The Arabian Oral Histoical Narative

The Arabian Oral Histoical Narative بقلم سعد الصويان ... This work consists of three parts: the corpus, the analysis of the corpus and the glossary. The corpus, which forms the second part of the work, is a transliterated and translated, long oral narrative, or, as the Arabians call it, sālfih. This sālfih is a sample chosen from hundreds of hours of narratives and poems collected in the field. The analysis of the sālfih takes up the first part of this work. It consists of several chapters, the first of which gives a summary of the sālfih and its historical context. The following chapter outlines the steps taken in the collecting of the sālfih and preparing it for publication. The remaining chapters analyze the language and style of the sālfih and examine the historical and ethnographic value of this oral narrative genre. The final chapter of the first part deals with the translation of the text and the compilation of the glossary which forms the last part of this work. The analytical part is the outcome of a process, the result of an attempt to think through and appreciate this oral data. The point of departure for the analytic part is mainly aesthetic. How to present to a non-Bedouin reader Bedouin oral narrative and poetry, not merely as a linguistic corpus, but as a vital and vibrant work of art! How to lead the uninitiated into the aesthetic and cultural universe of the desert nomad! It took a great deal of thinking and working on my part to teach myself how to perceive beauty and interpret art as the Bedouin would. This work is, in a sense, a document of this process of discovery, not to claim that I am totally content with the final result. The sālfih serves to illuminate its associated poem. With apologies to the rāwis, this work is a sālfih of the sālfih