‘The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy Khan: A Kirghiz Epic Poem in the Manas Tradition’
By Saghïmbay Orozbak uulu, translated by Daniel Prior
Penguin, 400 pages.

On the third floor of Harvard Widener Library, where the now-obsolete card catalogs reside, above the heroön of Henry Elkins Widener — who went down on the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic — the special, non-circulating collections occupy their own rooms. Among these is the Milman Parry Collection, where, on tens of thousands of special aluminum records, the voice of the poet Homer lives.

At least, that was how Parry, who died in 1935 of a tragic, apparently self-inflicted and accidental gunshot wound described the illiterate bards whose long sung narratives he recorded during two trips to Yugoslavia. Parry, with his assistant, Albert Lord, used this fieldwork to support the thesis that the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” could be fundamentally oral and improvised, rather than written, compositions.

Shortly before Parry’s Balkan trips, Soviet folklorists found their own unlikely Homer. They transcribed oral performances of the full national epic of Kyrgyzstan — the epic of Manas, an account of the deeds of a legendary khan — by an aging poet, Saghïmbay Orozbak. Despite the suppression of nationalistic poetry under the Soviets, Orozbak’s lively and accessible iteration of the Manas material survived and has enjoyed a scholarly renaissance. 

A portion of Orozbak’s Manas rendition — at 13,500 lines, this “episode” is of a length comparable to the Homeric epics — is now available in Daniel Prior’s excellent English translation and commentary. “The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy Khan” provides a trip into an unfamiliar time and place, but, like the best sort of travel — like Parry’s Yugoslavian treks — it illuminates something long familiar in a new, revelatory light.

An aging Kyrgyz lord, Kökötöy, dies while his son is away, leaving a long, self-contradictory final testament to his retainers, enjoining and then forbidding by turns lavish funerary arrangements for the benefit of the living, matching the desire to make in death a final display of magnificence with fear for the future of his people. He expires and leaves Boqmurun, his teenaged heir, puzzled: How should he act on the confused hearsay of his father’s final words?

Like his western counterpart, Telemachus, Boqmurun seeks the advice of an old ally of his father — Manas Khan, the greatest warrior that the world has seen and the protector of the whole Kyrgyz people. Manas advises him to brush away his fears and to throw a memorial feast for all time. “Let it become proverbial for those who see it that you, Boqmurun, have done everything to bury your father properly!” he exhorts. 

This being the time of epics, the repast does not go according to plan; Kökötöy’s memorial feast becomes an opportunity for jockeying between Central Asian potentates, Muslims and non-Muslims, Turkic and non-Turkic peoples — all fierce warriors with strange names and swift horses and fabulous wealth. The narrative has its climax in a battle between Manas and his Turkic allies and the people of Qïtay — our Cathay, or China.

The bombast and energy of Orozbak’s oral performance leaps from the page — he backtracks, interrupts himself, leaps forward, whatever it takes to maintain the forward movement of the poem. Epithets pile up on action — “Manas fierce-as-a-white-goshawk had broken the timbers that had been lashed together and set up, putting an end to his enemies’ wondering and filling his kinsmen’s hearts with joy.”

Mr. Prior’s extensive notes and prefatory material keep the reader who is unfamiliar with the Kirghiz epic from becoming lost; a long final essay holds out a guiding hand for those who would like to dig deeper.

Yet “The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy Khan” is more than an entry into a foreign tradition; it holds up a mirror to our own Homeric past, and recaptures the fresh strangeness that attended Parry in Bosnia — and,  long before him, almost three millennia ago, those listening to a blind Ionian sing the deeds of great men.