Arkadiy Severnyi - Шарабан (Sharaban) Лирицс транслатион то енглисх

Charabanc

• 1. From the French char à banc, a type of open carriage.
• 2. The word американка (amerikanka) here refers to a type of two-wheeled carriage invented in America for horse-racing (source: ). An alternative for американка is качалка, which as far as I could find is the translation for 'sulky', which was originally a four-wheeled carriage invented in England that was then adapted into a two-wheeled racing one in America. In any case, the purpose here is to emphasise the narrator's motion.
• 3. This song is related to the Russian Civil War. The city of Simbirsk (modern day Ulyanovsk) was the site of fighting that resulted in a key victory for the Reds both for its strategic implications as well as the symbolism of its being Lenin's hometown. 'Charabanc' was a sort of battle song for the fleeing Whites and spread, as seen from this song, westward.
• 4. He was probably an officer in the White Army.
• 5. A dictrict in Odessa. So named because it was originally a majority-Moldavian settlement, but over time grew population-wise as well as geographically to cover the main port region. When Odessa became a free port in 1817, Moldavanka became the centre of the city's smuggling and contraband trade, a bit of a rogue-ish place as referenced to in the next verse.
• 6. Шиш = nothing, мусор = garbage. A direct translation would have sounded odd but I tried to capture the meaning.
• 7. The original saying is Дружба дружбой, а табачок врозь, literally 'friendship is friendship but tobacco apart' but meaning more that 'friends are okay as long as they don't get in the way'. The joke here replaces 'tobacco' with the diminutive form of 'legs'. It's a continuation of the light-hearted fun of Odessa mentioned in the previous verse.