Persian Folk Tales — Part 1: The Washerman's Story · The Hidden Treasure · The Deaf Man and His Sick Friend · The Gardener and the Little Bird
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Four tales from Persia, translated from the Persian by Edward Rehatsek of Bombay and printed at Glasgow in 1889 in A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories, edited by W. A. Clouston. Behind them stands the Mahbub ul-Kulub, the beloved Persian story collection from which Rehatsek drew them — and this episode opens a new KacheliTV shelf, our season of Persian folk tales.
A washerman at his river bank is visited by three dove-maidens in turn, and loses all three to his own fickleness — for, as they tell him, the first condition of love is fidelity. In Damascus, a poor man's buried gold vanishes from under a jujube-tree, and it takes a lunatic's chance remark and a little boy's quick wits to trace it to the one honest man who dug there for medicine. A deaf man rehearses a visit of condolence all the way down the road, and every answer his sick friend gives him is the opposite of the one he expects. And in a garden at Balkh, a little bird caught in a net talks for its life, buys its freedom with three maxims — and watches the gardener break every one of them within the hour.
Stories in this episode:
0:35 Introduction
2:12 The Washerman's Story
5:29 The Hidden Treasure
12:40 The Deaf Man and His Sick Friend
15:08 The Gardener and the Little Bird
Source: A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories from the Persian, Tamil, and Urdu, edited by W. A. Clouston (Glasgow, 1889); the Persian tales translated by Edward Rehatsek from the Mahbub ul-Kulub — public domain. Narrated by Scratch.
Music: "Subterranean Earth" (instrumental) — opening and closing theme, with a short excerpt between stories.
