An oak green grows in the bay;
A golden chain entwines the oak:
A learned tomcat by night and day
Commits around it his walk;
Rightwards he goes singing songs,
Leftwards – a fairy tale he reads.
There are wonders: there Leshy* roams,
A mermaid on the branches sits;
There are on unknown tracks
Footprints of beasts unseen before;
There is the hut on chicken legs*
With no windows, no door;
There visions fill the wood and vale;
There rise waves at sunrise pale
On the deserted sandy shore,
And thirty knights in armour bright*
Walk in a line from waters light,
With their captain on before;
There is a prince who on the way
Captures a dreadful king with ease;
There in broad light of day
Across the woods, across the seas
A wizard with a hero flees;
There a captive princess cries,
A brown wolf to help her tries,
A mortar with the Wicked Witch*
All by itself goes inch by inch;
There among his golden heaps
The Deathless King* is worn away;
There the Russian spirit lives
There old Rus* smells faraway!
And there I was, and mead I had
And saw the oak by the sea;
And there sat the learned tomcat
Who told his fairy tales to me.
One fairy tale I have recalled:
I shall confide it to the world…*
Translated by Emil Sharafutdinov (Emil S. on allpoetry)
This is the famous introduction to the great fairy novel in verse “Ruslan and Lyudmila” by Alexander S. Pushkin. Actually it is the most popular and memorable passage of all Russian poetry in Russia because it is known absolutely to anyone from kindergarten. There are about fifty pages more of this beautiful Russian verse which I have neither power of mind nor time to translate into English. This translation precisely follows the original in every rhythm and in every word. Alexander Pushkin begins his introduction from recalling almost all Eastern European and Slavic folklore personages, see the notes:
*Leshy – a forest demon or a spirit of woods in the form of a man similar to English Woodwose
* The hut on chicken legs is the notorious adobe of the Wicked Witch (Baba-Yaga in Russian) similar to the fairy tale of Brothers Grimm about the Gingerbread hut in the wild forest.
* The thirty knights and their captain living in underwater realms are folklore personages from another Alexander Pushkin’s fairy tale in verse “Tsar Saltan”
* The Wicked Witch – Baba-Yaga. In Russian folklore the witch usually flies in a mortar than on a broomstick.
* The Deathless King – Koschei the Deathless. In Russian folklore he is the most evil and most powerful antagonist. In England this folklore personage was transformed into Sauron by Tolkien and later into Lord Voldemort. While his soul was alive Koschei remained immortal and his soul was concealed in a needle which was hid in an egg, which was hid in a duck, which was hid in a hare. The hare was in a chest and the chest was buried under the very same green oak which grew in the bay on the island.
*the Rus – is the old name for Russia. Before Russia got centralized around Moscow there had been the Ruses, Kiev Rus and Novgorod (Newtown) Rus.
* Pushkin’s story of Ruslan and Lyudmila goes on and on without breaking the rhythm, it narrates of the young knight named Ruslan who sets on a quest to save his bride Lyudmila, the daughter of the Prince of Kiev, who was captured by a wicked wizard and carried away into his secret domain etc…
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