Egor i Opizdenevshie · Сто лет одиночества (100 Years of Solitude), 1993
Two songs are woven through the entire chapter: Yegor Letov’s “Ophelia” and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” that fuse into one at the end of the episode, using the rhythmic patterns of Letov’s song with Pink Floyd’s lyrics with some borscht inflections.
The episode also shares my translation of “Ophelia” with one missing second stanza. Below — genuinely exclusive — full translation:
Distant Ophelia laughed in her sleep:
A pot-bellied thrush, a shaggy deer
The habitually last year’s painted snow
Easily, lightly and cheerfully crunches on teeth.Dressed-up Ophelia flowed over the brim:
A serpentine honey, a raspberry poison
A rubber little tramcar, a zinc-coated May
An expired little ticket to the show’s rerunEnamoured Ophelia drifted far away
The night was bright, the earth did ring
Hastily hurried, without hiding from view
The clock to its foolish, comical landObedient Ophelia floated to the east
A wondrous captivity, granitic delight
A lemony pathway to an orange grove
Invisible lift to a transcendent floorDistant Ophelia laughed in her dreams:
A weary demon, a willow bush
Gifted ponies scattered at dawn
To the four winds — try to catch them now—
The translation’s aggressively-literal but I don’t think you can or should translate Letov’s surreal adjective-noun game and grammar-as-surrealism game (the way he stacks up modifiers and scatters idioms without logical hierarchy) using any other approach, more so, not sure one should translate Letov at all but, alas, I did already!
How Letov described the making of this song in an interview:
…It [creative work] comes about like a waterfall, a fountain, but only after you’ve been knocking at the door for a very long time. Just like that, if you’re not doing anything, nothing comes about. I, for instance, from about ‘98 to 2000 did absolutely nothing — just gave concerts, drank, lived for my own pleasure — and nothing got composed whatsoever. Only when a particular urge arises, when you start to sort of… professionally (that’s probably what professionalism actually is) knock at certain doors… track things down…
Take for example, how did “Ophelia” come about? I had this rough poem about Piter — that is, I was composing a little poem about the blockade in Leningrad — “In blockaded Leningrad the clocks are in no hurry…” — about what is NOT yet happening there, and what is happening. Wrote it for a long time and realised something was off about it. And at a certain moment, when I was walking about and searching… hunting, like a professional hunter… I generally hold the view that all of us — those of us who compose things — are not in fact authors. We are some sort of conductors of something that exists somewhere… everywhere. For this you need to muster a certain courage and sign up for the fact that you agree to pay for plugging into this and doing this thing. The payment can sometimes be very cruel and severe, judging by the way artists die all around… As a result of which you grab hold of the thing, and through you passes a kind of current.