Belarusian Folk Tales — Part 1: The Magic Cap · Let It Be So · The Carpenter · The Two Stones
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Four Belarusian folk tales from Slutsk district, in the Polesie — the opening episode of a new shelf. Alexander Serzhputovsky recorded these tales from village storytellers in the years before the First World War and published them at Minsk in 1926; the tellers of tonight's tales were Liavon Liebiedzik and Danilo Kuliesh, of the village of Chudzin. The English here is freshly rendered in-house from Serzhputovsky's Belarusian.
A little husband whom nobody would look at twice sells his cow — and then sells the buyers his old cap for a hundred roubles, because they believe it pays his tavern bills by magic. A poor hired lad gives a beggar his last earnings and receives two words in return — "let it be so" — and everything he whispers them at sticks fast: the rich suitor to the storehouse wall, the priest, the mother, and a wise-woman with her skirts held high. An old man builds a sound house over a great stone, and a glib young carpenter rebuilds it worse every year. And a proud millstone, carted like a lord, cracks itself against the roadside stone it sneered at — the stone that grinds for everyone to this day.
Stories in this episode:
0:35 Introduction
1:34 The Magic Cap
6:48 Let It Be So
13:44 The Carpenter
16:57 The Two Stones
Source: A. K. Serzhputovsky, Tales and Stories of the Belarusians of Slutsk District (Minsk, 1926) — public domain; fresh in-house English rendering from the Belarusian. Narrated by Benedetto.
Music: "Feline Grace — Concert Hall Miniatures" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt between stories.
Left out of this part, by name: Truth and Falsehood, excluded whole (its bargain of eyes); The Poleshuks and the Poleviks, excluded whole (a war epic); The Stubborn Woman, The Lord and the Peasant, The Foolish Wife, Curiosity, and The Wandering Hired Man, each excluded whole under this shelf's standing exclusions and entered in its register. The Dog and the Money and the book's Christ-legends stand benched for a ruling, not built. This part tells Slutsk-district tales only, and the shelf claims no completeness that its exclusions contradict.
Belarusian folk tales, Belarus folklore, Serzhputovsky, Polesie tales, Slavic folk tales, fairy tales, trickster tales, bedtime stories, KacheliTV
