In the Socialist Groove

EASTERN EUROPE

In Prague's Rococo Theater last week, a big crowd rocked to a big beat as bearded Singer Waldemar Matuschka belted out his latest hit, a paean to the motherland called My Horse Is A-Gallopin':

It's a country of linden trees

And honey in the blooms.

Where the prices are steady.

Where the taverns are full

And the girls are willing.

The lyrics could have been written by the Czech Tourist Agency, but the melody is better known in grass-roots U.S.A. as On Top of Old Srnokey.

Down the street from the Rococo, in a dimly lit basement nightclub, a shaggy combo, the Golden Boys, hammered out a lilting press release for Saint Vitus Cathedral, "Pride of all Gothic." The locale may be different, but anyone west of the Carpathians would recognize the tune as Winchester Cathedral.

Boots for Masochists. More and more these days, the songsmiths of Eastern Europe are fitting socialist lyrics to capitalist tunes. A few years ago, TV and radio shows behind the Iron Curtain were dominated by the Soviet Union's decidedly square chastushki (folk songs). Today, Western songs constitute 60% of all the pop music broadcast in the Slavic countries. No wonder wary government censors have demanded that the lyrics be "put into our social context."

Thus such a subversive ditty as Sandy Shaw's Puppet on a String has been recast in Hungary as Paprika Puppet; the Spotniks' Walking Back to Happiness has become an ode to the joys of a country cottage, one of the most coveted status symbols among crowded Czech city dwellers. "The main problem with American lyrics is that they are too gushy for our listeners," says one member of the Text Writers' Circle, which supervises all song translations in Czechoslovakia. "Under our system we are conditioned to be less sentimental."

There could be no complaints about sentimentality in the case of Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. The original lyric is a mildly defensive warning to an errant lover that "one of these days, these boots are going to walk all over you." In Czechoslovakia, it has become the confession of a masochist: "These boots trample on everything beautiful/I live alone thanks to these boots/With these boots I stamp our love/They are taking their own revenge/I am stamping on my own happiness."

Original Cherry Blossoms. If the socialist versions of Western lyrics sound a little choppy, it is because some Slavic languages "lack words of one syllable, which help rhythm, and are short on vowels," explains Czech Translator Jirima Fikejzova. "In any case," she adds, "we try to be more original and avoid the banal, moon-June endings of American songs."

In some instances, originality is merely the result of an elementary knowledge of English. A Hungarian translator, for example, listened to the Beatles' Penny Lane, which is named for a street in Liverpool, decided that the song dealt with poverty, and turned it into a sociological tract called The Little Country Road of Poor People. The Czech version of the blues lament Jailer, Bring Me Water comes out as an upbeat number about the glories of nature. How did that happen? Well, admits Translator Jiri Fiser, after several unsuccessful attempts at deciphering the meaning of the words, he gave up and stared out the window. "It was spring," he recalls. "The cherry tree was blossoming outside my window. So I wrote about that."

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