Баллада о борьбе [Ballada o borbe] [English translation]

Among melting candles and evening prayers,

Among war tropheys and peaceful fires

Lived the book children, who knew no battles,

And they were aching from their trivial catastrophes.

Children are always vexed

By their age and their day-to-day

And we fought to scratches,

To mortal resentments.

But our mothers

Patched our clothes in time

Whereas we swallowed books,

Getting drunks on the words.

Hair sticked to our sweaty foreheads,

The phrases brought out a sweet sinking feeling in our stomachs

And our heads spun with the smell of strife

Which was rubbing off on us from the yellowing pages.

And we,

Who knew no wars,

Who took a howl

For a battle cry,

Tried to comprehend the mystery of the word "command"

Of the drawing of borders,

The meaning of attack

And the clang of war chariots.

And there's so much food for our small brains

Inside the boiling pots of wars and commotions of old,

In our children's games we assigned enemies

To the roles of traitors, cowards and judas'

And we wouldn't let

The villain's trail go cold,

And we swore love

To the fairest of ladies.

Reassuring our friends

And loving our close ones,

We put ourselves

In the roles of heroes.

Except you can't escape into daydreams for good,

Fun doesn't last long, so much pain is around us.

Try to pry open the hands of the fallen

And accept the weapon from work-weary hands.

Put it to the test,

Taking posession of a still warm sword,

And putting on the armour -

What's it worth? what's it worth?

Settle whether you're a coward

Or one chosen by fate

And get a taste

Of real strife.

And when a wounded friend will fall beside you

And you will howl in sorrow at the first loss,

And when you'll suddenly be left without your skin

Because he was the one who got killed, and not you.

Then you will understand

That by the snarl of visors

You recognized, discerned, discovered -

It is the snarl of death,

Lies and evil,

Look how crude are their faces,

And crows and coffins

Always follow them.

If you hadn't eaten a single piece of meat off of a knife,

If you idly watched from above,

And if you hadn't joined the struggle against the scoundrel, the lyncher

Means that in life you were irrelevant, irrelevant.

If you made use

Of the salty tears

Cutting the way

With your father's sword

If in the heat of battle

You found out what are things worth

Means as a child

You read the right books.

• Artist:Vladimir Vysotsky