КИНО: Сказка (A Fairy Tale)

Note Tsoi’s hyphenated word pairs here, which serve as similes, and are a bit tricky to translate: кирпич-облако (a “cloud-brick,” speaking here of the impenetrable “wall” of the cloudy sky); ладонь-лист (palm-leave, where “palm” means the open palm of a hand, paired here with an imperfective past active participle to describe the “palm-leaves” that in the past “were waving” to us from on high, and are now falling)… also, note the phrase “экран окна” — meaning that the window is compared to a movie or TV screen on which this “fairy tale” is unfolding (this could be an allusion to the many Soviet-era animated fairy tales for children shown on television. Finally, the mysterious “Она” at the end is clearly Death (Смерть is one of those feminine и-nouns!). Note the two verbs with the compound “недо-” prefix, meaning to “not do something sufficiently.”

Сказка

Снова новый начинается день
Снова утро прожектором бьёт из окна
И молчит телефон, отключен
Снова солнца на небе нет
Снова бой, каждый сам за себя
И мне кажется, солнце
Не больше чем сон

На экране окна
Сказка с несчастливым концом
Странная сказка

И стучит пулеметом дождь
И по улицам осень идет
И стена из кирпичей-облаков крепка
А деревья заболели чумой
Заболели ещё весной
Вниз летят ладони-листья
Махавшие нам свысока

Там, за окном
Сказка с несчастивым концом
Странная сказка

А потом придёт Она
"Собирайся,” скажет, “пошли,
Отдай земле тело."
Ну а тело недопело чуть-чуть
Ну а телу недодали любви
Странное дело

Там, за окном
Сказка с несчастливым концом
Странная сказка

A Fairy Tale

Again a new day begins
Again the morning beats from the window like a searchlight
And the telephone is silent, the line’s dead
Again there’s no sun in the sky
Again, battle, every man for himself
And it seems to me that the sun
Is nothing more than a dream

On the TV-screen of the window
A fairy tale with an unhappy ending
A strange fairy tale

And the rain pounds like a machine gun
And autumn roams the streets
And the wall made of cloud-bricks is strong
And the trees are sick with plague
Sick since spring
And the leaves — those palms of hands
That once waved to us from on high — fly downward.

There, outside my window
A fairy tale with an unhappy ending
A strange fairy tale

And then She will come
“Pack your things,” she’ll say, “Let’s go,
Give your body back to the earth.”
Well, the body didn’t quite sing as much as it might have,
But then, the body was short on love.
How strange.

There, outside my window
A fairy tale with an unhappy ending
A strange fairy tale