The Song Narrative as an Expression of the Verbal Culture of Siberia in George Grebenstchikoff's Fairy Tale "Khan Altai" and Its English Self-Translation

The article discusses the functioning of song passages in George Grebenstchikoff s fairytale "Khan Altai". It was first published in the Riga journal Perezvony in 1928 and belongs to the initial stage of the writer's work after his emigration to the United States. The English-language self-translation of the fairy tale was created in the 1940s and has not been published. The Archive of the Museum of Fine Arts (Barnaul) has five versions of the translation. In the fairy tale, the image of Altai plays the central role. The aim of the study is to identify ways of creating the song passages, their functioning in the text, and their influence on the tale's poetics. The material consists of 12 passages. Grebenstchikoff created them on the basis of traditional folk songs, which influenced the form, the composition, and the system of images. The song fragments are written in un-rhymed blank verse, stylized as translations of Altai folklore. The author accentuates the song passages graphically and into-nationally: they differ from the context by the characteristics of the verse. The literary analysis made during the study showed the following results. Grebenstchikoffs appeal to the folk tradition is manifested in the choice of the form of the song passages. He uses an amoebean design based on the parallelism of compositionally significant parts and images. The clarity of the song rhythm of the Russian unrhymed poetic text is achieved through inversion ("Were I into a bird to turn - by the entrance of her wigwam I would sit"), lexical repetitions ("Oh, come, come, come, Katun-Su!"), syntactic parallelism ("Tell, then, to my father that as a hero in battle I fell, // And to my mother that fifteen wounds I had received!"). When creating the English self-translation, Grebenstchikoff used the same strategies as in the original work. The analysis shows the high accuracy of the translation: all the passages were translated and arranged graphically in the same way, the climax aspects of the songs were also transmitted with high accuracy. The line and stanza division of the text was also preserved, and the compositional characteristics of the amoebean design were transferred to the English text. In the final part of the article, the author draws a number of conclusions. The form of the song passages in "Khan-Altai" serves as a means of constructing characterology and adds a sacred motif to the images of the fairy tale. In the tale and its translation, psychological parallelism is used, based on the animistic worldview. The preservation of the native culture in exile, thoughts about the self-determination of Russia, Siberia and Altai led Grebenstchikoff to work on translating poetic monuments in the space of another linguaculture, to appeal to traditional Altai folklore, on the one hand, and to choose a fairy tale plot, on the other.

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