Talk:Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Thanks for the article!.

✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 11:50, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Title

This is a very interesting article. I'm not sure if the current title is the best translation though. I'm trying to find some English-language literature that has studied it.

• "It suffices to examine the text Slovo pogibeli russkoi zemli , or the Lay of the Destruction of the Russian Land". (Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 2002 Page 86-87)
• "Thus the introduction to the Life of Alexander Nevsky is plausibly thought, based on lexical evidence, to have been borrowed from now-lost parts of the “Discourse on the Destruction of the Russian Land." (Khan et al. 2018 p. 182)
• "...is another unfinished text , The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land." (LLBA 1999 p. 1587)
• "Toporov has noted its variations in the “ Speech ” of Moisei Vydubitskii , the Lay of the Host of Igor ' , the Lay of the Destruction of the Russian Land ( Slovo o pogibeli russkoi zemli ] and “ further right up to Gogol " (Wendy Helleman 2004 p. 47). It's interesting that she translates "slovo" as "word" when on its own, but still as "Lay" in this work's title.

So there is some disagreement about Word/Lay/Tale/Discourse and about/of/on. I did see inside this article disagreement about destruction/death, but not here. I would also think that historiographically "Rus'" would male more sense than "Russian", but in literary studies the latter seems commonly used. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:38, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

As it appears the entire article was (auto?)translated from Russian Wikipedia into English, and all sources are in Russian, the current English title is arguably the result of WP:Original research. None of the 4 refs I found above use 'Word' or 'about' in the title. These 4 refs are not enough to be representative though, so until we find out what seems to be the WP:COMMONNAME, the current title can stay. It's not necessarily a bad title, just very literally translated without reliance on English RS, and probably not the most common in English literature. I intend to do some further searching. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:35, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

I've found four more recent English-language literature references indicating that Tale of the Destruction of the Rus' Land is the most commonly used English-language title/name of the text, so I have changed the title. I'll include the examples I found above as alternatives in a footnote. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 20:27, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Halperin (2022), p. vii–viii gives some further comment on the toponym: I have previously erroneously translated “russkaia zemlia” for the Kievan (Kyivan) period as the “Russian Land.” Because the East Slavs had not yet divided up into Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians, technically russkaia zemlia should be translated as the “East Slavic Land.” The translation “Russian” represents Great Russian chauvinism toward the Kievan inheritance. In an effort to finesse that prejudice, some scholars invented a hybrid anglicization of Rus’ as an adjective, the “Rus’ian Land.” I find both “East Slavic Land” and “Rus’ian Land” artificial, and awkward. I prefer to lose the grammar but keep the content by translating it as the “Rus’ Land,” despite the fact that “Rus’” is not an adjective. I am not alone in such usage. Of course, russkii referring to the Muscovite grand principality and later tsardom from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century could legitimately be translated as “Russian,” but that would entail employing two translations of the phrase, “Rus’ Land” for the Kievan and Mongol periods as well as for early modern Ukraine, and “Russian Land” for early modern Muscovy. Because I am trying to emphasize the evolution of a single myth I have for that reason preferred to use only a single form. For simplicity’s sake I will disregard variant medieval spellings such as ruskaia and variants such as rustaia and use only the normative spelling. I have previously too often used other noun place names as adjectives when preceding “land,” for example, the “Novgorod Land.” To accentuate the uniqueness of the Rus’ Land I have now standardized all cognate terms using adjectival forms, ergo the “Novgorodian Land.” That is important further justification for Rus' in the title, main body text, and in translations of Russian-language source-titles. On the other hand, personal names of modern institutions such as the Department of Old Russian Literature may be left as "Russian" in this tradition of "Great Russian chauvinism" (as Halperin calls it). Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:46, 2 February 2023 (UTC)