Geser. The Вuryat heroic epic. Ye. Khundaeva

байбай ла. – Энэ саган түрэ лэ <…>. Зугаалажа байтагай! Гэжэ Үрөөр хэлэжэ ябалдана бэлэй лэ (5748 – 5761) – Прилетала с юга сорока На ночь мясо к себе уносила. “Пусть эта светлая свадьба <…> так же гуляeт, пируeт. Пьют архи и курят табак!” – [Вот такой] юрол сказав, она улетела (5748 – 5761) – A magpie flew in from the south and took home the meat saying: “May this fair marriage party <…> feast and enjoy themselves, let them drink arkhi and smoke tobacco”, thus having wished she flew away (5748 – 5761). This is an example of uniting a few sentences.

      To achieve the equivalence one might make use of some transformations like substitutions, such as the lexical and grammar substitutions, transliteration, addition of the lacking parts of speech, most often of the subject, predicate, object, as well as the change of the order of words, concretization and compensation. Sometimes of great use might be such transformations as the antonymical substitution, the syntactical likening and the other translating techniques.

      The Geseriade as part of the world culture

      The epic as a part of culture is the expression of the national way of thinking. It may help tell the nationality of an individual. Besides, the communicative function of folklore enables the exchange of the achievements among the certain human communities and individuals. This function also provides for the possibility of the communication in the sphere of folklore in the form of the dialogues. The communicative function makes it possible to create the international cultural fund. The interaction of the Tibetan, Mongolian, Buryat and the other cultures made it possible to create different variants of the heroic epic of Geser. One of the functions of culture is associated with the social and individual factor, that is with the differentiation of the social, national and other communities of the peoples, on the one hand and their integration on the other. The cultures are not isolated from each other and they are of no great significance if taken alone, just all by themselves. Each culture carries in itself the energy of the neighbouring and other cultures. In this context the idea that it is very difficult to understand and cognise the other, “аlien” cultures is not relevent at present. The idea of each culture being of a perculiar nature, of the contribution of each nation to the culture of the whole mankind is obviously quite clear but it does not contradict the idea of a certain coherence of all the cultures. The words “harmony” and “understanding” should become the key notions of the contemporary world view. The people belonging to different cultures should treat each other with the greatest understanding possible. It is very important to recognize the priority of the spiritual entities in the whole life of the contemporary man, the ecological imperative and nature-corelating tendencies. The globalization brought the world civilizations and cultures closer to each other, the world has become more cohesive and coherent. In the context of the theory of the cultural pluralism the culture is taken to be the linking element among nations. Therefore understanding and respect towards the cultural values and traditions of the peoples is not going to be the fact of being educated but rather the precondition of the mutual understanding and the harmonious development. One cannot say with the great confidence that there is a more civilized culture or a less civilized, a backward culture. At present we witness the two types of the development: the traditional and the innovational. In the period when the might of the state was determined by the technical and economical as well as the military and political factors, the superiority proved to be with the advanced technogenic civilization. However the end of the XX century revealed, on the one hand, the negative consequences of the technological expansion of the civilization that brought the mankind to the global crises and, on the other hand, it revealed the spiritual advantages of the traditional type of development in some cases. Now the contacts among the different communities are becoming wider, the direct communication is becoming more diversified. Now we witness the growth of the planetary unification though we still recognize the necessity of knowing one’s own “roots”. We witness the interest of many people in their own origin. The man who is not aware of his forefathers and the cultural traditions feels as if he were a black sheep, he feels a loser in some circumstances. Chingis Aitmatov, a well-known Kirgiz writer, gives the following historical fact that in the ancient times the people recognized the importance of the kinship ties. The ancient Kirgiz people had a custom, which is as follows. When they captured a man from some other tribe they did their best to make him forget his past. They tied his head very tight so that the hair began to grow inside. As a result the man forgot everything, in his brain there were the processes that turned him into an obedient slave. They are known as the mankurts, the people who do not know their origin, roots, ancestors, traditions and rituals. But the fact is that each man would like to share the other people the knowledge of his own culture, to speak about it, to exchange the cultural experience. Each culture has the right to exist. Many people are of the opinion that in the XXI century there might be a certain opposition of the civilizations and cultures. They think that the motivation for the conflicts will be the culture rather than the ideology or economy. The differences among the civilizations are quite evident, i.e. the different histories, languages, traditions, beliefs and religions. But that should not be the cause for the armed opposition.

      Quite a number of the non-technogenic civilizations turn to their genuine “roots” which is likely to give the world a traditional colouring. The epical culture of the Buryat people shows all the stages of the man’s development. The Buryat epic gives a wide panorama of the origin of the Universe showing the significance of the basic elements of the macrocosm, i.e. the chaos, the world ocean, the prime elements, the threesome universe that come the first when treating the problems of the anthropogenesis.

      The Buryat epic has made a good contribution to the interpretation of the problems of the origin of the Universe and the Man. It made it clear that the Man is a microcosm, that the whole might of the Universe is concentrated in the Man. This might be taken as an indispensible human and cultural significance of the Buryat epic. The Buryat epic enters the modern picture of the world, now in the epoch of globalization, with a clear-cut, the epically expressive paradigm concerning the origin of the Universe, the Earth, the Man, the paradigm of the relations of the people with the forces of Nature that provide for the proper physical and spiritual existence, the joint efforts of the corporative forces in the Universe's functioning (synergetics), the connection of the whole with a part and of a part with the whole, the selection of the way for the further development which is closely connected with the bifurcation processes, the stochastic phenomena, the dissipative structures and attractors. This all shows the contribution of the Buryat epic in the cultural heritage and its significant symbolic nature. The Buryat epic shows the historical stage of the development of the mankind in the ancient and medieval period, the period of the so called cosmogenic civilization which was based on the use of the tools and manual technology and was largely dependent on the natural forces in the time, when the cosmic forces determined the sense of life and dictated its laws.