Birtalan Ágnes: Kalmyk Folklore and Folk Culture in the Mid-19th Century: Philological Studies on the Basis of Gábor Bálint of Szentkatolna’s Kalmyk Texts.
INTRODUCTION
sample text of Bálint's Mongolian materials along with a Khalkha song. 6 8 1 have published a Benediction (Kalm. yöräl) in the book devoted to the Kalmyk language and culture (co-authored by Attila Rákos). 69 The Grammar with its Kalmyk Chrestomathy has also been published recently by me. Four folk songs recorded by Bálint have been translated and published in the collection of the Mongolian literature. THE STRUCTURE OF THE PRESENT VOLUME AND THE FOLLOW-UP PROJECTS ON THE KALMYK MATERIAL Bálint collected two large sets of Mongolian spoken idioms (Kalmyk and Khalkha) and included some sample texts from his collections into the Grammar while the other parts (the majority of the texts) remained without translation and any additional remarks. His texts, as emphasised in the Preface of the Grammar , offer the first examples of the vernacular language transmitted in a fairly correct transcription, quite close to pronunciation despite its deficiencies. The folklore texts, particularly the tales, and songs provide the first large collection of Kalmyk oral tradition. The brief texts on Kalmyk folk life might be considered as a somewhat sketchy description of a particular sphere of life, but they were uttered in Kalmyk, contain the native terminology and in comparison with other contemporary sources of the late 18 t h and early 19 t h centuries (Pallas, Bergman, Nebol'sin, Ziteckij, Kostenkov etc.) their peculiar value cannot be denied. Each text group of the Manuscript (cf. the Contents of the Manuscript) is worthy of exhaustive studies. In the present volume my endeavour was to introduce the corpus from various points of view: I. The text ° to offer a philologically correct translation, ° to provide notes to the grammatically or semantically problematic expressions, ° to provide notes on typical Kalmyk phenomena. II. The context ° to collect Bálint's statements on a particular text from various sources, ° to summarise the circumstances of recording (if there is available data) from various sources, ° to determine the place of the text among 18 t h and 19 t h century records, n to identify the text's place within the Kalmyk (and in some cases Mongolian) cultural context, ° to define the typology or taxonomy of the text (genre, structure, content, poetics, various classifications) ° to enumerate parallel-texts to Bálint's record. Owing to scarcity of data, not all the above listed aspects emerge in each text group and further research will undoubtedly help complete the material currently available. For the present volume a textual research has been carried out, but concerning the investigation of context, some research aspects of certain text-groups require additional studies. A further thorough investigation of the Kalmyk and Mongolian tale-corpus might provide more parallel texts to Bálint's tales, including a complex typology within the frame of an internationally accepted taxonomy. The investigation of the texts from other viewpoints (comprehensive motif-analysis and investigation of linguistic features of the texts) are in progress at present. The complete context investigation of the ethnographical texts is under elaboration and it will be the topic of a separate study (19 t h Century Ethnographica Mongolica). For the ethnographical context not only the contemporaries but present-day records are also investigated, with special attention to the folk culture of the Xinjiang-Oirats, the inhabitants of the primary homeland of the 6 8 Kara, G.: O neizdannyh mongoFskih tekstah G. Balinta. In: Narody Azii i Afriki 1 (1962) pp. 161-164, on p. 164. Kara, György: A mongol irodalom kistükre. Antológia a klasszikus és mai mongol irodalom és népköltés müveiből. 2. kiadás. Budapest, Európa Könyvkiadó 1971. [The little mirror of Mongolian literature. An anthology of the Mongolian elassical and contemporary literature and folklore] pp. 159-160, 169-170, 174-175,277-278. 6 9 Birtalan - Rákos: Kalmükök, p. 123. 20
