In 1998, I travelled to a village near Ramallah in the West Bank for a year. My goal was to collect material for a description of the Arabic dialects spoken in the villages around Ramallah. I had studied Semitic languages and wanted to write my doctoral thesis on this topic. During my year-long stay, I visited over 100 villages and was able to make audio recordings, mostly of older speakers. They often told me fairy tales or fables. Before the advent of television, it was customary for men and sometimes women to sit together in the evenings and tell each other stories. When I travelled through the area, this tradition had already died out, but some elderly people still knew the stories from the past.
When I returned from the West Bank in 1999, I was initially assigned other tasks at Heidelberg University. It was not until 2009 that a selection of 118 recordings was finally published by Harrassowitz Verlag under the title "Der arabische Dialekt der Dörfer um Ramallah. Teil 1: Texte". The volume contained the audio recordings on the left-hand pages in phonemic transcription and on the right-hand pages a German translation as literally as possible. The book was intended for Arabic linguists. The German translation served solely as an aid to understanding the Arabic text reproduced in phonetic transcription on the opposite page. It was therefore often not written in particularly good German.
However, some of the stories are so beautiful that they deserve to be retold and published in good English. So, in 2022, I set about reworking the best stories. In doing so, I took certain liberties, even retelling some stories, but I always retained the laconic narrative style. With some narrators, however, editing was not necessary at all and I was able to stay very close to the original text. The result is the 45 stories printed in this volume. Since most, but not all, of them are fairy tales, I think the name ‘Palestinian Fairy Tales’ is justified.
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Palästinensische Märchen Sample (PDF) |
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