Old Cossack Songs

1.

Not by the plough is our glorious earth furrowed ...
Our earth is furrowed by horses' hoofs,
And sown is our earth with the heads of Cossacks.
Fair is our quiet Don with young windows,
Our father, the quiet Don, blossoms with orphans,
And the waves of the quiet Don are filled
with fathers' and mothers' tears.

Oh thou, our father, the quiet Don!
Oh why dost thou, our quiet Don, so sludgy flows?
How should I, the quet Don, but sludgy flow!
From my depths the cold springs beat,
Amid me, the quiet Don, the white fish leap

2.

A Cossack went to a distant land,
Riding his horse o'er the plain;
His native village he left for aye;
He'll n'er come back again.

In vain did his youthful Cossack bride
Gaze northwards every morn and eve;
Waiting in hope that her Cossack dear
Would return from the land he ne'er will leave.

But beyond the hills where the snow lies deep,
The ice-fields crack and the tempests blow,
Where grimly bow the pines and firs
The Cossack's bones lie beneath the snow.

As the Cossack lay dying he pleaded and begged
That above him a mound be piled on his grave,
Where a guelder-tree from his native land
Its blossoms bright should for ever wave.

(From And Quiet Flows the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov, translated by Robert Daglish and Stephen Garry.)