Crossing Boundaries: the Translation and Cultural Adaptation of Folk Narratives

It is one of the paradoxes of folk narrative research that the t r ans l a t ion and the t r a n s c u l t u r a l adap ta t ionof folklore texts have received so Httle attention so far. This lack of scholarly interest is surprising insofar äs folkloristics and ethnology, from their beginnings in the late 18th Century, had a keen interest in o ther cultures — and they bcgan with translations. In the same way äs Herder translated folk songs from many European languages, MacPherson Gaelic songs into English, and Goethe Serbian epics (through an intermediate Italian text) into German, ethnologists, travellers, and collectors translated innumerable myths and tales, epic poetry and songs into their own (European) languages. Folkloristics had an international orientation before it turned to a more romantic and national agenda that stressed the own traditions and demanded less translation. Later in the 19th Century, however, new schools and theories with an international or even global orientation turned up such äs the Philological school, the Indic theory, and migration theories. The studies of the Finnish school, in particular, produced ample evidence of the fact that folk narratives and songs have always crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries. The scholars of this school, some of whom knew many languages, translated narratives from a host of remote languages, mostly for the sake of comparative analysis; in their studies they discussed the differences between variants or oikotypes from different parts of the world in detail; some of them even paid closer attention to the processes of cultural adaptation of migratory tales or ballads. However, the problem of how the narratives and songs had crossed all these linguistic boundaries, the process of t ranslat ion itself, went almost entirely unnoticed, both in folkloristics and, äs Axel Schmalfuß noted (1972, 288), in cultural anthropology äs well. Translation was obviously taken äs self-explanatory and unproblematic, and äs a consequence many important questions remained unasked. How does the translation of folklore texts function? Does it differ from literary translation ? Who where the translators ? Were they, in former centuries, merchants, sailors, soldiers, hawkers or minstrels, or were they rather scribes, teachers, ministers, or even poets? In other words: were (and are) they educated, semi-educated or uneducated persons ? What role do bilingualism or multilingualism play, and are multiethnic, bilingual or border regions the typical areas of transfer from one language to another? What about bilingual audiences, bilingual narratives, and code switching? How, on what occasions, and for what audiences was and is a translation undertaken? What methods of translation are