soundtrack.

The second verse employs some Russian idioms: “виноватый без вины“ - one who is wrongly accused, here turned into a play on words by using near homonyms “вина и вино“ - guilt and wine, unfortunately the pun doesn’t work in translation; “чужими руками жар загребать“ - to use someone else to do your dirty work, literally to rake in hot coals with someone else’s hands, “someone else‘s” is omitted in the original, which means that you are doing the raking yourself; and finally “на миру и смерть красна“ - literally, even dying is beautiful when surrounded by others. But dying without music is not!

Thank you very much for reading, and keep listening to Kino!