This is possibly one of my favourite folk collections I have read in years! I loved it. Apparently in Russia there is a folk tradition of oral epic poems/songs, called bylina, which I previously knew nothing about. But they form their own sort ofâŚ.canon of characters, and expectation of form and subject, and even borrow bits from one bylina into another if itâs gonna fit. So any individual bylina stands on its own, but when you read (or, I suppose, listen to performances of!) a whole bunch of them, you get a fuller sense of the characters and of the setting and expectations and all that.
As well as bylina themselves being new to me, this particular collection is excellent. Each translated bylina has a multi-page introduction providing interesting context to the bylina in question, and discussing the differences between all the variants of that particular bylina.
Then the translated bylina is a direct translation of one specific performance by one specific person, including the singerâs errors and asides and all. And the singers are all named and the date of their performance given.
Itâs GREAT.
Also, you can totally see differences between the styles of different singers this way! Some of them are better than others, imo, but thatâs going to be the case in any art-form. My biggest annoyance was the singers who overuse repetition of whole sections, over and over again, I guess to stretch the performance out longer? IDK. The bylina for Mikhailo Potyk was one egregious example of this. Poetic repetition is a thing that has value, and itâs used to great effect in many bylina in this book, but you can really take it too far!
One poetic framing device that I was fascinated to see in a number of the bylina in this collection is something thatâsâŚ..kind of a simile in reverse? Itâs a juxtaposition of a piece of imagery with whatâs actually happening, by negating the imagery. And it works really well, once I got my head around it! Hereâs an example:
âA white birch wasnât bending to the ground,
Pale leaves werenât spreading out,
Vasily was bowing to his motherâ
Itâs not a method of presenting imagery Iâve ever seen before, but itâs clearly a thing in this genre, and I love it.
Something else I noticed was the degree to which there are these likeâŚ.agreed-upon poetic phrases. In a bylina you never refer to someoneâs head, only to someoneâs âreckless head.â Even in contexts where that makes no sense. Wine is always âgreen wineâ and itâs always served in a drinking vessel that can hold a bucket or a bucket and a half of the green wine. Heroes of bylina and their companions are âdaring good youths.â And so on.
Anyway I was genuinely riveted by many of the bylina in this book, and even the ones I didnât like for themselves were genuinely interesting to read in the context of the genre. I liked that the collection even includes a few parodies/humorous variations at the end. They werenât funny to me at all, because I donât have nearly enough familiarity with bylina to get all the jokes, but itâs cool to see that the genre even had its performers poking loving fun at it!
