Manas is dead. Grown old, the hero sickens and speaks his testament to the forty friends: care for the child that Kanykei carries, seven months in her womb. They bury him at the bank of the Talas, on Mount Sulpukar, and Kanykei sings her lament over him. Then her father-in-law Jakyp sends the word that the widow must take one of Manas's younger brothers, as the saddle stays behind when a horse dies — and Kanykei refuses: should her child be a boy, she will never take those men. In the tenth month, in a yurt watched over by the old mother Bagdy Dolot, the child is born, and it is a boy: Semetey. 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 Death of Manas
03:04 The Widow's Answer
04:30 The Birth of Semetey
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
