The small animal involved, however, is not everywhere the same. Thus one of the most common plots is the tug of war into which a small animal induces two larger ones to enter in the belief that they are pulling against him. Beyond this, however, there are many differences both of detail and of general treatment. Examples and discussion of other variants of the accumulation or ritornelle st (.)Ħ As far as the outline of the plot goes, many of the resemblances are striking.
What is really needed by now is less emphasis on collecting more and more texts and much more on rigorous and explicit standards in recording and translating. It is often quite impossible to assess how close these translations are to the original texts or whether, as perhaps happens rather often, they are only paraphrases or even touched-up and rewritten versions. 2 But quite apart from this there is the added point that when none of the original texts is provided it is not possible even for someone who knows the language to check the basic trustworthiness of the translation in the most literal terms. The problems involved in any translation, let alone from a totally unfamiliar culture, are of course notorious-not that this has deterred some collectors from going through a double process of translation prior to the publication of their collections.
When only translations are given, there are additional difficulties. The resulting texts are often little more than abstracts or summaries of the plots-a perfectly adequate source when all one wants to consider is the origin of the plot or its relevance for social structure or education, but clearly quite inadequate for analysis in depth. It is often not made clear how they were recorded-on tape, from dictation, by the tellers themselves, or even written by hired schoolboys who are often unskilled in the local arts of story-telling and certainly not experienced in the near impossible task of transforming the oral art form into the medium of the written word. Herskovits’s Dahomean stories that were apparently first translated (during the actual flow of (.)Ĥ These collections are of very variable quality.
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