Folktales from Syria

CMES Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation

by Samir Tahhan, Andrea Rugh (Translator)

Syrian poet Samir Tahhan collected folktales from old men sitting outside their houses in Aleppo, drinking tea. Afraid these stories would disappear with the passing of this generation, Tahhan also went to halls and events to hear professional storytellers and record their performances. Anthropologist Andrea Rugh helped translate the resulting two volumes of stories from the original Arabic and wrote the informative introduction to this one-volume collection.

Some of the tales appeared in rhyming verse in Arabic and some were based on events that are said to have actually taken place in Aleppo. Rugh explains the concepts of the most popular types of Syrian story structures: the gissa, the hikaya, and the hudutha. With two of the poems, the Arabic and the English are shown side by side in order to demonstrate the internal poetic structures of the original rhymes.

With their emphasis on morality and social values, the tales will be familiar to Western audiences. Another value for the reader is finding the accepted social values and behaviors that Arab adults try to inculcate in their younger generation, often through complex characterizations. Teasing out these meanings gives the reader an appreciation for the act of translation and hints of the power of the Arabic language in prose and poetry.

Professional illustrator Douglas Rugh has provided the book's black-and-white prints based on the stories and his experiences as a child growing up in the Middle East.

104 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mercie]

I feel like it's hard to assign ratings to books like this. It's a collection of oral folktales, so there are so many factors to take into account that might not apply when I read modern Western books. So my review and rating are more so based on the introduction, and how the tales are organized and translated, rather than focusing solely on the stories as I might with books written solely by the author listed on the cover.
So, like I said, it's a collection of folktales. These come from Syria and were collected by Samir Tahhan and translated and introduced by Andrea Rugh for this collection. Rugh's introduction is enlightening for understanding the categories of stories these fall into in the Arabic tradition, along with the cultural relevance around these stories. However, the stories are split into "stories" and "tales and episodes," but Rugh doesn't help to explain why tale and episodes would be so distinct from stories that stories would be the only category to stand by itself. In addition, she goes into great depth about the differences between Muslim and Christian folktales, but doesn't give any specific background into the individual stories and basically says that doesn't matter now, so why so much detail about that?
I also feel that the main issue with this collection I that these stories were originally oral. As the introduction explains, these were told in various settings by storytellers. This might be less common now and I do believe that it's important to save these intangible parts of culture, but just reading the stories leaves the reader without a lot of the nuance of hearing these stories in the original settings.
I think if this book were much more academic, it would make more sense. There should be more analysis of the stories to give more context, rather than just a few endnotes, since this doesn't read super well as a collection of short stories.

[Namrirru]

So sweet! They're Syrian fables with morals to their story for parents to tell their little children.