[Regular readers will know that I translate poetry, mostly from German, Russian, Middle High German, Old Church Slavonic, a bit from Latin and French (though I don't really have much of a feeling for these latter). You can see some samples of my translations here. More recently I've begun translating from Saχa/Yakut. This work is largely a result of the encouragement Jerome Rothenberg has given me, with whom I was fortunate enough to come into contact some time ago and whom I finally met in person last year. Jerry, who was Paul Celan's first translator into English and who later developed a system of “total translation” for Navajo recitative art, among other achievements, told me something that cracked open the way I see translation work and enabled me cautiously to begin to come out as a poet: one need not see the original text as “the” poem, and the translation as its approximation. Rather, one may see the original as the raw material for one's own poetry, just as others get their raw material from dreams, Ouija boards, break-ups, or nature. Anyhow, what follows below is part of a draft of a project about which I am sure I will be writing more here in the future, but the details of which I should hold back for now.]
1.
In 2005, the Saχa oral epic tradition known as Oloŋχo was proclaimed by UNESCO to be part of the “the Intangible Heritage of Humanity”, along with Ifa divination in Nigeria, Kabuki theater in Japan, and many other new members of this distinguished list. UNESCO's intervention was crucial, as Robin P. Harris has shown, for the revival of Oloŋχo as a vital tradition in the Saχa Republic of Russia in the early 21st century.[1]
To write down a work of oral literature is to transform it from something intangible into something tangible-- you can pick up a book, and touch its pages. But at the same time, to write it down and translate it, to freeze a specimen of a living tradition in time and space, can also help to keep it alive as a dynamic cultural practice. This then is the foremost reason to produce a new translation of the Oloŋχo: to provide external support to a living cultural tradition, by stimulating broader interest and appreciation for it in the English-speaking world. The Oloŋχo is so to speak both a wave and a particle, and to isolate it and study it in its particulate form can only aid in understanding of both of its manifestations.
The transformation of oral literature into text, of intangible into tangible, is moreover a common tendency throughout history and across the world. Indeed the foundational works of textual literature often have a long initial phase as oral epic. This is most notably the case for what is often considered the foundational work of western literature, to wit, the poetry of Homer, which existed for at least a few centuries before it was ever written down, and which still bears many formal traces of its earlier phase as oral epic. Is the Odyssey, one might ask, of a different basic character, with respect to its status as literature, than the Oloŋχo? The answer seems to depend on the era in which the question is posed. A second reason to translate the Oloŋχo then, is to contribute to the history of this tradition's textualization, and thereby to help not only to maintain as a living oral tradition, but also to aid the work in gaining its rightful place within the canon of world literature more narrowly conceived as a body of texts, a collection of “particles”.
Beginning in the early 19th century a considerable effort was undertaken in various countries of Europe to crystallize national epics out of the folk recitative traditions. Motivated by a strain of romantic philology, first birthed in Germany and associated notably with figures such as the Brothers Grimm, poet-scholars began to collect and process elements of oral popular culture and to distill them into what could be recognized in a learned European context as literature. In some cases, such as that of the Grimms themselves, the focus was upon folk tales. In other places, where more elaborate oral traditions were to be found, the result was a new, or newly particulate, national epic poem, one that could both help to buttress demands for national autonomy through cultural distinctness, and create a sense of cultural uniformity across a broad region that previously might not have been conceived as a “nation”. The most successful example of such a work is Elias Lönnrot's version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, first published in 1835 and explanded in an edition of 1849. Lönnrot's effort would be repeated again and again over the course of the century, for example in Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald's 1853 rendition of the Estonian national epic, the Kalevipoeg, which was largely his own creation with interwoven bits of folklore he had collected; or Vasile Alecsandri's 1852-53 version of the Romanian folk ballad, Miorița, which became a standardized textbook reference for what had previously been a diffuse and malleable cultural good.
To some extent, what we now call the Oloŋχo may be seen as akin to these traditions/works (waves/particles). But two factors have shaped its history and development as a work in a unique way: first, the geographical remoteness of Yakutia; second, the singular political history of Russia, most notably the revolution of 1917 and the policies this event ushered in for the management of the cultures of national minorities within the Soviet Union. It is worth very briefly outlining the history, from first contact through the Soviet period, of European scholarship on the Saχa language, and on Yakut culture and literature, since this history is in large part what continues to shape, and to limit, our understanding of what the Oloŋχo is.
2.
Due in large part to its geographic remoteness, European scholars long remained in doubt as to the classification of the Saχa language, and were hesitant to draw the conclusion that ultimately imposed itself as the correct one, that Saχa is a member of the Turkic family, along with Turkish, Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, and Uighur. Part of the reason for this hesitation is that the Yakut people appear to have numerous cultural links to the Mongols, as attested in a large portion of the Saχa vocabulary that may be traced to a Mongol origin. It is now understood that Saχa is a Turkic language with significant early borrowings from Mongolian, and later significant borrowings from Russian, and with a smaller but not insignificant contribution from the Tungusic Evenk language as well as a number of so-called “paleo-Siberian” languages. The Russian influence is largely at the lexical level and does not reach the deeper syntax and grammar. While Russian vocabulary is omnipresent in Soviet and post-Soviet Saχa writing, including both literature and journalism, it is entirely absent from the language of the Oloŋχo.
By contrast, both loan-words from Mongolian and references to Mongolian culture are common. Particularly revealing is the place of a powerful divinity named “Genghis Khan” within the Yakut pantheon of supernatural beings. From this, as well as other hints (including, now, DNA evidence), it may be established that the Yakut people left the western Baikal region at the heart of the Mongol empire sometime around the mid-13th century for their current home far to its north in the basins of the middle Lena river, a region too climatically inhospitable to be under more than the nominal control of a complex medieval Eurasian state structure. It is believed that the original Yakuts arrived there in fleeing to the margins of empire, and adapted to the new forms of life that the natural environment permitted. Further to the north they developed an economy based on reindeer-herding and on forms of hunting and fishing that are common across the circumpolar region, while the Yakuts somewhat further south developed an economy heavily reliant on horses and cattle, a reliance reflected notably in the vast number of Saχa poetic terms derived from dairy products. The Oloŋχo is charged with language and images drawn from new reality into which the Yakuts migrated, while also preserving many echoes of the world from which the ancestors of the Yakuts came.
Significant cultural contact between Russians and Yakuts, including frequent intermarriage, began in the first half of the 17th century with the Cossack-led Russian conquest of Yakutia. Cultural exchange was so deep as to lead even to the genesis of a new ethnic group, the Dolgans, today living on the Taimyr peninsula to the west of the Saχa Republic, who are in large part descendants of Yakuts and of Yakutized Russians (as well as of other Siberian groups). However, these deep exchanges left few written traces during their long initial phase, and did not yield any systematic study of Saχa language and culture by Russians or other European scholars. Most of the Russian settlers in the region were illiterate, other than the colonial administrators, who for their part typically were motivated by a policy of Russification and accordingly were little interested in documenting the region's cultural diversity.
The earliest European efforts to document the Saχa language were carried out by the German naturalist and proto-ethnographer Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt in the 1720s,[2] in connection with the First Kamchatka Expedition directed by the newly founded St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Messerschmidt's work involved little more than vocabulary lists, and was not particularly focused on Saχa, but rather was only part of the rudimentary project of creating a multilingual glossary of Siberian languages, including also, in particular, the Tungusic Evenk language. The first systematic grammar of Saχa was published only in 1851, by the St. Petersburg Indologist Otto von Böhtlingk,[3] on the basis of materials compiled by the traveller Alexander Theodor von Middendorff (1815-1894). Böhtlingk's work is a model of deeply learned comparative German philology, and one that is nearly impossible to read if one does not also know, e.g., Ottoman, Tatar, Tibetan, and Mongolian. Because it was only a side project of Böhtlingk's, moreover, a short break from his Sanskrit studies, the work tends to underestimate the richness of the object of study itself, the Saχa language, and to consider it almost exclusively from a comparative perspective rather than in its own right.
In the late 19th century scholars built on the work of Böhtlingk, and increasingly did so from within Yakutia. Frequently, these were ethnic minorities within the Russian empire who had been “sent to Siberia”, where their status was something between prisoner and exile, and where they were generally permitted to pursue their intellectual interests without too many obstacles. These include the Belarusian ethnographer and linguist Eduard Karlovich Pekarskiï (1858-1934), who is the author of what remains today the most authoritative dictionary of the Saχa language,[4] and the Jewish Lithuanian ethnographer Waldemar Jochelson (1855-1937), who worked both for the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and, in coordination with Franz Boas, for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. For these researchers, the Saχa language and culture became an object of study largely as a result of circumstances; fate placed them in a certain milieu, and so they placed that milieu under a microscope, and in so doing created a body of scholarly work that would serve as the basis for the development of a tradition of written Saχa literature in the 20th century.
With the notable exception of Pekarskiï, who attempted a transcription of a portion of the Oloŋχo beginning in 1886, the European linguists and ethnographers in Yakutia at the fin-de-siècle passed over the opportunity to note the richness of Yakut storytelling tradition. These researchers were often single-mindedly preoccupied with the cultural phenomenon of “shamanism” to the exclusion of all others,[5] as the intense altered state of the shaman likely seemed more worthy of observation and description than the longer and less “dangerous” imaginative journey of the Oloŋχosut or Yakut bard. In part because of this perceived danger of traditional religious expressions, much of the early history of textual production in Saχa was focused on the publication of portions of the Bible in translation (Pekarskiï found these woefully inadequate in view of their failure to capture the sense of the Gospels in an idiomatic Saχa that might be hoped to make sense to native speakers).
What changes with the revolution of 1917 is that Saχa literacy quickly comes to be seen as most important for the education of Yakuts themselves, rather than as an object of scholarly study by Europeans. In part, this revolutionary shift opens up the possibility for indigenous insertion of traditional forms of expression into the emerging body of Saχa literature, though at just the same moment as stewardship of the Yakut written language is passing from Europeans to Yakuts, a strong break with past tradition is also underway, indeed a break with both the oral traditions of the locals and the scriptural traditions of the settlers and missionaries, and a high premium is instead being placed on modern style and on contemporary Soviet themes.
We do not see, before or after the revolution, any idea that the Yakut people form a nation in the sense that was earlier articulated in, e.g., Finland, Estonia, or Romania: the concretization of the Oloŋχo into a work of textual literature can thus not be thought of as a delayed Yakut echo of the Kalevala. This difference cannot entirely be explained, in the prerevolutionary period, by the fact that Pekarskiï and the others were not themselves Yakut: after all, Lönnrot was ethnically Swedish, not Finnish, and Kreutzwald was ethnically Balto-German, not Estonian. The difference is rather to be explained by the geographical and geopolitical situation of Yakutia within the Russian empire, a place that nobody doubted was more or less fixed: romantic nationalism was birthing new states on the margins of Europe, and poetry was helping this to happen. But in the far northeastern corner of Eurasia, empire still seemed a valid arrangement. The Russian revolution reinforced this arrangement and the perception of its validity, though of course now it had to be articulated in new terms: it could not be called an “empire”, but rather was conceived as a voluntary federation of Soviet republics, which were all de facto understood to be subordinate to a Russocentric government in Moscow. The Soviet national anthem conveys this dual reality well: “An individisible union of free republics / Has been brought together forever by Great Rus'.” For the Yakut people in particular, this formula meant that an autonomous culture could thrive, with the right to education in its own language and a certain amount of support and recognition for expressions of its cultural distinctness, but always on terms set down by a central authority far away.
This authority is one that, in arts and culture, valued modernity above all, and was wary of traditional artistic forms. A new canon of Yakut national writers was trained up and promoted, such as A. E. Kulakovskiï (1877-1926), who wrote in a socialist-realist style and emphasized the importance of the Soviet revolution for the enlightenment and modernization of Yakutia. A. I. Sofronov (1886-1935), more commonly known by his nom de plume, “Alampa”, wrote Saχa poetry and drama in a highly modernist style. Platon Oyunskiï (1893-1939) was one of the few early founders of Soviet Yakut literature who continued to pursue scholarship on traditional Saχa folklore into the 1930s, including extensive field-work involving transcription of Oloŋχo recitations. Perhaps relatedly, he was found guilty of leading a “bourgeois-nationalist counterrevolutionary organization”, and died in prison the following year. Oloŋχo studies did revive in the late-Soviet period (Oyunskiï was “rehabilitated” in 1955), but generally from a rigorously philological and comparative-linguistic perspective that did little to help maintain Oloŋχo as a living tradition. It is only in the post-Soviet period, and indeed in the early 21st century, that the Yakut art of storytelling has become the target of serious efforts of revitalization.
3.
When we speak of the Oloŋχo, we are not speaking of a particular well-bounded work akin to Hamlet or Popol Vuh. Rather, this is the name, most broadly, for an open-ended and expandable cluster of works, which are whatever is or ever has been recited by an Oloŋχosut. Somewhat less broadly, the Oloŋχo is constituted by whatever small portion of the recitations of the Oloŋχosut's has been transcribed up until the present moment. Here, too, the work is open-ended, as more transcriptions can only make it larger. In a still narrower sense, the Oloŋχo is the relatively small cluster of works that, since the end of the 19th century, have been most commonly edited, published, and translated (particularly into Russian). These include, most preeminently, “Ñurgun Bootur the Swift,” first transcribed by Oyunskiï in the 1930s, and “Kyys Däbäliïä,” transcribed for the first time by S. K. D'yakonov in 1941.
Vladimir Nabokov provided a hyper-literal translation into English of Pushkin's Evgeny Onegin, as if to demonstrate that poetic translation is impossible, that a poem necessarily relies on unique features of the language in which it is written, so that to remove those features is necessarily to remove its poetic essence. There is some truth in this, but the Oloŋχo poses very different problems than the canonical works of European verse, and in our view it is quite feasible to capture its essence, or something very close to it, in English. For one thing, in traditional Saχa poetics there is generally no importance attached to meter, or rhyme, or other constraints that might make it difficult to attain something close to equivalency of meaning in another language while also conserving the formal poetic features of the original. The principal poetic elements of the Oloŋχo, as with many other oral epic traditions of the world, are epithets, alliteration, and parallelism, occurring in lines of varying length (though generally rather short), and generally capable of being reproduced in translation. The elements that are inevitably lost, of course, are those essentially linked to performance. And the most important of these, surely, is the musicality. The Oloŋχo consists in both recited parts and sung parts (in “Ñurgun Bootur the Swift” there are roughly one third sung lines to two thirds spoken ones), and is best understood, like many bardic traditions, as an art form that is as much music as it is poetry.
The poetry, again, can be retained. The poetic quality of the Oloŋχo resides in several different overlapping elements. It is often, and not incorrectly, presented as a heroic epos, which is to say that it follows the remarkable exploits of a given bootur-- a term that comes most directly from the Mongolian bağatur, but is also etymologically linked to the better known Russian bogatyr', the Slavic counterpart of the medieval knight-errant figure common in medieval European literature. It is the bootur who typically is placed center stage in editions of the Oloŋχo, particularly in translations into western languages intended for whatever modest stream of tourists passes through Yakutsk. This centering occurs not only in the selection of passages, but also in such superficial elements as cover illustrations and book-jacket summary descriptions. But while the Oloŋχo is rightly understood as heroic epic, one might argue that the emphasis on this dimension comes at the detriment of other of its deeper poetic qualities. Of course these deeper qualities can coexist with the “plot” of the hero's voyage, as they plainly do in Gilgamesh or the Odyssey. But because the Oloŋχo is so vast, in any edition that only presents selected parts of it, there is a risk of shutting out the more “purely” poetic parts, those in particular that express a wonderment before nature, that probe the mysteries of what lies beyond it and of what the sources of our own existence might be.
4.
While traditional cultural practices of the Yakuts have been put under stress by modernization, the Saχa language, unlike other regional languages such as Evenk and Yukaghir, is by no means moribund. On the contrary it is a true regional lingua franca, strong enough to compel other linguistic minorities, including Evenks and Yukaghirs, as well as native speakers of Russian, to learn it as a second or third language for interethnic exchange. Saχa does not need, now or in the foreseeable future, any extraordinary measures for its conservation. In this light to translate it and to promote interest in its literature must not be seen as part of an effort to “save” it, but rather as a recognition of its true status as a significant world language with a significant literature. To some extent this recognition has long been afforded to it within the context of the distinctive variety of multiculturalism promoted in the Soviet Union and later in the Russian Federation. But one important reason to translate the Oloŋχo into English, to the extent possible without reliance on Russian scholarly sources, is to help to separate Yakut literature from the hegemonic culture that surrounds it and that has long had the power to frame and to define the value of the cultural productions of its minority subjects. It is natural that work on the Oloŋχo has historically been filtered through the Russian language and Russian scholarly and political concerns, just as, say, Nahuatl or Quechua are filtered through Spanish. Nonetheless, to de-Russify the Oloŋχo through a direct Saχa-to-English translation is to return more closely to its historical sources, and to help to portray this work on its own terms.
[1] See Robin P. Harris, Storytelling in Siberia: The Olonkho Epic in a Changing World, University of Illinois Press, 2017.
[2] See D. G. Messerschmidt, Forschungsreise durch Sibirien, 1720-1727, 5 vols., Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962-1977.
[3] Otto von Böhtlingk, Über die Sprache der Jakuten. Grammatik, Text und Wörterbuch, St. Petersburg: Buchdruckerei der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1851
[4] E. K. Pekarskiï, Slovar' Yakutskogo yazyka, Petrograd: Izdanie Imperatorskoiï Akademii Nauk, 1917.
[5] See, e.g., V. F. Kostorin, “Shaman v roli vracha,” in Sibirskiï Vestnik 102 (September, 1895).
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