Hatto, Arthur T., ed. and trans., The Manas of Wilhelm Radloff (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1990)
Walter May, trans., Manas: The Great Campaign: Kirghiz heroic epos (Bishkek: M.-B., 1999)
These are two very different undertakings to render the Kyrgyz national epic into English-language accessibility. A scholar of Russian lit/folklore would call Manas a bogatyr tale, I think (Kyrgyz baatïr); I have only a taste of Russian byliny under my belt and no closer reading, and byliny are not very close. Thus the rest of the post avoids literary analysis attempts that would fail; see instead Elmira Köçümkulkïzï’s overview of the epic cycle, which has links to text-segments she’s translated.
Hatto’s volume has all the trappings of scholarly endeavor, with facing-page text/translation and the retention of Radloff’s breaks between tales; there is (happily) no attempt to recombine the tales into a long narrative. Köçümkulkïzï (link above) says that Hatto “misunderstood many words, customs, and socio-cultural issues.” I found it far more readable than May’s, however, possibly because I’m used to reading scholarly translations of things. :/ Of minor interest: here, as also in some Russian texts, the Chinese are “Kitay,” and I wonder whether they’re reeeeeeally ethnic Chinese (of one group or another) or whether the older stories meant Khitan, i.e. a specific Mongolic group.
May’s translation is declared to be of Sagymbai Orozbakov’s version. It’s done from a “word-for-word” rendering into Russian by N. Kidash-Pokrovskaya, A. Mirbadaleva, and S. Musaev, according to its title page’s verso, not to mention sponsored by the President of the Uigur Association, the president of the Sakr firm, and a random scholar named R. Rakhmanaliev; that is to say, this act of problematic two-step translation is in part a nationalizing promotional effort. Massive, instant suspicion on my part…. The translation itself is in rhymed octosyllabic couplets that approach doggerel at times. S. O.’s version is either younger than the texts Radloff collected or updated somewhat, since it talks of guns casually. The slim volume is presented as one poem of 14573 lines, with brief annotation and an indifferent glossary of terms which includes some place-names and ethnonyms; Köçümkulkïzï writes of a two-volume version printed in 1995, which may’ve been a different undertaking. (She also gets his surname wrong—May is a known translator of other texts in Russian.)
Only 1000 copies of May’s 1999 volume were printed, btw. I love this research library. Just saying.