Artistic Transformation of Oral Poetic Speech into Written Form
The father of Mara Tashimovich, Tashim Iskhakovich Baidzhiev, was a well-known writer, educator, and philologist. He is one of the founders of Kyrgyz professional prose and drama, the author of the first textbooks on the Kyrgyz language and literature, a translator of Russian classical works, and a researcher of folklore. His contribution to the study of the epic "Manas" is particularly significant. He headed the folklore and epic "Manas" sector at the Institute of Language, Literature, and History of the Kyrgyz branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, prepared the trilogy "Manas" for publication and translation into Russian, and, together with Ziyash Bektenov, compiled a textbook on Kyrgyz folklore and the epic "Manas." In 1950, they were repressed as "bourgeois nationalists" and imprisoned in the Sand Camp in the Karaganda region. T. Baidzhiev died of exhaustion in 1952. Z. Bektenov returned from prison in 1955 after rehabilitation.
M. Baidzhiev's earliest childhood memories are associated with "Manas" — with how he learned from the manaschi Akmat Rysmendeev, from whom his father recorded the epic "Manas." This fascination then transitioned into translation, scholarly, and popularization work. M. Baidzhiev created the first documentary film about "Manas," participated in the literal translation of the four-volume academic edition of the epic into Russian, compiled and published an encyclopedic three-volume work on the epic "Manas" in Russian and English, and published numerous articles about its poetics and storytellers.
In short, Mar Baidzhiev approached the "Tale of Manas" armed with a wealth of creative experience, a deep understanding of the primary source, and a precise goal — to recreate the Russian-language version of the Kyrgyz folk epic in poetic form. However, to achieve this desired goal, it was necessary to overcome many creative difficulties.
The main difficulty is the artistic transformation of oral poetic speech into written form.
Oral literature has a synthetic nature: in it, verbal elements are combined with musical, choreographic, and mimetic elements; written literature, i.e., literature, is a single-component art: in it, the material carrier of imagery is only the word.
A literary work has an author — a primary (the creator of the work) and a secondary (the image of the author in its intra-textual existence); it is created through artistic imagination, through which the writer embodies their view of the world, demonstrating their creative energy; it contains the author's position as an expression of the author's attitude towards various aspects of life, understanding their ideological, philosophical, and moral problems.
Another difficulty is the poetic processing of the text of the folk epic. Firstly, M. Baidzhiev himself is not a poet — he is a prose writer and playwright. However, he had some experience of this kind in the play "Ancient Tale," written based on the folk poem "Kozhozhash." Secondly, M. Baidzhiev had no predecessors in the genre of poetic adaptation. There were prose adaptations: "Manas the Magnanimous" by S. Lipkin (1948), "Manas" by K. Dzhusupov in the artistic translation of L. Dyadyuchenko (1996), "The Great Kyrgyz Epic 'Manas'," which included a brief prose retelling of the entire trilogy, done by S. Musaev in the literary processing of A. Orusbaev and M. Rudov (1999). But there were no poetic adaptations. Although there were poetic translations of some episodes of "Manas" and "The Great Campaign," published in Moscow in 1946.
People's Writer of Kyrgyzstan Mar Baidzhiev