French have Bonapart, cheese, wine and Paris,
You like their couture - you learn their language.
And you want to be like calm Parisians,
To read the newspaper with coffee, to bite the croissant.
Polish have Warsaw, bigus, żurek and flaczki,
Marie Curie also, by the way, Polish.
You go to them for skiing, you know their language,
You find yourself thinking that you respect them.
Refrain:
But my country - total ruin,
And people are walking proudly in flat caps and sportswear1.
But my country - total ruin,
How it is possible to hate own homeland so much?
Americans have a status and the Statue of Freedom,
Las-Vegas, Niagara, New-York, Hollywood
And a lot of people there can get along.
But if we even have just one person, they do not fit.
Faraway Iceland has two hundreds of volcanos,
Reykjavik, a couple of geysers and eternal ice,
And every person from the street can go for coffee
Into the office of the president, safely.
Refrain.
My country has Kyiv, Volyn' and Karpaty,
Donbas and Black Sea, Odesa and Lviv,
And there are only Deputies who live high on the hog,
Everyone else is playing roles in the movies about losers.
Biting the bullet, everyone stands and lets the convoys2 pass.
Earning a bottle of wine for month's work.
The biggest happiness of Ukrainian is to make it to tomorrow,
We are already in trenches, though this is not a war.
Refrain.
1. a reference to Gopnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopnik2. in Ukraine, people on top government positions usually are moving in convoys of multiple cars, and before this convoy passes, police blocks some streets for it and does not let anyone to move across this space. If convoy is late, the "standing" can last for hours. Some cases known when people died in these artificial "traffic jams" or because emergency car could not get through the block.