What is Girl And Balloon About?
This song was one of Bulat Okudzhava’s hits in the 20th century.
I translated this song to English and slightly edited the ending to make it less mysterious. Although it is still a little bit mysterious.
Song Lyrics
Girl is crying.
Balloon flew away.
People console her.
But balloon is gone.
Lady is crying.
Can’t find love.
People console her.
But balloon is gone.
Woman is crying.
Husband left.
People console her.
But balloon is gone.
Old woman crying.
Didn’t live enough.
Her balloon came back.
She wants something else.
How To Understand This Song?
This song revisits a woman at four stages of her life and examines something about her psyche. The first verse looks at her as a girl crying over a lost balloon. The second verse focuses on her crying over not having love. The third verse comes back to her once she is a full-grown and now divorced woman. And the fourth verse looks at her as an old woman living with regret.
What’s The Life Lesson Here?
If I were to guess it’s that you should not cry about what’s not right. This approach to life isn’t good. Face things, live, but don’t be someone who pouts but doesn’t make their own destiny. Regardless whether you are a woman, this is such a simple yet relatable song because we’ve all seen little girls cry for little reason. We’ve also seen people struggle trough life that when we see the imagery in this song, we can immediately picture it and feel it as though we’re going through it or know someone who is.
But perhaps the most relatable aspect of this song is the fleeting nature of life. Life throws us challenges and problems. Those problems seem large at the moment. But time just ticks along, rendering those problems trivial. There is a triviality to it all that we can’t beat and our complains about it are not answerable. We have to process it internally, always in an ultimately unsatisfying way.
Listen To The Full Playlist Of My Cover Songs Of Bulat Okudzhava
If you like this song, I translated more songs that are similar to feel and depth. Here is a page on this site with more songs by Okudzhava. Take a listen to them on my playlist of Bulat Okudzhava cover songs:
Announcing The Poetry Book With Bulat Okudzhava Translations
I am beyond excited to announce that I released a poetry book which contains my English translations of songs by Bulat Okudzhava. Since it’s on the Kindle, as I translate more poems and add them to the book, if you have the Kindle version of the book, you will get those updates automatically. Here is my post about this poetry book and the different poems it contains.