Monday, December 2, 2013

Dubinushka


Rocking out on a folk song

Dubinushka, little oak stick

I have heard a lot of songs
in my native place,
they sang of joy and sorrow.
But one of all these songs
has sunk into my mind,
this is the song of the working people:

Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
Hey, the green cudgel moves by itself!
Let's pull, let's pull
together!

From the grandfather to the father,
from the father to the son
this song has been handed down.
And always when
the work became too hard
we reached for the cudgel, our true help.

Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
Hey, the green cudgel moves by itself!
Let's pull, let's pull
together!

The Englishman is cute:
To make the work easier
he invented machine by machine.
But our poor Russian peasant,
when his work gets too hard,
still sings the song of the cudgel:

Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
Hey, the green cudgel moves by itself!
Let's pull, let's pull
together!

If he has to tow a barge with wood,
or if he has to forge iron,
or if he is mining ore in Siberia:
With strain, and with pains in his chest
he sings this song again and again
and thereby remembers the cudgel:

Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
Hey, the green cudgel moves by itself!
Let's pull, let's pull
together!

And on the towing-paths along the Volga,
nearly sinking in the sand,
breaking his legs and his spine,
chafing his chest,
only to tow a bit easier
he keeps singing the song of the cudgel:
Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
       
Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
Hey, the green cudgel moves by itself!
Let's pull, let's pull
together!

And along the big road,
along the big post road,
which is named after Vladimir long since,
there the sound of chains is to heard,
dull, fateful,
and in the same rhythm the song of the cudgel:
Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
       
Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
Hey, the green cudgel moves by itself!
Let's pull, let's pull
together!

But the time has come,
and the people rose,
and it straightened its mighty spine,
and it shook off from its shoulders
the heavy yoke that had been there for centuries,
and now it raised the cudgel against its enemies:

Hey, oaken cudgel, come on!
Hey, the green cudgel moves by itself!
Let's pull, let's pull
together!

7 comments:

AllenS said...

I received this video in an email last week. There's another one (Russian) about how to open a can without a can opener.

john said...

Is that the group Leningrad singing? They could play at my house anytime.

Michael Haz said...

This is why you should always buy a $200 car to drive to your ice fishing shanty. Everyone knows that. Mostly.

bagoh20 said...

I love the elegance of that engineering. It seemed like an impossible task, and yet they did it with nothing but some sticks and rope. Nice.

john said...
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john said...
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bagoh20 said...

Funny how this stuff happens, but the word "cudgel" started me on an hour-long journey into the history of The Five Points in Manhattan. Which started out as a lake with a an indian tribe living on the shore, then became a middle class neighborhood after they filled it in, and then soon after it changed into the world famous slum, which at one time had the highest murder rate in the world with an average of 1 per day for 15 years. Eventually it gave rise to Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. Hell of a history for one intersection in this big wide world.

I just love the internet and Wikipedia: text, maps, photos, drawings, - what an amazing gift.

The yungins will probably never appreciate how far we have come with this information stuff. It's no trip to the moon, but pretty amazing in other ways.