Jun. 19th, 2021

Most English readers know a rhymed story about "Robbin-Bobbin, the big-bellied man".

(and I hope most of them do really like a sketch about Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" (1983))

And most Russian readers know its translations from both Chukovsky and Marshak.

And as for me, I long thought that Chukovsky's verse "Обжора" ("She-Glutton", https://brodskiy.su/stihi-korneya-chukovskogo/obzhora/ ) was also a translation of some English original, until I found that it was his original work.
But it had so much similarity with "Robin-Bobbin" that I decided to draft its rough translation back to English :

I had a sister,
once she was sitting nearby a fire,
and fished a big sturgeon from this fire.
But the sturgeon was sleeky,
and he wriggled back away to his fire.
And she staid hungry,
without a lunch, all alone.
For three days had not have a meal,
not a bread crumb in her mouth.
The only she ate, poor soul,
is a fifty of piglets,
and halfhundred of goslings,
and a ten of chickens,
and a ten of ducklings,
and a piece of a pie,
slightly larger than that stack of hay,
and twenty barrels of pickled agarics,
and four pots of milk,
and thirty ropes of bread cracknels,
and fourty-four pancakes.
And from that hunger she got so slim,
that she would not fit in this door.
And if there's a door she would fit,
she could not move neither forward nor back through it.

Surely your corrections and updates are welcome.

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Volodymyr Mutel

May 2025

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