Dungan Folktales and Legends transed. by Kenneth J. Yin (review)

Abstract

Dungan Folktales and Legends is an anthology, translated by Kenneth J. Yin from the Russian edition of 1977. The Dungans have a very complex cultural background, as they are Chinese-speaking Muslims (speaking northwestern dialects, close to Mandarin) who originally lived in Gansu and Shaanxi provinces and fled to Russian Central Asia after the failure of the Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) against the Qing Dynasty. Recognized as a separate ethnic group of Central Asia, the exact history of the Dungan’s formation in the premodern period still remains not completely clear. There are several theories of their origins (including the origins of the “Dungan” name [Donggan in Pinyin], commonly used in Russian and several other languages).1 Now the Dungans live in Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, and the northeastern area of Uzbekistan (formerly republics of the Soviet Union). This volume is the most comprehensive anthology of Dungan folk narratives, available now in English for the first time, and features masterly translations of the most outstanding and characteristic oral narratives collected in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in the mid-twentieth century. The original Russian collection was compiled by the famous Russian sinologist Boris L. Riftin (1932–2012) and two Dungan scholars: Makhmud A. Khasanov and Ilʹias I. Iusupov.2 Riftin started to collect Dungan tales in the 1950s, when he traveled to Kyrgyzstan and worked there at the Dungan collective farm in Milyanfan to study the language and folklore of this people, related to his interest in spoken Chinese and Chinese folk literature in general. It was not the first folkloric expedition of Russian sinologists to the Dungans. The work on collection and studies of Dungan folklore by Russian scholars started around the turn of the twentieth century, during the imperial period, as noted in the preface to this collection of tales.3 The present collection contains seventy-eight folk stories divided into three parts: (1) wonder tales and animal tales; (2) novel-type tales, folk anecdotes, and adventure stories; and (3) legends, historical tales, and narratives. The preface introduces the major special features and cultural status of the Dungan tales. The volume also has several appendixes, a glossary, an index, the original notes to the texts in the Russian translation, and translator’s notes aimed at an English-reading audience.