Girl in the Chair: The Storyteller and the Bateleur, or, why researching animal tales is worth it

As I have mentioned before, I am busy working on my next folktale collection, focusing on animal tales. I have done a whole lot of research in the past year, making a long list of stories - and animal species - I would love to include. Right now, I am translating, retelling, and polishing the tales one by one, in writing and in telling. The latest one provided me with a bit of a research adventure, so I decided to share.

Before we get started:

1. There are a lot of animal tales out there. I could just Google "lion + folktale", find one, copy and paste, move on. Sadly, there are books on the market that do exactly that. But I do believe that the more work I put into a story, the better the book will be. And I also believe that in order to tell a story well (especially from another culture) I have to do my homework, and understand it as much as possible.

2. I set some goals for myself for this project. In order for a story to be included, it has to be enjoyable (exciting, interesting, polished), has to represent the animal in a positive way (not dumb, evil, or cursed), and the flora and fauna of the story has to match the place it comes from. The latter one is the important part for this post.

The case study

The story I am working with is a Mbaka folktale from Angola. I came across it during my Following Folktales Around the World reading challenge, and it stuck with me. It is titled The son of Kimanaueze and the daughter of Sun and Moon. The basic tale is that a great hero's son decides he wants a bride from the sky, but doesn't know how to get his letter of proposal to her. He asks various animals to help take the letter to the heavens.

The (bilingual) text mentions four animals:

Mbambi, translated as Deer,

Soko, translated as Antelope,

Kikuambi, translated as Hawk,

and Holokoko, translated as Vulture.

None of the four help the hero, actually, and they only have one line each in the tale, so I could have settled for these names and moved on. But since this whole book is about animals, I wanted to pay attention to detail, and go beyond stereotypes. 19th century British translators had a habit of labeling any bird a "pidgeon" or "eagle", and every ungulate "deer." So I looked up the book's end notes to see if these animals were really the ones they were translated into.

Obviously not. And here things got interesting.

Mbambi, according to the notes, is Cephalophus burchelii. This name, however, doesn't exist anymore. Taxonomic names can change a whole lot in a century, and it was obvious that Mbambi had swapped Latin names since 1894, but I had no idea to what. I was sure he is not a deer, given that Cephalophus refers to duikers. I also learned that the old name referenced British naturalist William John Burchell, so I started searching for terms like Burchell + antelope, Burchell + bushbuck, Burchell + Cephalophus etc. Nothing really came up, until finally I ran into an article about the catalog of Burchell's mammal collection. And there they noted the new name: Sylvicapra grimmia ssp. burchellii, common duiker. Win.

Soko was a more complicated case, given that the notes gave no Latin name at all. The translator only stated that it is some sort of an antelope, with longer horns. This was not much to go on, so I decided to look up antelop species that live in Anglola. Since Angola's borders have also changed, I looked up the regions where the Mbaka live and tried to cross-reference. Eventually I came across the Springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis), which matched the description, and also the role in the story (see below). I am not sure about this one, but decided to go with it until further notice. (Fun fact: antidorcas means "not a gazelle". Gee thanks.)

Kikuambi had a Latin name: Fiscus capelli. However, this one is also out of date. Luckily, my search came up with a very useful page, which led me to the current name, and another which helped me with names in different languages. This is how I found Lanius humeralis capelli - which is not a hawk at all. It's a small shrike (Northern fiscal). I also had to do some extra work figuring out what to translate it to in Hungarian, since we don't have a common name for it. But at least I had the species.

And then came Holokoko, Helotarsus ecaudatus. This one was pretty straightforward: Google told me that it is an older Latin name for Teratophius ecaudatus, the bateleur. Not a vulture. This bird:

This whole side quest took me about two hours, and resulted in finding out about four fascinating animals. With one line each in the folktale.

First off, I had to make decisions on how to incorporate them into the text. In a folktale, modern names can stick out like a sore thumb ("and then along came the Northern fiscal"). And yet, I like to tell the story with the accurate animals, and name them with their original names. So, I settled on "along came Kikuambi, a small shrike" - and put the rest in the Comments section after the tale. 

Why go to all this trouble?

Because the four lines in the story suddenly made sense in contet, and expanded into a small scene. The hero first tries to send the letter with the small and swift duiker, but Mbambi can't run up to the sky. Then he asks Soko, who can jump (pronk) very high - but not that high. Then he asks a bird who can perch in high places, but he can't help either. Finally he asks the bateleur, who can soar very high - but even he can only get halfway to the sky.

And now it all makes sense.

A lot of this was probably self-explanatory to people when the original text was collected. But if I am telling it to contemporary audiences in Hungary (or Europe), these things need spelling out. And yes, the story would still work if it was four random animals saying no to the hero - but with the specific species, and the background knowledge, the story gains richness, detail, and layered meaning.

And, honestly: I freaking enjoy doing this work. Hello, dopamine. I love the search, the discovery, the puzzle. And I love animals, I always have. So I enjoy finding out about interesting species, and doing them justice when telling people about them.

And now I am moving on to the second paragraph...

(Note: if you are a biologist, birder, anthropologist, or any other professional, and you see a mistake in this post, please educate me :) )

Unlikely heroes, diverse tricksters (Following folktales around the world 127. - Angola)

Today I continue the blog series titled Following folktales around the world! If you would like to know what the series is all about, you can find the introduction post here. You can find all posts here, or you can follow the series on Facebook!

Folk-tales of Angola
Fifty tales, with Kimbundu text, literal English translation, introduction, and notes
Héli Chatelain
The American Folk-Lore Society, 1894.

This is a very old book: the very first volume of the American Folk-Lore society series! It contains fifty folktales collected from the Mbundu people of Angola. The collector was a linguist who traveled to the country to help missionaries learn the local languages. Most of the tales came from a student of his named Jeremiah, who even accompanied him to America to help put the stories into writing.
The long and detailed (although definitely dated) introduction talks about Angola's geography, natural resources, climate, population, languages, societies, folklore, and oral traditions. A separate chapter deals with phonetics and pronunciation, since all the stories are printed in mirror translation, both in the original language and in English. They have been translated carefully word for word, which makes the English rendering hard to read and enjoy (even though, I still found quite a few fun stories in it). At the end of the book we get extensive notes for each tale to help with the understanding of linguistic and cultural details. This book was definitely ahead of its time.

Highlights

I have read a similar story before, but I really liked this version of The son of Kimanaueze and the Daughter of the Sun and the Moon. A mortal man wanted to marry the celestial girl, but there was no one to carry his letters to her. Frog figured out a way to make the trip back and forth (in the water jugs of heavenly maidens), and managed to arrange the marriage through multiple visits.

The tale of Dinianga Dia Ngombe was strange but very entertaining. The hunter killed a deer and skinned it, but then the animal suddenly jumped up and got away. The hunter yelled after it, shaming it for running around "naked" - to which the deer responded that the hunter looked even more embarrassing, going home with an empty deer skin and nothing else. The humor was similarly poignant in the story of The young man and the skull; here the protagonist met a talking skull that warned him that his wits will be his undoing. The young man went around boasting that a talking skull told him he's so smart it will be his end... until they told him to prove his story. The skull, however, refused to talk, and the young man was beheaded, his own skull joining the family of talking skulls that should have known better.
I was fascinated by the tale of the two men who competed for the same girl. The father gave them the difficult task of catching a live deer. One of them considered his options and decided not to try, while the other stubbornly completed the task. The father gave the girl to the former, claiming that a man who followed senseless orders without thinking will make a terrible husband, and will beat his wife if she makes a mistake. Whoa.

Connections

Pic from here

The story of the (beautifully named) Na Nzua Dia Kimanaueze was similar to the European "boy who turned into animals" tales, except here the hero could take on the form of any animal, not just three, and besides rescuing a princess, he also used his forms to hunt for food when he was hungry. The princess, by the way, had to be rescued from slavery in Portugal. The story had a similar beginning than that of The woman who ate too much fish, except in that one, she did not have to give up her child to the God of Fish (eco-tales!), but rather, a particularly large fish came to life in her stomach, just like in the African-American story of the Singing Geese.
Once again I encountered a story about a woman (Ngana Samba) who married into the spirit world - here, against her will - and managed a daring escape together with her children. There was also another story where a little sister saved her siblings from the evil Ma-kishi spirits by keeping vigil at night and keeping them occupied. She eventually convinced her sisters to run away from the spirit world; in their escape they were helped by a hawk, which, strangely reminded me of a story I read from Kiribati.

There was a whole host of resident tricksters, including Hare and Monkey. In a Tar Baby variant they actually appeared together, and were caught by the tar-women set up by Leopard (but obviously they got away). In the tale about the shared food secretly stolen, Fox was tricked by a wily Mole, but he managed to take revenge in the end. In the story where the "male goat gave birth to kids" trial had to be decided, it was clever Duiker (a distant relative to Mouse Deer) who helped the defendant; while the infamous horse-riding trick of Br'er Rabbit was played on Elephant by Frog. I was also reminded of Br'er Rabbit stories by the "briar patch" tale, where Turtle made people believe he could only be killed by being thrown into the river. The ungrateful predator rescued from a trap (and then put back in) was Leopard, tricked by Hare. Leopard was also the villain of the story where he invited animals along to his family, played tricks on them on the way, and had them killed in the end. It was Monkey who managed to outsmart him (in other African traditions it used to be Antelope who tricked wily Tortoise).

Where to next?
Namibia!