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)

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. Supplied with folklorist notes and edited by Ulrich Marzolph. Beitrage zur Iranisti k Band 25. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004. viii + 288 pages. Grammar notes, glossary, bibliography. Cloth 88.00 [euro]; ISBN 3-89500-423-5. With two CDS.

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 Iran by the late Professor L. P. Elwell-Sutton, the distinguished British Iranist (1912-1984) who recorded the Vafsi texts and their Persian translations from two native speakers on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Elwell-Sutton later transcribed and researched the materials, but they remained unpublished in his lifetime. It is due to the efforts of Dr. Ulrich Marzolph, one of the most outstanding contemporary experts on Middle Eastern folk literature, that these unique oral texts have now become available to us. (1)

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 Germany and consulted in order to achieve more accuracy in the transcription and interpretation of the materials.

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 Iran, namely in Vafs, Chehreqan, Gurchan, and Fark. The language of the tale texts is defined as the Gurchani dialect of Vafsi. This part also contains information on the original storytellers and on the recording process. Two villagers, the sixteen-year-old Ghazanfar Mahmudi (speaker A) and the approximately sixty-year-old Mashdi Mahdi (speaker B) were narrating in Vafsi for about 228 minutes, and also gave an approximate and spontaneous translation in Persian. As the recording time ran approximately four hours each, they took turns narrating. The history of the project, methodology, and procedures concerning the corrections of Elwell-Sutton's original transcription and criteria regarding the translation of the texts are also discussed in this part.

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 ...