Originally posted on DA: 6 September 2016


So I made a translation of this song to Bulgarian a while ago. Something that I rarely do, but this one time it came out of the blue and actually turned out quite very nice. The rhyming, the sounding, the correspondence to both the glorious original song and to the completely irrelevant Bulgarian history.... But anyway.
Then someone said, oh it'd be so nice if there's an English translation. Indeed, the one drawback of my otherwise genius (hehe) translation to Bulgarian is that.... well, it can only be read by a handful of people and appreciated by even less. In this respect even Finnish is in better position than Bulgarian because at least it uses (mostly) the Latin alphabet.

In short, I decided to do an English translation too.
In long: I had thought of doing it a long time ago already, but couldn't get the inspiration to. Well, I cannot brag about with too much inspiration now either.... but it turned out it can work out today. I discovered, part of the problem this time, curiously enough, was - try to guess - exactly the thing which makes writing rhymes in English so easy: the vast freedom this language provides. Like, Bulgarian is very stiff and rhyming in it (which I deem obligatory for my own rhymes because stupid like this) occurs like 10 times more difficult (and therefore usually lame) compared to English. Since I wanted to keep the original pattern where all the lines rhyme with each other because everything ends on a long "a", I didn't have much of a choice how to do it. Luckily, Bulgarian has plenty of verbs that can end in a long "e" instead - and it sounds very nice actually.
However, English does not have those. They have certain long vowels but they seldom end words in them. Those which do like "too", "bloo", "root", "food" etc. or alternatively "see", "bee", "scree", "pedigree" etc. don't call for a classically epic song about the heroes of old. It was clear I'd better drop the long vowel idea, even if it's what makes a lot of the sounding here. But then there's billions of other *nests* of words which rhyme with each other. I had to pick one. Which one, dammit. This hindered me from writing this for the longest time. Eventually, I just picked one.... well, you could say I picked it at random. Sounded nice and had more potentially epic words. With a bit of thought I puzzled together a lyrics that turned out nice, corresponding well enough to the original and again entirely singable, which in this kind of translations for me is a must.
So here you had the chance to take a peer into the neural processes that go on in my head when I'm writing rhymes. Disappointed? Well, it works.... kinda.

Anyway, so, I hope you like it. As unbelievable as it is this time I think I like the Bulgarian translation more.
(This happens EXTREMELY rarely. Because, as I mentioned, Bulgarian is very stiff, writing rhymes in it is WAY more difficult than in English and I very much suck at it.)

Original lyrics:

Illä harmaan korven korpit laulaa,
Hurme tämän kansan roudan sulattaa,
Katso kuinka hohkaa kansi taivaan,
Kutsuu se meitä tumman virran taa.

Heikot vaipuu kuohuun sysimustaan,
Sankarit kun astuu joen rantaan,
Halki iäisyyden laulu raikaa,
Kutsuu se veljiä tumman virran taa.

"Tumman Virran Taa" by Ensiferum.


Bulgarian translation:
Ensiferum - Tumman virran taa BG


P.S. I've done quite a few song translations to bizarre languages by now. I'll upload here some of them, the better ones. Though they all bear the curse of the non-English languages.