“Brave George Campbell” ( born Bonnie George Campbell , Child 210 , Roud 338 [1] ) - Scottish folk ballad , which is one of the stories of conflicts on the Anglo-Scottish border. It was first recorded by in the 1770s. Walter Scott was preparing a ballad for inclusion in his collection " Songs of the Scottish Border ", but for some reason did not. Different versions of it at the beginning of the XIX century were recorded by Cunningham, Smith and Finlay. included in his publication a variant resulting from the combination and processing of these three texts. Francis James Child in his collection cites four versions of the text of the ballad, but mentions six or seven [2] .
Story
George (or James) Campbell drives his horse out of the house. He comes back without a rider and with a bloody saddle. Campbell's bride comes out of the house, grieving that the crop is still ripening, but her child will never be born. In some cases, the mother or sisters of the youth join her [2] .
Ballad publishers were inclined to consider her hero a real historical person, respectively changing his name to James or John ( Bonnie James Campbell , Bonnie John Campbell ). Child was skeptical about this, because in reality, for a long time of clan feud, under certain circumstances, many men from the Campbell clan died, including, for example, one of the first known bearers of this name, , who was killed at the end XIII century, John Campbell of Calder, who was killed in 1591, or the brothers Archibald and James Campbell, who were killed on October 3, 1594 at the Battle of Glenlight [2] [3] .
Russian translation
The ballad was first translated into Russian by Samuel Yakovlevich Marshak in 1944-1946 and published in 1946 in his collection “Selected Translations. English Ballads and Songs, titled George Campbell. Ignatius Mikhailovich Ivanovsky translated the ballad under the names “Brave Scot” and “Brave George Campbell” (for the first time in the collection “Three Forest Arrows” in 1972) [4] .
Notes
- ↑ Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
- ↑ 1 2 3 English and Scottish Folk Ballad: Compilation / Comp. L. M. Arinstein. - M: Rainbow, 1988 .-- 512 p. - ISBN 5-05-001852-8 .
- ↑ Bonnie George Campbell [Child 210] . The Traditional Ballad Index. An annotated source to folk song from the English-speaking world . Robert B. Waltz. Date of treatment January 6, 2017.
- ↑ English and Scottish ballads in the translations of S. Marshak / V.M. Zhirmunsky, N.G. Elina. - Moscow: Nauka, 1973.- S. 61. - 160 p. - (Literary monuments).