is my deep conviction that V.V. Derzhavin’s translation of Nurgun Botur the Swift is a wonderful (I would say, a classic) example of poetic translation of the ancient epic of the Turkic-Mongol peoples.
1975
Translated by Nadezhda Noeva,
Yakutsk. 2012
Translating the Olonkho
‘A MASTERPIECE OF ORAL AND INTANGIBLE
HERITAGE OF HUMANITY’
Alina Nakhodkina
Dr of Philology, Project Coordinator,
M. K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University, Russian Federation
INTRODUCTION
The Yakut folklore tradition is represented by a powerful and picturesque genre – the heroic epic known as the Olonkho. In 2005, UNESCO proclaimed the Olonkho ‘a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. This highly significant new status prompted a series of important events in the Sakha Republic, including the implementation of the State Programme on Preservation, the Study and Dissemination of the Yakut Heroic Epic Olonkho, the establishment of the NEFU Research Institute of Olonkho, the Olonkho Theatre, the Olonkho Land, the Olonkho Portal and many others. In 2007, at the M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, UNESCO’s proclamation also prompted the start of the Yakut-English translation project of the greatest of the Olonkho stories known as Nurgun Botur the Swift, first recorded by Platon Oyunsky.
An Olonkho hero
THE WORKSHOP IN 2007
The idea of translating Platon Oyunsky’s Yakut epic of Nurgun Botur the Swift, the first written, the most popular and longest – and certainly almost sacred – text into English first crossed my mind in 2003, but when I discussed the proposal with various specialists and friends everyone tried to discourage me, immediately pointing out the complexity of such a project. I nevertheless held a workshop on the Yakut epic for future translators, in which leading researchers of the M. K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University took part, including Professor Vasily Illarionov, Professor Louiza Gabysheva, Professor Nadezhda Pokatilova, Dr Vasily Vinokurov, Dr Ekaterina Romanova and Dr Svetlana Mukhopleva of the Institute on Humanitarian Research and Problems of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences. By that time the first song of Oyunsky’s Olonkho had already been translated into French and English. It was for this reason, given their experience in Olonkho translation, that the workshop was also attended by the faculty of the Department of French Studies, represented by Dr Lina Sabaraikina, Dr Lyudmila Zamorshikova, and Assistant Professor Valentina Shaposhnikova.
The workshop turned out to be very worthwhile, since our gathering provided a platform for communicating my plan to the scientific and translators’ society in the Republic, which predictably prompted a debate in which both our supporters and opponents participated. Our opponents had stated that we did not know the Yakut language of the Olonkho, but they totally ignored the fact that Otto Boetlingk, Yankel Karro, Douglas Lindsay and Kang Duck Soo were not Yakut native speakers and had translated various pieces of Olonkho into German, French, American English and Korean respectively. I suggested that we, modern Sakha scholars, knew the Yakut language better than non-native speakers and therefore through our superior command of vocabulary and idiom we could produce a far better translation than theirs.
THE TEAM OF TRANSLATORS
I then came to realize that our old Yakut was not that sophisticated and so decided first to translate the Olonkho from the Russian version. It seemed to be a good idea because the translation was intended for English-speaking readers for whom the main priorities were a plot and characters. However, I soon discovered omissions and mistakes in the Russian translation which was disappointing, and at the same time I became more and more captivated by the richness of the Yakut language of Olonkho. Certainly, we lost some time on the Russian-English translation but we still found the strength, will and enthusiasm to start again – this time translating the epic from Yakut into English. At this point, I turned to Albina Skryabina, a former university professor and my teacher, who once had translated the first song of Nurgun Botur the Swift into English for some translation contest, and asked her to join our team of translators. Now her translation opens the English version.
I also had the idea that we could use selected students’ translations for this project but then it quickly became clear that Yakut was not our only weak point, but it was the standard of our English as well. We were a team of non-native speakers in which the students were the weakest part. Consequently, I had to reject the idea, but still appreciate those students who worked on the translation, and I sincerely hope it was a precious experience for them. Some fragments of their translation in Songs 5 anf 6 made by Agrafena Ivanova, Zoya Kolmogorova, Irina Popova are included in the present edition. Time flew by and some former students became our colleagues. Only three of them kept the desire to translate: my post-graduate student Zoya Tarasova, who translated the second song, Lyudmila Shadrina, who translated the fourth song, and my assistant, Varvara Alekseeva who revised and translated Songs 5 and 6, and with whom I translated Songs 7-9. An experienced translator, Sofia Kholmogorova, also joined our team and translated the third song. While revising all nine songs of the Olonkho Dr Svetlana Yegorova-Johnstone, the British member of our team, proposed her own translation of some fragments of the text and together, working closely on the editing of the text, we shared many thrills and hardships of the creative process.
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
