More than ten years ago I started collecting materials on the Ubykh language, with the aim of gathering all available resources in one place: audio recordings, texts, research papers, etc.
I thought I had collected everything, both online and offline. But a couple of years ago, I was delighted to find new material by George Hewitt, an English linguist specializing in Caucasian languages. These were field recordings in Circassian and Ubykh from Turkey in 1974, mainly stories and tales, often with Turkish translations. One Ubykh recording, titled 'Hasan's Tale,' stood out, as it had no translation. Excited to find something new, I took on the challenge of translating it and bringing this nearly 50-year-old recording to life.
Using my limited knowledge of the Ubykh language and the materials I had collected earlier - Ubykh texts with translations from the works of G. Dumézil, G. Charachidzé, and others, as well as an imperfect but valuable Ubykh-French dictionary by Hans Vogt - I set to work.
After listening to the recording over and over again, I managed to make an almost complete translation of the tale.
As it turned out, it was a tale of a kind-hearted old man and an ungrateful wolf. The old man saves the wolf from the pursuing hunters by hiding him in his sack. However, instead of thanking the man, the wolf intends to eat him.
I encountered several problems during the translation. First, there were sections of the recording I couldn't decipher, so I left them blank. Second, the narration was split into three recordings: the main part with the beginning of the story, and two shorter, seemingly unrelated recordings. Only later did I realize these were two different versions of the ending.
After completing the translation, it became clear that the beginning and the two ending variants differed in narrative quality. While the beginning was eloquently told, the endings were noticeably more rushed.
In order to complete the work, I decided to find out the origin of this story in order to fill the gaps in my translation and find the proper ending of the story. First, I looked through B. Hewitt's Circassian recordings and found a Circassian (Abdzakh) version of the same tale told by an elderly man and entitled “07 Hassan's Tale”. Apparently, this was the source material on the basis of which Tevfik Esenç recorded the Ubykh version. Unfortunately, the Abdzakh version ends abruptly, not matching either of the Ubykh endings. This may explain the somewhat rushed nature of the Ubykh endings - apparently, Tevfik Esenç, being an excellent storyteller himself, who did not like boring narratives, improvised his own endings to give the story more color.
Next, I searched the internet using various terms in various languages. I found several similar stories: Leo Tolstoy’s fable “The Wolf and the Man” and a tale called “İyi Kalpli İhtiyar ile Kurt” (“The Good-Hearted Old Man and the Wolf”) in a collection of Circassian folk tales translated into Turkish. The stories were nearly identical, leading me to believe that the tale was likely based on a popular Eastern folk story.
Despite the similarities, these versions of the tale that I found did not quite match the endings of the Ubykh version, and so did not help me fill in the gaps in my translation. So I shelved the project and decided not to publish it.
I had all but forgotten about the story, and the translation would likely have remained on the shelf if I hadn’t stumbled upon it again in an unexpected place. Recently, while reading «The Three-Body Problem», a science fiction novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin, I encountered a familiar motif. Although the novel is about an alien invasion, it’s also deeply philosophical, exploring themes like trust and deception. Near the end of the second book, I came across this passage:
“[…] had even coined a name for supporters of the project: “Dongguo” after the soft-hearted scholar in the fable who saved a wolf’s life.*”.
This motif struck me as very familiar, and looking at the footnote to this passage, I found the following:
“Translator’s Note: In the fable “The Wolf of Zhongshan” attributed to the Ming Dynasty writer Ma Zhongxi, the bookish scholar Master Dongguo takes pity on a hunted, starving wolf and hides it in a bag as hunters pass by. When he lets the wolf out, it threatens to eat him but is persuaded to put the issue to a third party. An old farmer, after hearing the situation, protests that the wolf could not possibly fit in the bag. The wolf climbs back in, whereupon the farmer ties up the bag and bashes the wolf to death with his hoe.”
That's the same story I once translated!
It turns out this tale dates back at least 500 years to imperial China. Known as “The Wolf of Zhongshan” in Chinese, it remains widely recognized in modern China, with its content largely unchanged across various languages.
This unexpected rediscovery inspired me to publish my translation of the Ubykh version, even though it is incomplete.