In place of the unintelligible rezacy, the White Russian put the name of a well-known place, Rzeczyca: przytahak was likewise altered to pahaniàk. Certain errors of Karłowicz are noted, due to the Bohemian-Slovak not being familiar to him.
The importance of the text is to show how far a song can go with slight variants even in an alien linguistic atmosphere. There is a mysterious drawing connected with this which caught the attention of Wisła, which tried to encourage the collection of materials about it. Except a schoolboy who wrote certain hieroglyphs and then read them off, there is no Polish record of these things. Some suggest they are old Slavonic characters (? runes, ? glagolitic ? Cyrillic), or the remains of some things used by smiths of various sorts (? gypsy alphabet), etc. A misinterpretation led Smólski to quote a stanza of our poem as a riddle, thus:
|
Koło wożne |
[Trans. The wheel of a cart, dung forks after . . . hop so ! This is the child's bench.—Sklepica I don't know, but it is some diminutive of sklep, a shop.] |
|
It is suggested that klepica and hop tak (for sklepica and hak, tak) arise from an error of the collector's : they would be still nearer to the original then. No pure Polish variants are known, and all the variants quoted are of Slovak provenance. Various Moravian and Czech variants are cited. "Paprika-Janči" quoted as a chain-form is explained as a hit at Magyar speculators by Malý, but seems to be of the same family as the "House that Jack built." They draw pictures on paper, and then say: 1. This is an apple. 2. And out of this apple Paprika Janči was born. 3. P. J. builds him a house, etc. P. J. ends on the gallows. This belongs to a class of games depending on drawings for their starting-point. There are even German variants, not previously noted by Slav investigators. Thus the "O, Du schöne Hobelbank" has a stanza:
Das ist kurz und das ist lang
Und das ist 'ne Hobelbank.
Kurz und lang, Hobelbank, etc.
