Tale
Folk-Tales of Angola
Héli Chatelain · 1894
Synopsis
Fifty Mbundu tales, given in their Kimbundu text with an English translation, an introduction and notes. Animals often play the roles: in one, a dog that is fed in the village wonders why it should go off and starve in the bush, at the expense of the jackal, its companion; in another, tale thirty-six, a pig and a wild boar, whose lesson lies in the offspring the pig leaves behind.
Context
The collection appeared in 1894 in Boston and New York, from Houghton Mifflin, as the first volume of the memoirs of the American Folklore Society, which the author had helped to found in 1888. In his preface, he announces a national literature written in Kimbundu; Angolan literature would nevertheless be written in Portuguese. The book was translated into that language only in 1964, in Lisbon. An Angolan novelist rewrote the story of the pig in a fable in 2008, and his tales still serve as a starting point for fieldwork among Kimbundu speakers.
Who it is for
Fifty short tales, in Kimbundu and English, with an introduction and notes; translated into Portuguese in 1964, never into French.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first collection of the various genres of Angolan oral tradition, and as the starting point of their scientific study.
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