transcript — bl is a letter

Bonus Tale №6: The Only Thing a Gambler Needs.

As it is past Midsummer, it is time for us to reappear in your feeds with new old tales to tell. Some of the audience might be familiar with this specific one. The tale «The Soldier and Death» was adapted for television as one of the episodes of Jim Henson’s “The StoryTeller” with some minor corrections that made it easier for consumption. Since we are giving you the original, unabridged version translated into English in 1916, we absolutely must mention some of the details one might not be prepared for.

Bonus Tale №5: Red, Warm & Alive.

Last year, when we started this project, we decided it would be a good idea to try and translate an old Russian tale by ourselves. Facing Christmastime without a tale, albeit an extremely cruel one, just seemed … inappropriate. Yet as time went by, it was brought to our attention that there are at the very least four adaptations of this story translated into English by different people.

Bonus Tale №4: The Nesting Doll of Death.

Today for the first time we are turning away from Leonard Arthur Magnus’ translations and turning our gaze upon another English scholar who managed to refrain from adding his own ideas to the texts he worked with: Robert Nisbet Bain. The tale we are going to speak of is “The Frog Tsarevna”, or “The Princess Frog” (Царевна-лягушка).

It is one of the most well-known tales in Russia, and it proved to be more of a challenge for today’s narrator than usual. Besides a tsarevna (princess) and tsarevich (prince), in this version of the tale we have Vasilisa Premudraya (Vasilisa the Wise) and Koschei Bezsmertny (Koschei the Deathless). How could not translating these epithets make understanding the story easier? We have no idea.

Bonus Tale №3: A Gift Horse In The Cellar.

Our tale for today is different from the previous ones in our collection, since the English version of its title, “The Princess to be Kissed at a Charge”, has little to no correlation with the original one. In Russian, the tale is usually called “Сивка-Бурка (Sivka-Burka)”. There are over 60 versions of this exact story in Russian, and all of them are more or less about the same thing: a grateful dead offers their child some help in the form of a supernatural horse that comes from some place underground, can speak, is able to fly, and occasionally breathes fire. The name ‘Sivka-Burka’ refers to the colour of grey and chestnut mane of a horse, although the horse itself is often described as a white stallion.

Bonus Tale №2: The Devil You Know.

In our first episode regarding the place of a cat in the Slavic tales we mentioned the concept of a chort. While it is essentially another version of a demon or a devil (sometimes even the Devil), any chort is often described as the fallen angel of liminal space who belongs to no place in particular and has no specific area of expertise. Given the weird amalgamation of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and various local pagan beliefs that is still in use in Russia, it’s no wonder that a traditional Russian devil doesn’t abide by the rules suggested by, say, the Catholic Church.

Bonus Tale №1: Live, Laugh, Full Stop.

As we’ve mentioned in our teaser episode, there are a few tales we would like to tell you ‘as is’, giving you the unabridged texts. Some of the translations we’ve checked sadly aged like fine, uh, milk. So we tried to select some of the bite-sized stories with more or less tolerable English versions.

bl: bonus announcement

Welcome, gentle traveller.
You’ve reached a checkpoint.

Since we are currently at a dig site re-arranging and translating the materials for the actual episodes, it feels unfair to leave you in complete darkness for the time being. Our stories may not be guiding lights out of the dark — quite the opposite; and one can only wonder where they might lead you. Nevertheless, we want to grant you a humble offering in form of the bonus episodes, containing some of the unabridged Russian fairy tales told the way they were recorded back in XIX century.

Those we chose to bring to you belong to the land of the public domain. The translation dates back to the times when some of the words of both Russian and English languages used to have a different meaning. We are going to be your companion guides for each of these stories. After all, it is dangerous to venture forth alone: take our notes with you.

Thank you for following this path.
We’ll meet again.

Episode 01. A Cat.

NOTE: If you found any mistakes or mispronunciations, do please contact us, we’ll try to get better.

To this day there is a common idea nobody really questions. If you ask a Russian who should enter a new home first, it is highly likely they’ll answer without thinking: it’s a cat.

Cats figure prominently in Russian lore: cats are the first to cross the threshold of a new house. Cats tell the best stories. Cats can bargain with witches and fight off evil spirits. Cats also eat people.

We are going to explore and explain each of these ideas here.

There are things out there you might not know.

If you have forgotten something somewhere you have just left and have to go back to retrieve it, you need to look in the mirror before you cross the threshold and leave again. That is how one tricks the powers that made one forgetful.

Most kinds of evil or unholy beings can be banished either by prayer, or, which is even more effective, by the most explicit swearing you can come up with.