بررسی کتاب "داستان های مردم وفس" به نقل از موسسه مطالعات فولکلور آسیایی
Stilo, Donald L., transcription, translation, and annotation. Vafsi Folk Tales: Twenty Four Tales in the Gurchani Dialect of Vafsi as Narrated by Ghazanfar Mahmudi and Mashdi Mahdi and Collected by Lawrence P. Elwell-Sutton.(Book review)
Publication: Asian Folklore Studies
Publication Date: 01-APR-07
Author: Markus-Takeshita, Kinga
STILO, DONALD L., transcription, translation, and annotation. Vafsi Folk Tales: Twenty Four Tales in the Gurchani Dialect of Vafsi as Narrated by Ghazanfar Mahmudi and Mashdi Mahdi and Collected by
This book is an important contribution to Iranian folklore and dialectology that contains twenty-four oral tales in Vafsi, a little-known unwritten northwestern Iranian language, with their English translations. The materials were collected in August 1958 in west-central
D. L. Stilo, an American expert on the Vafsi language, was engaged for the project through a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Stilo reworked and computerized Elwell-Sutton's original tape recordings and transcriptions and made a detailed linguistic analysis. As new fieldwork was not possible due to political circumstances, a Vafsi speaker was invited to
The main body of the book is divided into four parts. The Introduction (1-23) contains a short summary of the Vafsi that is spoken in four villages in west central
At the core of the book lie the tale texts that are presented in Stilo's phonetic transcriptions alongside their English translations (26-197). They unmistakably belong to the typical stock of Middle Eastern tales and correspond with many internationally known types and motifs of folk tales. They include animal tales (nos. A6, A10), tales of magic (nos. A11, B8, B10, B 12), religious legends about the Prophet Moses (nos. B7, B9), novella tales (no. B 11), with a good deal of them featuring well-known tricksters, such as the Mulla Nasreddin (nos. A1, A5, B4), the thin-bearded one (kose: no. B1), and the bald one (kacal: no. A 9). There are also stories concerning fools (nos. A7, B3), the vileness of women (nos.A3, B2, B5), and formula tales (nos. A2, A4). Annotations (199-222) consist of a great number of grammatical interpretations of the texts by Stilo and the learned concise folkloristic notes by Marzolph. These latter are of particular interest for the folklorist reader since they contain the classification of each tale text according to AARNE and THOMPSON (1964), MARZOLPH (1984), and THOMPSON (1955-1958), and also contain some additional bibliographical references.
Readers who would welcome further information concerning Iranian folktales and storytellers should consult the relevant articles of the late Elwell-Sutton himself, who published on these topics in various journals between the 1970s and the early 1980s. (2)
The Grammar Notes (223-44) include the morphology and syntax of Vafsi in a nutshell. (More detailed discussion is promised to come to light in Stilo's planned Grammar of Vafsi.) The Glossary (245-86) and a short Bibliography (287-88) conclude the book. Two compact discs of the audio recordings of the original Vafsi texts accompany the volume.
This careful study adds to our understanding of the linguistic diversity of
Nevertheless, the insertion of a short summary on the major languages spoken in
REFERENCES CITED
AARNE, Antti, and Stith THOMPSON, ed. & trans. 1964 The Types of the Folktale. FFC 184.
MARKUS-TAKESHITA, Kinga 1995 Review of MARZOLPH and AMIRHOSSEINI-NITHAMMER, eds. Asian Folklore Studies 54: 353-55.
MARZOLPH, Ulrich 1984 Typologie des persischen Volksmarchens. Beiruter Texte und Studien 31. Beirut-Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
MARZOLPH, Ulrich, and Azar AMIRHOSSEINI-NITHAMMER, eds. 1994 Die Erziahlungen der Masdi Galin Hanom. Gesammelt von L.P. Elwell-Sutton.
THOMPSON, Stith 1955-1958 Motif-index of Folk-Literature. 6 volumes.
NOTES
(1.) Marzolph has done much to preserve the folkloristic legacy of Elwell-Sutton. He edited and supplied linguistical and folkloristic comments for the original texts of the tales of Mashdi Galin Khanum, an earlier collection of Elwell-Sutton from a gifted woman storyteller in
(2.) For more references on Elwell-Sutton's works on Iranian folklore studies the bibliographical references in MARZOLPH (1984, 310) and in the edition of Mashdi Galin Khanum (MARZOLPH, AMIRHOSSEINI, NITHAMMER, AZAR 1994, vol.1.7) can be consulted.
Kinga MARKUS-TAKESHITA
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