Please excuse me for mostly sharing songs lately, but a few things have converged. The events in my homeland and my emotional response to them. Exhaustion from yet another work sprint that’s on the edge of burnout, but you push on because you believe in what you’re doing… and a sense of inner emptiness as a reaction to all of this.
And then suddenly, there’s a new song, performed by five (!!!) Belarusian bands, set to the verses of Vladimir Neklyaev, the now-disenfranchised Belarusian poet. These verses were written after the events of 2010, when he tried to run for president but… it didn’t happen.
The song tears at my emotions; it resonates so closely with everything I feel inside right now that I just freeze, and all I can whisper at the end is “Wow!” before playing it on repeat.
Here is a literal translation of the original Vladimir Neklyaev’s verse:
Vladimir Neklyaev “To You”
I remember myself in a teenage coat,
We were rowdy boys back then,
But none of us were scoundrels,
Where did you learn to be scoundrels?
We aimed our minds at different things,
Naive, careless fools were we,
But we were never villains,
Where did you learn to be villains?
Yes, we feared prison, the far-flung camps,
We wanted to live normal lives,
But we were never bootlickers,
How did you manage to become bootlickers?
Yes, to avoid dying in filth and dust,
We sold poems and stories,
But we could never sell our conscience,
You wouldn’t understand that, people without conscience.
You who kiss filth in deep embrace,
Be it in palaces of kings or dukes,
You failed to become human beings,
But succeeded in becoming human scum.
