Пора возвращаться домой [Pora vozvrashat'sya domoi] [English translation]

[Verse 1: Bi-2]

Black rye bread

Breaks a blunt knife.

Eyes stare

At a blurred horizon.

Straight from the ceiling

The silent rain falls-

A line running

Across the spine of a book.

[Chorus: Bi-2]

The cities are burning

With foreign love.

The winding path

Has dragged on like a noose.

When all roads

Lead nowhere,

The time has come

To return home.

[Verse 2: Bi-2]

A noisy crowd

Filled the railway platform

And from behind the glass

A boy still waves to me.

Every fate

Is tied up with me.

A house long since demolished

Still lives in my memory.

[Chorus: Bi-2]

The cities are burning

With foreign love.

The winding path

Has dragged on like a noose.

When all roads

Lead nowhere,

The time has come

To return home.

[Verse 3: Oxxxymiron]

It’s hard to save one who flees towards death

Cypresses, palms, blue skies and sunburns are not armor

Here they pronounce monsoon differently, the landscapes are like dreams,

But how can we stop yearning for somewhere we are not?

Here it may not be comfortable, but it’s not Lefortovo 1

But you stubbornly wait to be teleported home, to inject

The old formula, in a childhood home without Ordnung2

Here you’ve seen everything: the mines of Dortmund and cliffs of Cornwall

The Morlock herds from slums in early books of Orwell. 3

A wanderer’s map is on his palm, until the ties to point A are broken

But a lump scratches his throat, part time work as a porter,

A glass of vodka with Cinzano…

What the hell is there to do if the heart conquers the mind,

When you're completely tired of being a stepson among natives?

Paradise is behind, but alas, we are kamikazes-

The world of gas chambers is ahead,

The army of Vlasov4, mass executions, but

Everything pulls back, wait, we’re entering our native antimatter

What's there to do, to say “stop?”

To give up and write under the table?

To chicken out, to fear that you’ll die here like an immigrant's vocabulary

Without real live speech in your native tongue

You thought you could survive without it, but the distance doesn’t shrink

You thought it would pass, it was nothing, distance heals, but

Your language hasn’t changed at all, kamo gryadeshi?5

See, Icarus, lay your hands on your forehead

Behind you cockroaches run, behind you are Paris and Istanbul

Three hundred grams of cognac, the plane flies higher and suddenly spins

Over a point over a cape- go down, my friend, and there-

[Chorus: Bi-2]

The cities are burning

With foreign love.

The winding path

Has dragged on like a noose.

When all roads

Lead nowhere,

The time has come

To return home.

The cities are burning

With foreign love.

The winding path

Has dragged on like a noose.

When all roads

Lead nowhere,

The time has come

To return home.

1. A Moscow torture prison2. German for “rigorous order”3. Actually a reference to H.G. Wells.4. a Nazi cooperator5. Bulgarian for “where do you come from?”