Fastidious Horses (Кони привередливые)

"Fastidious Horses", Vladimir Vysotsky, USSR, 1972

If someone got you interested in Vysotsky, this was likely your introductory song. This is probably Vysotsky's most famous song, and one of his best. I highly recommend you follow along with a more interpretive translation, as this song uses more poetic language than the rest and the translation may come across as clunky. Once again, here is a link to a website that acts as a hub for translations, among other things:

http://wysotsky.com/wysotsky/0002/008...

As for the content of this song, I will simply offer a translation of the Russian-language Wikipedia article:

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https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кони_пр...

"Fastidious Horses" - a song by Vladimir Vysotsky, written in the beginning of 1972. This is one of Vysotsky's most famous songs. Together with the songs "White Silence" and "The Ballad Of The Abandoned Ship", this was written and proposed by the author for the film "The Sannikov Land", but in the film none of these songs were used.

Vladimir Vysotsky's song "Fastidious Horses" - a tragic song, performed "with anguish". This is a first-person story of a man and how he has a presentiment of his own death. The lyrical hero of the song narrates that he is "being lost", and says: "Even not much more - I will stand, on the edge!" [Video note: the performance of the song that is featured in this video features a slightly different line: "Even a moment more - I will stand, on the edge!"] Vysotsky describes (his) "state" with the mouth of his own hero, and presents the image of Horses, rushing "along the very edge" of the abyss.

The author reveals the inner conflict of the narrator of the song: on one hand, the lyrical hero desperately prays that his Horses stop, on the other - he drives them faster and faster. He begs his Horses: "Even a little, but extend the path to the last shelter!" and says to them "Don't listen to the tight lashes!"

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There is so much more to be said about this one song than can be fit in a simple YouTube description, but I will stop there. I'll use the rest of this space for some notes:

This song uses a lot of Russian words that English "should have" - they very elegantly express certain concepts but they don't translate easily, for whatever reason. These words are the following.

"пропасть" - to disappear, vanish, fade... but really, this means "to become lost", not really so much location-wise as existence-wise. "потерать" (and the reflexive "потеряться") also mean something similar.
"успеть" - to "make it" on time for something. As discussed in the notes, it is a temporal version of "manage" or "succeed"
"опоздать" - to be late for something, the opposite of the previous verb
"зашелся" - went, or went into, or went numb. I'd like to add that the "gone all numb" can be figurative, and it may really also mean that it's "gone all out", or perhaps "went mad".

Again, there is more to say, but I stop here.