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Friedl, Erika: Folk Tales from a Persian Tribe. Forty-five Tales from Sisakht in Luri and English. Collected, transcribed, translated and commented on [...]. Dortmund: Verlag für Orientkunde, 2007. 327 pp.
This carefully produced collection presents tales from oral performances recorded mainly in the early 1970's. Friedl's initial purpose in recording oral narratives was language acquisition in support of her general ethnographic work, but at the same time, some of the storytellers urged her to record the narratives for their own sake. As Friedl observes, even in the 1970's interest in folktale performance was being displaced by books and radio, and "by 2006 storytelling was all but defunct" (p. 25). In keeping with her linguistic purposes, these transcriptions and translations do not seek to embellish the texts for any literary purpose, but only to present them (devoid of paralinguistic features such as halts, intonational shifts etc. and omitting some linguistic markers redundant in written English, such as the conjunction "keh" ["that"], used regularly in oral Persian and Luri to mark both direct and indirect speech). She also notes that she corrected the few discrepancies in names or narrative sequencing in the stories, and also omitted as unduly repetitive the common oral feature of syntactic chaining ( "... he got up and left. He got up and left and rode away ..."). She observes that all the performers she recorded spoke in a rather spare, unembellished style, "with very few 'mistakes' (their word)" (19). In articulating her editorial principles, Friedl criticizes the more intrusive editorial procedures of the few other published collections in Luri.
Friedl provides welcome brief biographical portraits of each of the six storytellers (four women, two men), and presents each teller's stories as a...