Seven Wakhi poems

Abstract

The Wakhi language, as represented in particular by those of its dialects that are spoken in Afghanistan and the Soviet Pamirs, has been described in more detail than any other Iranian language of the area that has virtually no written tradition. As early as the middle of the last century scholars began studying the language on the basis of mostly short or fragmentary glossaries and collections of texts and additional material became available during the thirties and fifties of the present century. During the sixties and seventies, two Leningrad Iranists, A. L. Grünberg and I. M. Steblin-Kamenskij, worked intensively on Pamirian Wakhi and the kind of Wakhi spoken in Afghan Badakhshan. Their research culminated in the publication of a rich collection of orally transmitted songs, fairy tales, proverbs, and texts of ethnographic interest, accompanied by a detailed analysis of Wakhi grammar and a comprehensive glossary. The material collected by Grünberg and Steblin-Kamenskij like that published by G. Buddruss and in some older articles by Russian scholars, conforms on the whole to what one would expect to find in an exclusively oral tradition. Apart from the usual kinds of fairy tales and songs we find also a kind of popular poetry unique to Wakhi.