Tatar Tales — Part 2 (Küzüm Khan)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Three more Tatar folk tales from the fourth part of Vasily Radlov's Proben, published at St. Petersburg in 1872. Radlov collected these tales from the Siberian Tatars — the Baraba Tatars and the Tatars of the Tara, Tobolsk and Tyumen districts — and printed his own German translation beside the Tatar texts; the English here is freshly rendered in-house from his German.
Küzüm Khan promises a Russian boy land "as big as an oxhide" — and keeps his word when the hide, cut into straps, rings a whole tract; and the peoples who would not follow him receive their names from their own answers: Kurdak, Turaly, Ajaly, Baraba. On an island in the Sea of Muchit, Alexander's men heat a giant egg in fire until it cracks, and out steps a young dragon that all but catches their seven ships — until the two great birds of Mount Kaf carry it away. And a rich man's son who has drunk away his whole inheritance buys the dearest girl of the caravan, gives her jewel back for the whole hundred thousand roubles of his debt, loses her last jewels to a raven, and runs away in shame — while she, in men's clothes, builds a house at the meeting of seven roads and waits for the traveller who must pass that way.
Stories in this episode:
0:35 Introduction
2:06 Küzüm Khan
5:31 The Dragon Young
9:44 The Bought Girl
Note on The Bought Girl: the caravan sale of girls is the period premise of the tale, disclosed here as it stands in the source; the tale resolves it into a marriage of equals — she is its clever heroine, who rebuilds the fortune and finds her husband again.
Source: Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme, Part IV (St. Petersburg, 1872) by Vasily Radlov — public domain; fresh in-house English rendering from Radlov's German translation. Narrated by Bruno.
Music: "Feline Grace — Concert Hall Miniatures" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt between stories.
Tatar folk tales, Tatar Tales, Vasily Radlov, Siberian Tatar, fairy tales, wonder tales, trickster tales, bedtime stories, KacheliTV
