The Kumyks are a Turkic people, indigenous to the present-day territories of Dagestan, parts of Chechnya, and North Ossetia. Presumably, the Kumyk language was formed in the pre-Mongol period. Until the 1930s, this language was the lingua-franca of the Northern Caucasus, that is, it could be understood and spoken by all the peoples living in this region.
The writing system has changed over time: first, the Kumyks used an Arabic script, which was replaced by a Latin alphabet in 1929. And since 1938, the Kumyks have been writing using Cyrillic letters, which was also partially changed in the early 1950s.
A poet Magomed Atabayev translated Yershov’s tale “The Little Humpbacked Horse” about Ivan (a peasant), who went to search the Firebird, into Kumyk in 2007.
Atabayev was born in 1938 in Khasavyurt district, Dagestan. The future poet graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow and, when he returned home, worked as an editor of fiction at the Dagestan book publishing house, as well as an editor of the Kumyk issue of the almanac “Druzhba” (Friendship) and the magazine “Literary Dagestan”. In 2008, Atabayev won of the III All-Russian Literary Prize named after P. P. Yershov and was granted the title of a “Missionary of the Russian culture to the peoples of Russia”. Yershov’s tale contained historicisms, archaisms, and folkloric images, and in order to translate it correctly, one had to know the culture of the Russian and the Kumyk peoples. Atabayev managed not only to accurately translate the overall plot of the tale but also to preserve the original rhythm and imagery.
Yershov Museum Complex of Ishim City houses a collection of ‘The Little Humpbacked Horse’ editions in different world languages: French, Japanese, Spanish, German, Latvian, Hungarian, Armenian, Hebrew, and the languages of the peoples of Russia. There are five different English translations.
The first translated editions of ‘The Little Humpbacked Horse’ appeared soon after Pyotr Yershov’s death. In the early 1870s, the book was published in Czech; in 1876 a Polish translation was published in Vilnius, Lithuania, and in 1888 one was made in the Polish capital Warsaw. In the early twentieth century, editions of “The Little Humpbacked Horse” appeared in Western Europe and Asia.
The writing system has changed over time: first, the Kumyks used an Arabic script, which was replaced by a Latin alphabet in 1929. And since 1938, the Kumyks have been writing using Cyrillic letters, which was also partially changed in the early 1950s.
A poet Magomed Atabayev translated Yershov’s tale “The Little Humpbacked Horse” about Ivan (a peasant), who went to search the Firebird, into Kumyk in 2007.
Atabayev was born in 1938 in Khasavyurt district, Dagestan. The future poet graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow and, when he returned home, worked as an editor of fiction at the Dagestan book publishing house, as well as an editor of the Kumyk issue of the almanac “Druzhba” (Friendship) and the magazine “Literary Dagestan”. In 2008, Atabayev won of the III All-Russian Literary Prize named after P. P. Yershov and was granted the title of a “Missionary of the Russian culture to the peoples of Russia”. Yershov’s tale contained historicisms, archaisms, and folkloric images, and in order to translate it correctly, one had to know the culture of the Russian and the Kumyk peoples. Atabayev managed not only to accurately translate the overall plot of the tale but also to preserve the original rhythm and imagery.
Yershov Museum Complex of Ishim City houses a collection of ‘The Little Humpbacked Horse’ editions in different world languages: French, Japanese, Spanish, German, Latvian, Hungarian, Armenian, Hebrew, and the languages of the peoples of Russia. There are five different English translations.
The first translated editions of ‘The Little Humpbacked Horse’ appeared soon after Pyotr Yershov’s death. In the early 1870s, the book was published in Czech; in 1876 a Polish translation was published in Vilnius, Lithuania, and in 1888 one was made in the Polish capital Warsaw. In the early twentieth century, editions of “The Little Humpbacked Horse” appeared in Western Europe and Asia.
