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sophia_sol) wrote2021-03-07 04:05 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2021-03-07 04:05 pm
An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, by James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova
An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova
This is possibly one of my favourite folk collections I have read in years! I loved it. Apparently in Russia there is a folk tradition of oral epic poems/songs, called bylina, which I previously knew nothing about. But they form their own sort of....canon of characters, and expectation of form and subject, and even borrow bits from one bylina into another if it's gonna fit. So any individual bylina stands on its own, but when you read (or, I suppose, listen to performances of!) a whole bunch of them, you get a fuller sense of the characters and of the setting and expectations and all that.
As well as bylina themselves being new to me, this particular collection is excellent. Each translated bylina has a multi-page introduction providing interesting context to the bylina in question, and discussing the differences between all the variants of that particular bylina.
Then the translated bylina is a direct translation of one specific performance by one specific person, including the singer's errors and asides and all. And the singers are all named and the date of their performance given.
It's GREAT.
Also, you can totally see differences between the styles of different singers this way! Some of them are better than others, imo, but that's going to be the case in any art-form. My biggest annoyance was the singers who overuse repetition of whole sections, over and over again, I guess to stretch the performance out longer? IDK. The bylina for Mikhailo Potyk was one egregious example of this. Poetic repetition is a thing that has value, and it's used to great effect in many bylina in this book, but you can really take it too far!
One poetic framing device that I was fascinated to see in a number of the bylina in this collection is something that's.....kind of a simile in reverse? It's a juxtaposition of a piece of imagery with what's actually happening, by negating the imagery. And it works really well, once I got my head around it! Here's an example:
"A white birch wasn't bending to the ground,
Pale leaves weren't spreading out,
Vasily was bowing to his mother"
It's not a method of presenting imagery I've ever seen before, but it's clearly a thing in this genre, and I love it.
Something else I noticed was the degree to which there are these like....agreed-upon poetic phrases. In a bylina you never refer to someone's head, only to someone's "reckless head." Even in contexts where that makes no sense. Wine is always "green wine" and it's always served in a drinking vessel that can hold a bucket or a bucket and a half of the green wine. Heroes of bylina and their companions are "daring good youths." And so on.
Anyway I was genuinely riveted by many of the bylina in this book, and even the ones I didn't like for themselves were genuinely interesting to read in the context of the genre. I liked that the collection even includes a few parodies/humorous variations at the end. They weren't funny to me at all, because I don't have nearly enough familiarity with bylina to get all the jokes, but it's cool to see that the genre even had its performers poking loving fun at it!
This is possibly one of my favourite folk collections I have read in years! I loved it. Apparently in Russia there is a folk tradition of oral epic poems/songs, called bylina, which I previously knew nothing about. But they form their own sort of....canon of characters, and expectation of form and subject, and even borrow bits from one bylina into another if it's gonna fit. So any individual bylina stands on its own, but when you read (or, I suppose, listen to performances of!) a whole bunch of them, you get a fuller sense of the characters and of the setting and expectations and all that.
As well as bylina themselves being new to me, this particular collection is excellent. Each translated bylina has a multi-page introduction providing interesting context to the bylina in question, and discussing the differences between all the variants of that particular bylina.
Then the translated bylina is a direct translation of one specific performance by one specific person, including the singer's errors and asides and all. And the singers are all named and the date of their performance given.
It's GREAT.
Also, you can totally see differences between the styles of different singers this way! Some of them are better than others, imo, but that's going to be the case in any art-form. My biggest annoyance was the singers who overuse repetition of whole sections, over and over again, I guess to stretch the performance out longer? IDK. The bylina for Mikhailo Potyk was one egregious example of this. Poetic repetition is a thing that has value, and it's used to great effect in many bylina in this book, but you can really take it too far!
One poetic framing device that I was fascinated to see in a number of the bylina in this collection is something that's.....kind of a simile in reverse? It's a juxtaposition of a piece of imagery with what's actually happening, by negating the imagery. And it works really well, once I got my head around it! Here's an example:
"A white birch wasn't bending to the ground,
Pale leaves weren't spreading out,
Vasily was bowing to his mother"
It's not a method of presenting imagery I've ever seen before, but it's clearly a thing in this genre, and I love it.
Something else I noticed was the degree to which there are these like....agreed-upon poetic phrases. In a bylina you never refer to someone's head, only to someone's "reckless head." Even in contexts where that makes no sense. Wine is always "green wine" and it's always served in a drinking vessel that can hold a bucket or a bucket and a half of the green wine. Heroes of bylina and their companions are "daring good youths." And so on.
Anyway I was genuinely riveted by many of the bylina in this book, and even the ones I didn't like for themselves were genuinely interesting to read in the context of the genre. I liked that the collection even includes a few parodies/humorous variations at the end. They weren't funny to me at all, because I don't have nearly enough familiarity with bylina to get all the jokes, but it's cool to see that the genre even had its performers poking loving fun at it!
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