Cosmopolitan Lines of Flight: Song Translations by Arkady Kots Band, Manizha, and Daniel Kahn

• In Event: Imagined Memories of Liquid Transitions: Manifestations in (Post-)Soviet / Post-Socialist Popular Cultures and Visual Arts

Abstract

The paper examines three case studies in which translation of songs that, with a certain degree of conventionality, can be attributed to contemporary folk music, creates temporal and spatial relations that run counter to the imperial and nationalist manifestations of the (post-)Soviet social imaginary. The first case is the translation of American folk revival songs into Russian on the album "Beloved and Bitter Land" by the Arkady Kots Band, which reimagines solidarity beyond the Soviet ideological clichés of "Friendship of Peoples." The other two cases of lifting cultural phenomena out of the (post-)Soviet context are translations from Russian into other languages: the song "City of Gold" into Tajik on the anti-war album by Manizha, and translations of Bulat Okudzhava's songs into English on Daniel Kahn's album "Bulat Blues."

Author

• Mark Simon, Bielefeld U (Germany)