Folk Tales of Libya — Part 1 (The Merchant's Son Muhammed · Dschuha and the Jew · Dschuha, the Cow, and His Daughter)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Three tales of the city of Tripoli, collected there by Hans Stumme and published in his Märchen und Gedichte aus der Stadt Tripolis in Nordafrika (Leipzig, 1898); heard here in a fresh in-house English translation made from Stumme's German. These are tales of the city of Tripoli, and are billed as such — no claim is made for Libya as a whole. In The Merchant's Son Muhammed, a bankrupt merchant's son, refused four or five medjidie by his rich brother at his wife's childbed, is taken up by an old hadj who, on Muhammed's oath to obey, clothes him, seats him as a mock Governor of Alexandria, draws twelve hundred duro of peace money from the frightened brother, and then installs him in Alexandria in earnest, where he judges justly for a year — until Harun Arraschid hears of a governor he never appointed, and the old man's production of Harun's own lost note turns the hearing to laughter. In Dschuha and the Jew, Dschuha prays for exactly a thousand denars — nine hundred and ninety-nine he will not take — pockets the nine hundred and ninety-nine thrown down to test him, and defeats the claim before the qadi by predicting it too well. And in Dschuha, the Cow, and His Daughter, the sales patter that sold a worthless cow dear — young, and already six months pregnant — is delivered again, word for word, to his daughter's suitors. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Feline Grace, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:38 The Merchant's Son Muhammed
23:21 Dschuha and the Jew
27:29 Dschuha, the Cow, and His Daughter
Seven further prose tales of the book are not read on this shelf, each excluded by name under the shelf's standing content law: Die Geschichte von dem Manne und dem Löwen (I) · Die Geschichte der Udea (II) · Die Geschichte von Hälbchen (III) · Die Geschichte von Muhammed dem Fingerspreizer (IV) · Die Geschichte von Buk Ettemsuch (V) · Die Geschichte von Dschemil und Dschemila (VI) · Die Geschichte von der Selbsterniedrigerin (VII) · Die Geschichte vom Hunde (IX). The book's poetic part (Teil B) — songs and verses, not tales — is benched as verse. No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From Märchen und Gedichte aus der Stadt Tripolis in Nordafrika by Hans Stumme (1898), public domain — in a fresh in-house English translation from the German. Narrated by Bruno. Theme: Feline Grace.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
