“I Wanna Hold Your Hand... But Not Too Tightly!”: Soviet Translations of Western Music Lyrics and Mid-Century [Soft] Power

Abstract

Attempts to satiate Soviet youth’s appetite for Western rock music in the 1950s and ‘60s on the one hand and the need to stem persistent attempts to obtain these products of the “decadent West” on the other prompted the creation of state-sanctioned Russian-language covers. These translations often reflected the “rewriting and manipulation” process (Lefevere 2017) that rendered suggestive innuendo and socio-political content of the original English-language texts impotent – or, at the very least, linguistically banal. The results were reimagined versions of the English-language original songs that accommodated the Soviet sociopolitical and cultural vernaculars of the Cold War.