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

[Kevin Windle]

A tiny footnote to John Dunn's message about the Polish version: I have a fading photocopy (source unknown) of Szla dzieweczka do laseczka ..., said to be a folk melody from Silesia. It has a chorus of Trallalala, trallalala ... but an alternative refrain is given, almost exactly as quoted by John: Gdzie jest ta ulica... This last is headed 'Nowsza wersja refrenu', indicating that it is a late addition, perhaps borrowed from a neighbouring language.

Kevin Windle


Dr K. M. Windle,
Reader, School of Language Studies,
Faculty of Arts,
Australian National University,
Canberra,
A.C.T. 0200,
Australia

Telephone: (61) (02) 6125-2885
Fax: (61) (02) 6125-3252
E-mail: Kevin.Windle at anu.edu.au

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of John Dunn
Sent: Monday, 16 November 2009 10:16 PM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] "Where is the house, and where is the street"

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.

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