Manas

The Manas has reached English before. In scholarly editions. In single episodes. In rhymed verse translated out of Russian by a man who did not speak Kyrgyz.It has never been told as a story.The Manas is the national epic of the Kyrgyz people, and among the longest works of oral literature ever composed - carried for a thousand years not in books, but in the memory of the manaschi, the singers who held the whole of it by heart.This is Book One of ten, drawn from the telling of the great manaschi Sayakbay Karalaev. And it begins not with war, but with the story the war is only the price of: a peace sealed with a bride, a meeting written in the stars over two children’s heads, and the slow arrival of Manas and Kanykei at an appointment made above them.From the walls of Talas to the courts of Bukhara, from the Silk Road to the high passes of the Ala-Too - this is the song a people kept alive through everything, finally told as a story.MANAS: The Love - Book One of the Manas Saga.