Folk Tales of Lesotho — Part 1 (The Legend of the Tortoise · The Egg · Séètètèlané)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Three folk tales of the Basuto people, collected in Basutoland — modern Lesotho — by Édouard Jacottet himself, who lived there nearly ten years and spoke the language, and published in his Contes populaires des Bassoutos (Paris, 1895); heard here in a fresh in-house English translation made from Jacottet's French. In The Legend of the Tortoise, every messenger the lion sends forgets the fruit tree's long name at the termite mound — every one, that is, except the tortoise, whose memory earns her a burial she simply digs out of by night. In The Egg, a chief's bride discovers that her unseen husband is an ostrich egg rolling round the courtyard and singing for joy; her father's medicine-charm hatches him into a man and a chief — until the eggshell fragments she kept call him back into the shell. And in Séètètèlané, the poorest of men, who lives on wild mice and wears their skins, finds an ostrich egg and gains a wife, a village and a chieftainship — all hanging on the one word he must never say to her. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Urgent Rhythms, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:39 The Legend of the Tortoise
5:16 The Egg
21:35 Séètètèlané
Eleven further tales of the book are not read on this shelf, each excluded by name after a full reading: Le petit lièvre (No. 1) · Le chacal, la colombe et la panthère (No. 3) · Masilo et Masilonyané (No. 5) · Masilo et Thakané (No. 6) · Tsélané (No. 7) · Mosélantja (No. 8) · Nyopakatala (No. 9) · Modisa-oa-Bipodi (No. 11) · Koumongoé (No. 15) · Monyohé (No. 17) · Mosimodi et Mosimotsané (No. 19). Seven more tales passed the screen and stand on the bench for later parts of this shelf (Nos. 2, 10, 13, 14, 16, 20 and 21), and two more are benched with flags (Nos. 18 and 23). No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From Contes populaires des Bassoutos by Édouard Jacottet (1895), public domain — tales IV, XII and XXII, complete and in book order, in a fresh in-house English translation from the French. Narrated by Felix. Theme: Urgent Rhythms.
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