英語 の翻訳

This is a popular steppe song about freedom. The Volga is the best known river in Russia, although there are others like the Dnieper or the Don that run parallel from north to the south steppe area.
The burlak (plural: burlaki) were barge haulers: some parts of the rivers are difficult to navigate for a boat before the generalization of the steam motor tugboats. Groups of people were tied together with straps linked to ropes that towed the boat, they walked along the shore…”Burlaks are cheaper that draught animals. and besides they can load and unload the boats”.
They were part of the village peasants still submitted by law to conditions similar to slavery (worse than serfs or labourers in western mines or factories) in Russia until the XX century.
Tsar Alexander II decreed the end of this serfom by law in 1861 but, after his assassination, in 1881, serfdom continued until the end of the tsarist regime.

Literary comment:
Popular poems and songs have short lines, in small and few stanzas separated by the refrain.
Lyrics are easy; with many visual images, symbols and metaphors, prarallelisms and a marked rhyme: equal line endings: in this poem, the sounds: –aya, ay, -ya
The Volga (feminine in Russian) is referred as Mom Volga or Little
Mother Volga (diminutive expressing affection). El Volga es de género femenino en Ruso, por lo que se habla de ‘madrecita Volga’

The river is free and expands like an almighty force, like the steppe. The steppe eagle is also usually called ‘father’’; it's another triple symbol: freedom and power over the earth, water and sky (Volga-steppe-eagle)

“It´s not the eagle rising in the sky” (metaphor for freedom), ‘’it´s the barge hauler walking wide’, without end, along the wide river bank where he (or she) is tied like a draught animal
This is interpreted: There´s no freedom, we are still slave-peasants
“don't fly low, near he ground, eagle”- or you can lose your freedom
‘Don't walk by the shore, barge-hauler” - or you will go on being a slave
The poet tells the Eagle to keep its freedom, and the barge-hauler to do something to avoid their endless fate; to walk way the shore; to strive for freedom.