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.

FOLKLORE GENRES

Kalmyk pastry

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0 and distributed them among [the lads]. Then began the dance to the music of some Armenian musicians; the lads holding the maids' hand 'limped' backwards and forth. Then they danced solo accompanied by Kalmyk songs." Cayanla täwdgyöräl Yorel v őest' Cagan Sar Enjl edü kewärän Eldw, bairta cayalj

... Esrnggdän enünäsn tilti Eriil-mend sedkl taryn, 301 V etom godu Budem radostno prazdnovat' Cagan Sar, A na buduSőij god Budem prazdnovat' jeSőjo luöäe SONGS (Bálint, Kaim. dünf

m Among the Kalmyks, Gábor Bálint began his lore-collecting activity by recording folk songs. As the structure and content of the folk songs of Mongolian ethnic groups are based on parallelism, the sentence structures of the stanzas are repeated and are usually less complicated than those of the prosaic genres. "Here I started this work [i. e. the collecting activity] with recording folk songs, as the sentences in songs are usually shorter and the prosaic length with participles and gerundial structures is missing, so they are more easily understood."

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3 Bálint provided some insights into his methods of recording folklore texts among the Kalmyks and a brief but profound summary of his ideas on the poetics of East-Mongolian (Khalkha) and Kalmyk folk songs. "The older lads put down for me folk songs in Kalmyk script for a token payment and I went over them with the help of my teacher. 1 transcribed the better ones and I asked my teacher or the informant to explain them. I even learnt three or four songs from the better sounding ones that had a characteristic [Kalmyk] melody. One can imagine how pleased the young Kalmyks were when I sang together with them! All twenty-five songs recorded by me, just like all other songs and poems of the East- and West-Mongols, are alliterative, i. e. the lines of a strophe begin with the same letter [i.e. sound], however, sometimes end rhymes also appear as [in the following stanzas]: 30

0 Ambekova provides a whole list of the various Kalmyk pastries prepared for the new year: Cayana börcgin yanz (Ambekova: Cecnbulg p. 108). 30

1 Bordzanova: Magideskaja poezija. pp. 165-166. 31)

2 Manuscript pp 15-35, Grammar pp 188-197. 30

3 "Ezen munkát itt is a dalok gyűjtésével kezdettem meg azért, mert a dalokban a mondat-szerkezet általában rövidebb és igy könnyebben érthető, nem lévén meg benne a participium és gerundiumokkal szerkesztett prózai hosszúság." Bálint: Jelentése, p. 11. 55