Season 97 · Episode 1 — the opening of the Georgian shelf of KacheliTV World Classics: folk tales from Georgia, read aloud in Marjory Wardrop's English translation.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
THE BOOK BEHIND THIS EPISODE
Georgian Folk Tales (London: David Nutt, 1894), translated by Marjory Wardrop (1869–1909) — the first volume of the Grimm Library and the first attempt to translate into English any part of the secular literature of the Georgian people. Wardrop took her tales from three collections: the Georgian tales proper from the collection edited by Mr. Aghniashvili (Tiflis, 1891); the Mingrelian tales from Professor A. A. Tsagareli's Mingrelian Studies (St. Petersburg, 1880), collected by him in Mingrelia in 1876–79; and the Gurian tales from an anonymous collection (St. Petersburg, 1884). Every tale in the book was read and screened under this shelf's content rule before anything was built: of the thirty-eight tales, three are told here. The rest stand named, each with its reason, in the shelf register — the excluded tales are not told, and no completeness is claimed for the book.
IN THIS EPISODE
0:35 Introduction
2:10 Master and Pupil — or the Devil Outwitted: a peasant's son apprenticed for a year to a devil learns shape-changing, is known again by his father, and out-changes his master through hound and falcon, horse and mouse, fish and pheasant, apple and needle, until the thread burns in the fire.
9:31 Conkiajgharuna — the little girl in rags, the Georgian Cinderella: a stepdaughter fed from her cow's horns of honey and butter, gifted golden hair for her courtesy, and found at last by the golden slipper that fits no one else.
19:26 The Strong Man and the Dwarf — a giant who has nowhere met his match challenges the kingdom to wrestle, and a weak, insignificant-looking dwarf out-brags him at every proof of strength, from the stone squeezed dry to the hot loaf worn as a plaster.
Narration: Scratch. Music: the instrumental theme "Three Pairs of Yellow Eyes" is heard at the opening and at the close, and in a short excerpt between the stories; there is no music under the narration.
