Brave Er Soğotox: The First 1000 Lines

I have just now passed the 1000-line milestone in my translation of the Brave Er Soğotox, and have decided this is a good point at which to share my draft. I am roughly 1/5 of the way done with the translation of the work. The Brave Er Soğotox is an epic poem in the Olonkho tradition of the Sakha people. I have written extensively about Olonkho, and about the Sakha language, in this same space. You are invited to read these other posts for background (simply click on “Sakha/Yakut” in the “Categories” section of the right sidebar).

The particular version of the Brave Er Soğotox that I am translating was recorded by Soviet ethnographers at a live performance of an Olonkho recitation by a Sakha bard in 1982. I selected it over other possible Olonkho legends because of its “purity”: unlike, say, the much better-known Nurgun Bootur the Swift, which was “cleansed” and modernised by Soviet authors seeking to make it more accessible, and was even turned into an opera, the Brave Er Soğotox comes directly from the source. For this very reason it is also, often, very difficult to understand. Many of the words the bard uses appear to be hapax legomena, coming from his own very idiosyncratic feel for the language, his own long life and the regional dialectal peculiarities of his distant childhood; he often spontaneously modifies the pronunciation of a word, or hybridises distinct words, in order either to fit the metrical and alliterative exigencies of the poem, or, sometimes, simply in order to amuse his audience. It's really hard, I mean, and I'm certain I'm still getting a lot of it wrong.  

I am finding as I proceed that it is practically impossible to preserve the original Sakha alliterations, which turn out to be the single most important element driving the poem along in its poetic power. I had at one point tried to do this through enjambment, allowing me to shuffle the words in a phrase between lines, but given that Olonkho basically lacks enjambment, to force this technique into the translation seems to denature the original poem more than to deprive it of its alliterations. So the poetic power is preserved principally in the images, in what the poem says rather than in the language used in the saying of it -- and that is still a lot of poetic power, as I hope you will see. 

Sakha is an extremely participial language, by which I mean that far and away the most common part of speech is the participle, frequently used in place of what we identify as the verb, and frequently with several participles strung together (e.g., диэн баран, literally “saying going”) where we have no choice but to use a single verb (we would translate this particular example as, simply, “he said”). There are several different categories of participles in Sakha, with technical names such as “participle of ends”, but these tend to be unhelpful in interpreting the sense of a participle as it is used. Accordingly in my grammatical analysis (about which see more below), I identify only (1) active participles (e.g., барар, identical in form to the third-person singular present form of the verb бар-) and (2) passive participles (e.g., барбыт), while describing every other participle as, simply “participle” -- this even though by far the most common participle is of the sort already used in the example above, i.e., баран. This form generally has the function of an active participle, but is not called that. 

A partial Czech translation of the Brave Er Soğotox has been done by Dr. Jonáš Vlasák, and I have read of it what I was able to understand. There is also a complete Russian translation, which is generally very good, but which takes liberties that I would prefer to avoid. That said, I confess I have relied on it for help when the meaning of the Sakha text escapes me. 

I am uploading here three files:

(1) The first 1002 lines of the poem, in Sakha.

(2) My draft translation into English of the same lines.

(3) An Excel file of a word concordance for the first 1002 lines, giving all the words in Sakha alphabetical order, the lines at which they occur, their English meaning, and their part of speech. 

This last file has proven to be the most time-consuming part of the work. It is a gargantuan task, but the larger it gets, the more it becomes helpful to me, as a sort of reference work that I myself have composed in order to make the later parts of the translation easier. It is also very, very rough, filled with mistakes, some of which are known or suspected by me, some of which, no doubt, slipped in without my knowing it. 

I am posting all this work in the faint hope of cultivating a larger community of like-minded scholars than I have been able to find so far. I have been working for the past two years with a very able and wonderful native Sakha speaker, who is however not a linguist nor a translator of poetry. A project as large as this inevitably needs input from multiple angles, and I will be sincerely grateful for any tips or leads.

--JEHS

Comments

[Julian Peters]

The opening lines of this poem are so beautiful and different. In a strange way I'm reminded a little of the first line of Rimbaud's "Barbare": "Bien après les jours et les saisons, et les êtres et les pays,"
Together, they could serve as the bookends of all knowable time.