The games of Kokotoy's memorial feast go on. First the foot-race: Toshtuk, whom no one under the earth overtakes in the leap, against the grey old woman Joloi sends to run for him — three months on the road, the runners feasted with brandy at the turning, and the race decided at last by the chamois-hunter, who prays to the Creator and strides out from the early morning to come in first. Then Bok Murun sets sixty parti-coloured pacing horses as the wrestling prize, and no prince of the believers or the unbelievers will step forward against mountain-like Joloi — not Toshtuk, not six-year-old Kok Kojan — until Khan Koschoi, ninety-five years old, his back crooked and his breast broad as a boat, takes the hero's own trousers for the bout and comes solemnly forward to throw the giant. From the earliest written Manas, recorded from Kyrgyz singers in 1862–1869 and published by Wilhelm Radlov in 1885 (Proben der Volkslitteratur, Part V), in a fresh English translation made for KacheliTV. This is the Manas of the first singers ever written down, not the later giant tellings.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
00:00 The Foot-Race
01:41 The Wrestling
06:06 Koschoi Takes the Hero's Trousers
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
