"Where is the house, and where is the street"

[John Dunn]

K. Dushenko (Slovar' sovremennyx citat, M. 2005, p. 564), who is usually conscientious over sources, includes the text of Крутится, вертится шар голубой [Krutitsja, vertitsja shar goluboj] among the anonymous entries, suggesting that it may date from the second decade of the last century.  He goes to say that it may be a folkloristic re-working (фольклорная переработка [fol'klornaja pererabotka]) of N.A. Titov's романс 'Sharf goluboj'.*

The Polish version that I am familiar with has the chorus:
Gdzie jest ta uiica, gdzie jest ten dom, gdzie jest dziewczyna, co kocham ją.
Znalazłem ulicę, znalazłem dom, znalazłem dziewczynę, co kocham ją.
(with a differently unusual relative clause).

The complication is these words are sung to a completely different tune and form the chorus to a completely unrelated text (Szła dziewieczka do laseczka ,,,).  It seems an intriguingly mobile example of late nineteenth-century Yiddish/Polish/Ukrainian/Russian folk-lore.  Or perhaps it is all just a coincidence.

John Dunn.

*A.N. Titov (1800-75) is described in Brokgauz-Efron's Malyj enciklopedicheskij slovar' (IV, col. 1732) as a генерал-лейтенант and as дедушка русского романса.  Which just goes to show what full lives people lived in the 19th century.


-----Original Message-----
From: Evgeny Steiner <es9 at SOAS.AC.UK>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:09:01 +0100
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] "Where is the house, and where is the street"

Did anybody mention that it should be 'sharf' (scarf), not 'shar'?
The oldest version is possibly the Yiddish one  - "Vi iz dus gesele" (first
published in Yuda-Leib Cahan. Yiddishe Folkslider mit Melodies. NY, 1912. -
Reprinted by YIVO in 1957). There is also a Polish text of early 20th c.
**In Russia there are theories that it was composed by KR (Const. Romanov)
or/and goes back to the romance 'Sharf Goluboi' of the first half of the
19th c.

Eugenio de Lisboa (I'll ask here about a Fado version ;-))



John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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