The Friday Circle

In the last class, we took a look at the noun system in a northern dialect of Mansi (Vogul), and started on a bear poem.

The order of noun suffixes works as follows: number + possession + case. As we’ve already mentioned, Sygva Vogul is elaborate in marking number: it has separate sets of endings for dual, and for three or more subjects and objects. Case endings may be instrumental (e.g. I hit him with an axe) or comitative (e.g. I hit him together with my friend, i.e. my friend and I hit him); ablative; locative; lative; or translative (without plural or possessive endings). Where two full vowels (but NOT ə) appear next to each other, a -j- is inserted between them.

For instance, where sāli is reindeer, sālijanəl (sāli-j-anəl: reindeer-1-their (3 or more possessors)) means 1 reindeer belonging to 3 or more people; while sālijaɣamēn (sāli-j-aɣ-amēn: reindeer-2-our (2 possessors)) means 2 reindeer owned by two people.

Or, where kol is house:

kol-əm-t	in my house
kol-aɣ-ən-t	in your (1 possessor) two houses
kol-an-ə-t	in their (3-or-more possessors) houses
kol-ət-t	in 3-or-more houses

Further examples can be found in Béla Kálmán, Wogulische Texte mit einem Glossar, Budapest, Akadémiai, 1976.

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The bear song, Mūnkēsiŋ uj-ēriɣ (’Song of the Creature of the Village of Munkes’, HU: ‘Múnkeszfalvi állat-ének’), was collected by Munkácsi on 8 March 1889 in Berjozovo, and was first printed in his Vogul Népköltési Gyűjtemény, III/2, pp. 260-5. This song was translated by Gyula Illyés (1902-83) as ‘Medveének’, a masterful translation that exploits those elements of rhythm, syntax and word formation shared by Hungarian and Vogul. Illyés produces a verbal art form that is unmistakably modern Hungarian, but which transcends the strictures of that language’s verse conventions to have the reader hear an echo of the Vogul language and pre-modern oral culture, transforming the basic structure of Uralic folk poetry, that of repetition and parallelism, into an exceptionally skillful translation. ‘Medveének’ is available in: Péter Domokos (ed.), Medveének. A keleti finnugor népek irodalmának kistükre, Budapest, Európa, 1975, pp. 39-46; and Béla Kálmán (ed.), Leszállt a medve az égből. Vogul népköltészet, Budapest, Európa, 1980, pp. 224-31.

Before a discussion of the poem and its translation, some notes on bear mythology.

In Ob-Ugric mythology, the bear is the most sacred and the most feared creature. Tales of the bear’s origin are perhaps reminiscent of the fall of Adam: the bear’s father is Numi-Torem, the Mansi god of the heavens. She (for it is usually a she) disobeys the Heavenly Father’s commands to stay in his house of gold and silver, and descends to Earth, where her life becomes full of difficulty. She must gather enough berries and sustenance to last the winter hibernation.

[The bear] is the guardian of justice and takes note of the most solemn oaths. It appears as a higher power who may take revenge for broken promises and as such plays a central role in the thought-world of the Ob-Ugrians.

G. F. Cushing, ‘The Bear in Ob-Ugrian Folklore’, Folklore, 88, 1977, 2, pp. 146-59 (p. 147)

Taboo words are used to refer to the bear: a male is the one with five buttons, a female bear has four, while a bearcub has three buttons. Bears may also be referred to as ‘the old one of the forest’, ‘the little idol’, ‘the holy beast’ and ‘the strong beast’. Its eyes are ’stars’ (xōs) or ‘currants’, while its front paws are ‘hands’ (kāt), its back paws ‘boots’, and it skin a ‘cloak’. When a bear is killed and skinned, the skinning process is referred to as āŋxwəlawət: ‘undressing’, removal of the cloak (HU: kibont, levetkőztet). Words for the bear’s stomach include xurəɣ (sack), såut (birch-bark basket, a word of Tatar origin), and pajp (birch-bark butt, HU: puttony), while its back is pūtjiw, the two struts from which a cooking pot is suspended over the fire. The name for the sledge on which the bear’s corpse is transported, ťāťä, also comes from Tatar. Where the word for an object comes from is not particularly important, then, what matters is that the object is not referred to by its name.

Cited in Cushing’s article (on p. 147) is a beautiful piece of colonialist prose, an excerpt from Grigoriy Novitsky’s Short Description of the Ostyak People, written in 1715, and an account of a trip taken accompanying the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan of Tobolsk. Novitsky does not distinguish between Voguls (Mansi) and Ostyaks (Khanty):

Apart from their worship of various idols, the Ostyaks have a great respect for wild animals, and particularly the bear. Their respect for the bear is based on the erroneous belief that if they kill this animal they are committing sin, so that if they have slain one with their own hands they must propitiate it with strange ceremonies of worship, for otherwise it will have revenge upon them as murderers.

So the Ostyaks, when they have succeeded in killing a bear, remove its skin and place it before the shrine in which the idols are kept, laying it out as if it were the living animal. Then the people assemble and hold a great feast and dance around it, declaring in their songs that it was not they who were to blame for its murder - after all, they were not responsible for the iron tip and feathers of the arrows: it was Russians who had forged the iron and the eagle who had provided the feathers. Shouting such songs, they draw nearer and nearer, then kiss the extended bearskin. When they have had their fill of such devilish pranks, the owner sells the skin without any more ado to anyone who will buy it. Their extraordinary respect for this animal, which is to some degree idol-worship, is also shown by the fact that they swear their most solemn oaths on its skin and take particular care by oaths thus administered.

Similarly, whenever it is necessary for an Ostyak to swear allegiance to the Tsar in public, they lay out the skin of this animal in accordance with their erroneous beliefs and place upon it an axe, a knife and other kinds of dangerous weapons. Then they offer a morsel of bread on the tip of a knife taken from the skin to the person they wish to take the oath, and the interpreter addresses them with these words: ‘If you swear a false oath and do not serve the Tsar honourably and do not see that you pay your taxes, may this animal have revenge upon you and may you suffer a painful death at its hands’.

I particularly enjoyed the contrast here between ‘erroneous’ beliefs in bear-deities and apparently sensible beliefs in Tsar-deities.

Bear songs have a number of parallels in heroic songs in tales, in that the bear narrates in the first person, and her adversaries are also heroic, often on horseback. This is curious, for horses are not native to this region. Along her travels, the bear may encounter superhuman adversaries on horseback, or teasing from a crow, while a wolverine acts as a messenger relaying orders from Numi-Torem to other animals, rather like a shaman, and a woodpecker acts as the watchman.

The song begins with an exclamation: kajajūjiń, kajajūjiń! This is to signal the transition from one genre or mode to another, from the ‘official’ real world to the fantastic.

The poetics of Vogul folklore is based on the use of repetition and parallels. Let’s take an example to illustrate these concepts. Here are the first few lines of the poem, in which the bear comes down from her father’s golden house in the heavens, to the sweltering hot summer on Earth He created, where she fills her hungry belly:

Kajajūjiń, kajajūjiń!
Numi-Sorńi āśkəm wārəlāləm
sāŋk åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū,
muńəm åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū,
taɣəntettal såut-sūntəm
taɣəntəpteɣim,
taɣəntettal pajp-sūntəm
taɣəntəpteɣim.

Following the opening cry, a very crude literal translation is as follows, and [T] indicates a taboo word:

Numi God-golden Father made/ hot pillowed joyous summer/ sweat pillowed joyous summer/ unfillable [T]stomach-mouth/ I filled,/ unfillable [T]gut-mouth/ I filled.

In the second and third lines (sāŋk åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū,/ muńəm åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū), three of the four words are repeated (åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū), and in the first slot in each line a synonym is used: sāŋk (hot) and muńəm (sweat). Here is the basic pattern: repetition and use of a parallel, which may be a pair of conceptual opposites, such as hot -and-cold, long-and-short, or a pair of synonyms. In fact, when ‘opposites’ are used, their conventional implications tend to fade away. For instance, when the protagonist does something for ‘a long time and for a short time’, the focus is on doing something for a period of time. In the bear poem, she collects back fat and belly fat in preparation for hibernation, and of course, the main thing is that she collects fat on her body.

What Illyés does is to find a balance between the literal and the creative. He replicates and recreates the patterns and, where taboo words are used in the Mansi, he uses a series of synonyms of accumulative effect (bendő, bödöny) to prepare the reader for the knock-out word (puttony):

Seje-haja, seje-haja!
Fönséges, aranyos atyácskám
teremtette forró földön
vigasságos, izzadságos nyáron át
tölthetetlen bendőm szádját
töltögetem,
tölthetetlen puttonyom szádját
töltögetem.

To be continued.

Posted on February 26th, 2007 under Ob-Ugric • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback