The Language and Translation of Arab Folktales

THE REALITY OF THE LANGUAGE OF TALES

Oral literature is as old as man. Being the foundation of all literature, it had existed in the Arabic language many centuries before the advent of the Arabic language standard, whose exact time and protagonists are still beyond our ken. During later centuries of deterioration of Arab culture, up to the 19th century, this literature had been almost the only torch in the dark. Even today, despite the spread of literacy and the penetration of electronic media even into Bedouin camps, it has not yet gone out.

Among the innumerable genres of oral literature a special position belongs to the prose form called folktale. Folktales, especially fairy-tales (Märchen), are the greatest of globetrotters, as they offer a vision of life we like to imagine, shifted beyond the boundary at which reality stumbles. The role they have played from time immemorial furnished the noun story in all languages with the meanings of life and adventure. Folktales (and folk oral literature en général) touch the heart of our collective being.

Telling a tale is essentially a work of myth. The simple spoken language of a folktale flies on invisible wings into the unknown, rediscovering the ancientness of language and of our self inside it. This rediscovery is a prerequisite for the feeling of returning to the state of mythical consciousness. The listener unreservedly, with his whole being, surrenders to a tale. Topnotch literature in a language which has been adapted by intellectual production to fit the high norms of the written word can never possess that something which is narrational per se and which has been kept alive in colloquial parlance.

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