superborb

I read this on

sophia_sol's rec and enjoyed it a lot! It's a collection of translated epics, with a longer introduction at the beginning explaining the style and historical context for the epics generally, and then a preface to each of the epics describing the variations of that epic and a little about how it is situated and interpreted. These epics are a cross-section of the various kinds of epics that might be performed, including the main 'cycle' of related epics and then more miscellaneous ones that draw on the same traditions.

CW: as these are folktales, there's often misogyny; bride kidnapping is a common topic.

What I really liked was the aspect of the common body of characters and backgrounds that get drawn upon for each individual epic. That's kind of what I like about fic, when you can see the different aspects of the characters as they have different adventures etc; of course, since there are only 30 epics translated and many are out of the main cycle, there's only so much of this aspect, but it was enough to be satisfying.

There was one epic at the end that was kind of satire, but it seemed that they didn't have a good grasp of how all the satirical pieces fit, so it was only just enough to give a slight flavor.

It was also really interesting to see the translation of an oral tradition, with minimal smoothing for written text. As you may expect, there's a lot of repetition (though the amount varies based on the performer). Often this is for emphasis, where if they want to drag out X, they'll repeat it in a few different ways. Or if X happened three times, the whole group of lines will be repeated again. There's also set phrases to refer to things; for example, wine is always green wine, gold is always red gold, heads are always reckless heads, etc. (The introduction gives none of these as examples for epithet-noun phrases, but the ones they give seem less common?) This makes sense when you're trying to follow something aurally!

Another poetic feature that was really interesting was the "Slavic negative antithesis", where a comparison is made to the negative form. The introduction gives as an example:

A bright falcon didn't swoop down on the geese,
on the swans,
And on the small migratory gray ducks--
A Holy Russian bogatyr
Swooped down on the Tatar army

The final tidbit I found interesting was the conflation of courtesy with knowledge-- one hero's special power is his courtesy, which is glossed as knowledge a few times.

Anyway, if folktales and oral epics are of interest, I'd recommend this book! It was solidly informative, while giving a good flavor of the translated epics.