Alf Laylah Farsiin Performance: Afghanistan, 1975

Abstract

Considerable scholarship has developed tracing possible oral sources for important examples of early written literature, as well as the observable features of oral narrative style and the processes of oral performance and transmission in various traditions and settings. The specific changes in a written narrative, when it turns, or returns, to oral performance and transmission, have not received as much attention. This paper examines one case of transformation of a story from Alf Laylah in its nineteenth century literary Persian translation, and thence into an oral performance recorded in pre-war Afghanistan. The comparison identifies elements of the then-current oral folktale style in Dari (Afghan Persian), both in plot structure and gross content, and in surface stylistics, that the teller(s) introduced into the performance of a tale for which the present performer identified a specific published edition as his source.