From my grandmother's cupboard

I found a collection of Fergana Valley folk stories in my grandmother's cupboard in 2021. Printed 1937, Cyrillic script, cover missing. I don't know how it survived the Soviet standardisation campaigns that tried to replace Uzbek oral tradition with approved versions of itself. Nobody in my family knows either. I teach French at a lyceum in Tashkent. I have been working on translating these stories into French since that winter, in the hours between lesson planning and everything else. There are forty-three stories in the collection. I've completed nine. The translation decisions are not simple: the Uzbek in the book is archaic, and the French I want to write doesn't want to be archaic, and finding where those two things can meet is the actual work. The story I'm deepest into right now involves a woman who weaves a rug that can only be destroyed by telling the truth about it. Structurally, I think it's making an argument that took me a long time to hear clearly. I'm still not sure I've found the French for the final line. Nobody else is going to translate these. That's not self-importance. I've looked.