“The ballad of the miller and his wife” [1] ( eng. Our Goodman , also Four Nights Drunk [2] ; Child 274 , Roud 114 [3] ) is a folk ballad . Francis James Child in his meeting reports on two of its versions, from a 1776 manuscript of David Heard and a London Broadside of the beginning of the 18th century under the heading The Merry Cuckold and Kind Wife , in addition to citing the lyrics from the play Auld Robin Gray set July 29, 1794 on Haymarket [1] [4] .
Story
The husband comes home and discovers, one by one, strange signs of someone else's presence: a horse in the stall, a sword, a raincoat, boots, pants and a hat. The wife finds an ingenious answer to his every question: that he confused the horse with a cash cow and so on. The husband finds a contradiction to each explanation, for example, by discovering buttons on what, according to his wife, is a pair of blankets. Finally, he finds a stranger's man in bed. To his wife’s remark that this was a nurse sent by her mother, he notices that he never met bearded women. In a variant from Broadside, the head of the family finds (three at a time!), Respectively, horses, boots, swords, wigs, cloaks and, finally, three men. Mention that the hero of the story is drunk is present in the lyrics given by Child in the appendix, where a man, arriving home at Christmas, discovers a sword and a stranger in bed, and then teaches his wife with a whip [4] [1] .
The plot of a quarrel of a married couple due to the suspicion of treason is very widespread in European folklore [1] . The story from the ballad gained wide popularity after the release of the single The Dubliners " Seven Drunken Nights ", where they performed a song based on one of its Irish versions.
Russian translations
The translated fragment of the ballad (a scene with boots) Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin included in his unfinished " Scenes from the Knightly Times ", putting it in the mouth of the minnesinger Franz. On the centenary of the poet’s death, Samuel Yakovlevich Marshak translated three stanzas (horse, uniform and boots), which first appeared under the heading “The Scottish Ballad” and commented by V. M. Zhirmunsky on February 8, 1937 . In the 1941 edition, the ballad is called "Miller", in the subsequent - "The ballad about the miller and his wife." In the autograph of her translation, there is another stanza, where the miller finds his rival, whom his wife gives out as his sister [5] [1] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 English and Scottish Folk Ballad: Compilation / Comp. L. M. Arinstein. - M: Rainbow, 1988 .-- 512 p. - ISBN 5-05-001852-8 .
- ↑ Four Nights Drunk [Child 274] . The Traditional Ballad Index. An annotated source to folk song from the English-speaking world . Robert B. Waltz. Date of treatment January 4, 2017.
- ↑ Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
- ↑ 1 2 Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 5 , Page 88
- ↑ English and Scottish ballads in the translations of S. Marshak / V.M. Zhirmunsky, N.G. Elina. - Moscow: Nauka, 1973. - 160 p. - (Literary monuments).