Magic in Dialect: A Review of The Magic Ring

The Magic Ring, translated and adapted by Siân Valvis, illustrated by Dovilé Valvis, Fontanka, 2025

Enter Boris Viktorovich Shergin, Soviet Pomor writer, folklorist, and illustrator from Arkhangelsk, hailed as The Bard of the Russian North (Певец Русского Севера). Shergin was famous for his vivid storytelling for children, specifically regarding various facets of traditional Pomorye life, delivering his tales in a native Pomor/ White Sea dialect that was praised by some of his greatest admirers—including the sculptor and puppeteer Ivan Efimov, who stated that through him, we can hear the ‘undistorted voice of our ancestors’ («неискаженный голос предков»). Although originally penned in 1930s, many of Shergin’s stories, including ‘The Magic Ring’ (‘Волшебное кольцо’), did not appear in print until much later, with Russification standardising the Moscow dialect while suppressing minority and regional languages.

Shergin’s work was finally brought to us in English this past summer by publisher Fontanka and translator Siân Valvis in The Magic Ring, in which one of Shergin’s stories stands alone from its sibling folklore. The tale begins with Vanya, the protagonist sent to pick up his mother’s pension, only to be distracted by a muzhik mistreating various animals. The first time Vanya encounters the man, he saves a dog; the second, a cat; and the third, a snake. However, the latter is no ordinary serpent; she is Skarapeya, a magical snake queen prominent in Russian and Slavic folklore. In expressing gratitude, Skarapeya instructs Vanya to return her to her father and kingdom with some crucial advice:

My father is the famous Serpent King. He’ll offer you a gift, but here’s the thing: take nothing from the coffers, refuse all other offers, just be sure to ask him for his ring. That’s the secret—mind you keep it . . .

With Skarapeya’s guidance, Vanya leaves with this magic ring, determined to fix up the izba in which he and his mother live while germinating a few plans of his own—including making a bid for the Tsar’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Naturally, there are foils, and so it is up to Vanya, as well as the cat and dog he saved, to help right them all with the help of the magic ring.

The premise is simple yet engaging. For a Western reader, the beginning might read like ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, wherein a poor mother instructs her son to sell their only cow for money, only for him to return with magic beans. It is a happy coincidence, then, that Vanya (Ivan) and Jack (John) are derived from the same name, and in an additional layer of resonance, the ring as a magical object gestures towards an Armenian folktale of the same name, ‘The Magic Ring’, in which a man finds a ring with two trapped genies therein, who then help their rescuer restore his palace to its former glory. There is also ‘Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp’, based on Hanna Diyab’s story and added by Antoine Galland to his French translation of One Thousand and One Nights, where Aladdin comes across genies in both a magic ring as well as an oil lamp. From the Arabic and Hebraic tradition, there is the Ring of Solomon; from Norse mythology, the Ring of Draupnir; and who could ever forget the One Ring from Tolkein’s Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy? Shergin’s version of The Magic Ring, a traditional folktale from the Pomorye region, shares much in common with a Marathi folktale of the same name, wherein a pig, saved by the protagonist, brings him to a magic ring, only for problems to arise when said ring is stolen, and the protagonist’s animals must recover it.

The beauty of Shergin’s rendering, however, lies chiefly in its Arkhangelsk dialect, which only adds to the storytelling. Within the writing, there is an emphasis laid on the ordinary person’s reality and circumstances, and this together with the characters’ Northern Russian dialect forms a melodious marriage that, as Elena Galimova wrote, asserts ‘how beautiful the Northern Russians are, coastal dwellers in their deepest essence.’ This prevalent folkloric pride in casting the “ordinary” person as the hero is common across Russian fairy tales, nearly all of which concern themselves with the plight of the young peasant boy or girl on an adventure, leading to the gradual attainment both moral and material elevation—though with Shergin, this reverence is especially felt. There is no desire for pretence and no shame in Vanya’s origins, but an unequivocal dignity, with his mother openly sharing with the Tsar that Vanya’s ‘people are common folk. . . his town is your [the Tsar’s] own.’ This unaffected pride echoes Shergin’s personal thoughts about his language and native place, as stated when he was only twenty-two years old:

Our Arkhangelsk northern folk dialect is the main thing that we—inhabitants of the Northern Dvina [River] and the White Sea [region], can be especially proud of. Russian society must learn about the antiquity of [our] Northern speech and value its vivid wealth.

(Наш архангельский северный народный говор—главное, чем мы, жители Двинской земли и всего Беломорья, можем особенно гордиться. Надо, чтобы русское общество узнало о древности северного говора и оценило его образное богатство.)

How then, to render such Russian into an English that would remain both faithful to the original as well as interesting to the reader and captivating to children? Siân Valvis, winner of a PEN Translates award for her translation of Kolobok, seems to have the answer. In her latest transadaptation—a rather experimental work in which she blends Yorkshire phrasing, Cockney rhyming slang, and Carroll-esque language to create a unique dialect of her own—Valvis adds colour and a clear narrative voice. Her work is resplendent with vivid neologisms that imbue the English with charm sure to capture the minds, ears, and hearts of The Magic Ring’s next generation of young readers.

The onomatopoeia of ‘swhip the ring off his hand’ for ‘cташшила у его с перста кольцо’ and the evocative ‘they . . . wanderambled through thickets dark, cross fields and dales barebarren, and clamberosed over peaks aplenty’ for ‘побрели лесами темныма, пошли полями чистыма, полезли горами высокима’ illustrate the extent of Valvis’s creativity and the success with which her transadaption is executed. There is even a moment where Skarapeya’s lines, delivered in prose in Shergin’s original, take on poetic form under Valvis’s, a moment of infidelity which I, usually a purist, found so enriching to the story and Skarapeya’s characterisation that I felt its absence when I returned to Shergin’s original. The transadaption thus succeeds in preserving the magic of Shergin’s original story while asserting Valvis’s original and inspired style. In her translator’s note, Valvis writes: ‘when I came to Skarapeya’s lines, something strange happened: her short, secretive Russian whispers slithered out silkily in English—and shimmered into SONG. After that, the rest of the story sprang forth. And so I am grateful to Skarapeya, the silvery snake, who saved my story.’ So, Skarapeya, the benign and obliging snake goddess, has saved two protagonists: our valiant hero and our intrepid translator.

The Magic Ring’s illustrations, exquisitely and expertly drawn by Dovilė Valvis, suffuse this book with still more ineffable enchantment. Each page is accompanied by pictures drawn in a distinctive and unique style that enthral and intrigue the reader with their unbridled whimsy—an echo, perhaps, of the same ‘weird[ness]’ and ‘whims[y]’ with which Siân Valvis characterises Shergin’s folktales. The illustrations are all completed solely in black, white, and red—the apotheosis and most sacred of colours in Slavic folklore, representing life, blood, power, vitality, strength, and beauty. Tthe boldness of the red courses throughout the book like a garnishing essence, bringing an even greater vividity to Shergin’s plot and Valvis’s language.

In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, where the path to a universal language may seem inevitable; where our history consists of the manifest diminishing (if not eradication) of dialects as countries seek to legitimise their language with standardisation and codification; where dialectal uniformity is propagated by broadcasting and mass media to uphold the ‘mainstream language-use standards of society’, reinforcing a socio-economic divide and the snobbery of the so-called “cosmopolitans” of each country; Shergin extolls the ordinary individual and honours the Pomorye dialect; as one article comments, he ‘in equal measure generously nourishes his language both with living folk speak . . . and with all the riches of Russia’s literary language.’ In having exalted his regional dialect to the Russian folkloric canon, Shergin’s writing had already touched the lives of so many Russian and Soviet children: now it is time for The Magic Ring to wanderamble and clamberose its way into the hearts of so many more.-

Sophie Benbelaid* is a blog and issue copyeditor for Asymptote based in London and holds two degrees in French and Russian Literature from the University of Oxford. She was acknowledged for her contributions to Robert Chandler’s translation of Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits and Saints by Teffi, and was a finalist in the International Translation Contest “Writers of the Silver Age about War” held by The Library for Foreign Literature and the Institute for Literary Translation. Having previously worked as a translation intern with the Institute for Literary Translation, she is an aspiring literary translator and hopes to publish her work in the near future. For now, you can read her writing on her Substack. *

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