Yordan Radichkov: Les récits de Tcherkaski [Tales from Cherkazki]

The latest addition to my website is Yordan Radichkov‘s Les récits de Tcherkaski [Tales from Cherkazki]. As you can see I read the French translation of a selection of these Bulgarian tales. Though there is an English version, it is very hard to obtain. These are linked stories about the Bulgarian village of Cherkazki. The tales are often absurd, such as the story about the monster called a verblude which can take any form, from a smiling woman to a tree and can do lots of thing from creating the Sahara Desert to causing Noak’s Ark to appear. Sometimes, the absurd stories are very funny such as Gotsa Gueraskov’s trip to the Moon. He did not like it, as it was too dusty and made him sneeze, so he came right back. He was not much more impressed with Paris when he went there. Some are just plain funny, as with the account of the men trying to take their animals to market, with the animals naturally being reluctant to go, while the events are interspersed with the story of a man looking for his escaped Serbian pig. Barrage balloons, flea-sized spies, termites, leg warmers, strange wolves and hieroglyphs are just some of the subjects of the other stories. They are very well told, in the oral/folk tradition, very funny and very unpredictable.

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