The Witch of Konotop

Description

Konotop, some time in the eighteenth century. Captain Mykyta Ulasovych Zabryokha commands a hundred Kozaks and cannot count past thirty. His scribe, Prokip Ryhorovych Pistryak, answers every question in a fog of archaic church language that his captain does not understand and is too proud to admit he does not understand. Between them they decide that the drought punishing the town must be the work of witches, and that the sensible course is to round up the local women and throw them in the pond.

What follows is one of the funniest books in Ukrainian literature, and one of the cruellest. The witch Yavdokha Zubykha floats when she should sink, mocks her judges from the water, and then takes her revenge the slow way, through a love charm that ruins every person who asked her for help. Nobody in this story gets what they wanted. Everybody gets what they deserved.

Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778 to 1843) is widely called the father of Ukrainian prose. He wrote The Witch of Konotop in 1833 and published it in 1836, and it has been part of the Ukrainian canon almost ever since. It has never before appeared in English. The obstacle was always the language: the book runs from Old Church Slavonicisms in the scribe’s mouth to broad village speech in the captain’s, and the comedy lives in the gap between them. Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova solve it with a pseudo Elizabethan English and King James cadences for the scribe, set against the plain warm voice of the narrator. The volume also carries Tumbleweed, a very different piece of work.

A poor man is murdered on the road for the money sewn into his footwraps, and the crime is uncovered by a tumbleweed rolling across a field as though pushed by the hand of God. Where The Witch of Konotop is farce with a knife in it, Tumbleweed is a quiet story about poverty, conscience and the limits of getting away with something. Readers who know Mykola Hohol will recognise the ancestry at once: the rambling folksy narrator, the absurd officials, the demons and witches drawn straight from village belief.

Kvitka-Osnovyanenko got there first. Folklorist Natalie Kononenko contributes a guest essay on what Ukrainian tradition actually held about witches, born and learned, and on how far Kvitka-Osnovyanenko departed from it. Michael M. Naydan adds a biographical note and an account of the translation. Published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program. Translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova. Edited by Ludmilla A. Trigos.

Binding Type: Paperback
Contributors: Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko,Michael M. Naydan (Translator),Alla Perminova (Translator)
Published: 11/15/2023
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications B.V.
ISBN: 9781804841167
Pages: 174
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 0.40″ H x 8.00″ L x 5.00″ W

About the Author
Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, Hryhoriy: – Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778 to 1843) is considered by many to be the father of Ukrainian prose. Born to a prominent Ukrainian family just outside Kharkiv, he became a tireless cultural activist for his people, helped found the Kharkiv Theatre in 1812 and served as its first director. His prose works, among them the sentimental Marusya and the comic The Witch of Konotop, and his plays, among them Matchmaking at Honcharivka, earn him a place in the pantheon of nineteenth century Ukrainian writers.Naydan, Michael M.: – Michael M. Naydan is Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He has published over 50 articles on literary topics and more than 80 translations in journals and anthologies, and has translated, co-translated or edited more than 40 books, including Yuri Vynnychuk’s The Night Reporter and the Selected Poetry of Bohdan Rubchak for Glagoslav Publications. His own novel about Lviv, Seven Signs of the Lion, appeared with Glagoslav in 2016. He received the George S. N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies in 2013.Perminova, Alla: – Alla Perminova is a professor of English at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a practicing literary translator from and into Ukrainian, English, and Spanish. She received her doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in translation studies from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv where she worked as a full professor for fifteen years. She is Oleh Olzhych National Literary Contest first prize winner (1997), Fulbright senior scholar (The Pennsylvania State University, 2012-2013), the author of 70 scholarly articles, translator and/or editor of 20 books, presenter of over 30 talks at international conferences. Her personal philosophy as a translator and a researcher is discussed in her book A Translator’s Reception of Contemporary American Poetry (in Ukrainian, 2015), in which she promotes the reception model of literary translation.