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Manas : the Kyrgyz heroic epos in four parts
Volumes I and II only. Beautiful blue hardcover describing exploits of epic hero Manas. 2004 publication.
559 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 28, 2010
In order to translate poetry, one needs to be a poet. Sadly, Mr. May's relationship to poetry is so vastly different from mine that, were I not firmly of the belief that no-one has the right to say that somebody is not a poet, I would be tempted to do just that.
In fairness to Mr. May, Manas is terribly hard to bring into English because the music of the Kyrgyz language is so different than that of English, and the structure of the language lends itself to rhyming in a way that English, with its cursory-to-absent adjective-noun agreement and its near nonexistent relationship to case, most emphatically does not. I translated a portion of the text for my undergraduate thesis, and decided to forgo rhyme scheme altogether in search of a better translation, one that was not stilted or arcane and didn't distort the story in favor of rhyme and meter. Alas, it was little better than Mr. May's translation, although its flaws were in different areas, such as the utter absence of any sort of music whatsoever, as well as my desire to sit with anyone who read it and spend hours explaining the depth and complexity of the decisions that went into the translation and the nuances of meaning that were changed or lost. As you might imagine, it had way too many footnotes.
However, I'm excited that the whole Epos is available in English now, as none of it had been translated into English when I took my sad little stab at it in college. I am also gratified to see that Mr. May chose to maintain the use of "epos" rather than the translated "epic," a source of much debate between my thesis advisor and myself, and one which ended in the conclusion that maintaining the word "epos" was important to honoring the culture of origin of Manas, which is so much larger and more important in Kyrgyz culture than what we typically think of when the word "epic" is evoked.
In fairness to Mr. May, Manas is terribly hard to bring into English because the music of the Kyrgyz language is so different than that of English, and the structure of the language lends itself to rhyming in a way that English, with its cursory-to-absent adjective-noun agreement and its near nonexistent relationship to case, most emphatically does not. I translated a portion of the text for my undergraduate thesis, and decided to forgo rhyme scheme altogether in search of a better translation, one that was not stilted or arcane and didn't distort the story in favor of rhyme and meter. Alas, it was little better than Mr. May's translation, although its flaws were in different areas, such as the utter absence of any sort of music whatsoever, as well as my desire to sit with anyone who read it and spend hours explaining the depth and complexity of the decisions that went into the translation and the nuances of meaning that were changed or lost. As you might imagine, it had way too many footnotes.
However, I'm excited that the whole Epos is available in English now, as none of it had been translated into English when I took my sad little stab at it in college. I am also gratified to see that Mr. May chose to maintain the use of "epos" rather than the translated "epic," a source of much debate between my thesis advisor and myself, and one which ended in the conclusion that maintaining the word "epos" was important to honoring the culture of origin of Manas, which is so much larger and more important in Kyrgyz culture than what we typically think of when the word "epic" is evoked.
January 18, 2010
The epic story was interesting, but the translation was into very poor English verse. Translating poetry is difficult, so I'm normally pretty forgiving, but this was the worst kind of sing-song verse with painfully awkward syntax imposed on it in order to fit the rhyme scheme.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews