Magpie, Speaking in Hebrew, and a Jewish Monk: on a Contradiction in the Russian Translation of the Story of the Seven Wise Men

Abstract

The article examines the Russian translation of the novel which is included in the Story of the Seven Wise Men — the story of the third wise mаn which tells about a gullible man, an evil wife and a faithful magpie who speaks Hebrew. In the process of analyzing of some Russian lists we can discover a non- obvious contradiction: apparently, the native language of the hero is Hebrew, but at the end of the story he goes to the Holy Land and becomes a monk. To explain this contradiction we use the European (Latin, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Danish and Polish) versions of the novel and make a careful assumption that in Russian translation the author used a special narrative manner.