Our job would never have been completed were it not for the great contributions made by our proofreaders: Paul Norbury (Publisher, Renaissance Books, Folkestone, Kent, UK); and Geneviève Perreault (MA in Linguistics, translator, Laval University, Canada).
ABOUT THE OLONKHO
‘Olonkho’ is a general term referring to the entire Yakut heroic epic that consists of many myths and legends. Epic forms of folklore are created during the early stages of ethnos (cf. Russian bylinas [bi`li:na(s)]: tale with an epic plot) and in the case of the Russians it becomes clear that an ethnos appeared during the later stages of their development when such massive oral forms of folklore as epics were forgotten. There are famous world epics such as the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Finnish Kalevala, the Buryat Geser, the Kirghiz Manas, the Armenian David of Sasun, and many others. And among them our Yakut epic Olonkho takes its own place.
A warrior fighting a demon
A warrior with a bow
As the Yakut epic researcher Innokenty Pukhov states elsewhere in this volume, the Olonkho is an epic of ancient origin; by name, it is directly related to the Buryat-Mongol epic, the ontkho. The epic originates from the times when the Yakut ancestors lived on their former homeland in the South and had a close connection with the ancestors of the Turkic and Mongolian tribes living in the Altay and Sayan regions.
The Olonkho is written in an archaic language enriched by symbols and fantastic images, parallel and complex constructions, traditional poetical forms and figural expressions (‘picturesque words’ or ‘kartinniye slova’ in Russian – a term used by A.E. Kulakovsky, a famous Yakut writer and philosopher). The language of the Olonkho is rich in various figures of speech, especially metaphors, similes, epithets and hyperboles. The Olonkho is full of descriptions, as it is generally a descriptive work.
Thus, constant epithets are linked to the names of characters thereby connecting various fragments of the narration:
Mighty Nurgun Botur the Swift,
Who rides a fleet of foot black horse,
Born standing on the border
Of the clear, white sky (Song 5)
Fair-faced Tuyarima Kuo
With the nine-bylas-long braid (Song 1)
Born in the age of enmity
Ehekh Kharbir, Three Shadows,
The night stalker,
The deceiving twister
Whose whirlwind turns everything upside down,
Mighty Timir Jigistei,
The famous Ajarai. (Song 3)
The Olonkho’s bright artistic images and stylistic devices, elaborate poetic language and metaphors are close to the linguistic consciousness of the English-speaking readers knowing the poetic tradition of world epics.
TRANSLATION ISSUES
The most difficult aspects of translation are traditionally phonetics, syntax and lexical and cultural gaps.
Phonetic problems started with the transliteration of diphthongs. There are four diphthongs in the Yakut language that are as frequent as monophthongs: уо [uo], иэ [ie], ыа [ϊɜ], үө [уɛ]. The diphthong consists of two elements – a nucleus and a glide – and the nucleus has priority in pronunciation. I used this phonetic peculiarity in the translation to make Yakut names and nouns shorter and more readable, for instance ‘Суодалба’ [suodal`ba] became ‘Sodalba’; ‘Иэйэхсит’ [iejeh`sit] – ‘Ekhsit’; ‘ыhыах’ [i`hieh] – ‘Esekh’; ‘Күөгэлдьин’ [kjuegel`jin] – ‘Kegeljin’. I made an exception for diphthongs in one-syllable names and nouns such as ‘уот’ [uot], which was translated either as ‘Uot’ as part of a name, or as ‘Fiery’ as part of a constant epithet attached to the name.
I transliterated some exotic monophthongs based on their phonetic environment and the context, e.g. the Yakut letter ‘ы’ [i] is transliterated either as ‘y’, which is more traditional, or ‘i’. In general, while translating the epic, I ignored almost all the rules of transliteration, since it seemed to me that words transliterated according to these rules would be cumbersome or at best slow down the reading. My goal was not to put off the English-speaking readers but to inspire them to go on reading this long poem.
Another phonetic obstacle was long vowels, for which I used the same strategy: I shortened long vowels in polysyllabic words and transliterated their approximate pronunciation, e.g. ‘Туйаарыма’ [tuja:ri`ma] was translated as ‘Tuyarima’; but kept to similar graphic forms in short words, e.g. ‘өлүү’ [e`lju:] – ‘Eluu’, ‘Айыы’ [aj`i:] – ‘Aiyy’, ‘алаас’ [a`la:s] – ‘alaas’, etc. Some words are spelt with ‘h’ in order to show their length or different pronunciation: ‘илгэ’ [il`ge] – ‘ilgeh’, ‘сэргэ’ [ser`ge] – ‘sergeh’.
A breast-feeding woman sitting under the tree of life
Consonants were also a challenge. Thus, Ҕ [ǥ] does not have a direct counterpart in English and may be interpreted as both [kh] and [g]. I chose the last variant as the closest equivalent, e.g. ‘Бохсоҕоллой’ – ‘Bo(k)hsogolloi’; ‘оҔо’ [o`g(kh)o] – ‘ogo’. This choice was motivated by a word ‘удаҔан’ translated as ‘udagan’ (shamaness) in earlier translations. Sometimes I used data from Russian translations, e.g. the words ‘ыhыах’ and ‘уда5ан’ in Russian have the following graphic forms ‘ысыах’ [i`sieh] and ‘удаганка’ [uda`ganka]. That is why I used ‘s’ in the English translation ‘Esekh’ instead of ‘Ehekh’ – besides, there is a demon in the Olonkho who has a similar name ‘Ehekh’ spelt with ‘h’.
Structural differences in the Yakut and English languages make it impossible to achieve an accurate transmission of phonetic means such as alliteration, assonance, consonance and rhyme involving equal rhythm, length and number of lines. But these phenomena can be compensated in translation by other linguistic means to transfer phonetic and syntactic features approximately. Fortunately, English poetry – as well as Yakut poetry – is based on alliteration. Of course, nowadays alliteration is almost transformed into a non-functional supplement to the modern English verse and becomes an ornamental element of it. However, alliteration is a traditional part of old German poetry (Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian). In many cases only alliteration gives a structural certainty to old English poems that are not free from some monotony and colourless rhythm. Therefore we see that alliteration is a key element of the old English verse and in this respect to use alliteration in the Yakut-English translation of an ancient epic poem is relevant.
Black horse lost,
Broil broke out…
Bride was contested,
Battle commenced,
Blood was shed,
Bayonetted eyes,
Broken skulls –
Brouhaha