Traditional Slovak Folktales (review)

The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989 opened many opportunities for in-depth studies of numerous countries previously inaccessible to Western scholars. One of these countries, Czechoslovakia, long thought of as a single nation, peacefully divided with the "Velvet Divorce" of 1993. With beautiful and alluring Prague as its capital and world-famous authors such as Kundera, Klima, and Havel, the Czech Republic has garnered much attention in the scholarly writings of the last decade; however, the eastern portion of the former country, the Slovak Republic, has remained in the shadow of its one-time partner, and fewer studies reflect the rich culture of this primarily rural nation. David L. Cooper's Traditional Slovak Folktales lays a firm cornerstone for further work in the field of traditional narrative in the region.

Folklorists will be familiar with the volume of tales produced by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Few, however, are likely to be aware of the nineteenth-century collections of Pavol Dobsinsky, a Slovak who published collections of traditional tales in the late 1850s and early 1880s. The primary reason for this neglect has been the lack of careful translations of these works. For this reason alone, Cooper's effort marks an important contribution to the study of not only Slovak culture, but that of Central and Eastern Europe as well.

In his introduction, Cooper acknowledges that Slovak tales have been previously translated into English and published, but he feels that these earlier translations suffer from "a lack of specific knowledge of the Slovak idiom," as well as a style that is "far too literary for the folktale" (p. xxviii). Despite this observation, Cooper's translations often strike the reader as too literal and sometimes unnecessarily confusing. For instance, in the collection's first tale, "The Enchanted Forest," a bear has been sent to request an herb from a snake. Cooper's translation of the snake's reaction is cumbersome: "The bear came to the snake and asked for half of the herb. But the niggard was evasive and tried to release poison into the bear's body" (p. 6). Presumably, the snake tried to bite the bear.

Notwithstanding the occasional lapse of meaningful vocabulary, Cooper's edition offers the scholar of traditional narratives a broad base of primary material. Including 50 of the 153 tales originally published by Dobsinsky, the volume offers selections from each of the major genres represented in the original collections. In addition to a useful introduction, the prefatory material includes a Slovak pronunciation key as well as a brief glossary. Besides the translations themselves, Cooper makes a valuable contribution with the scholarly apparatus he has appended to the compilation. He provides Dr. Viera Gasparikova's useful "Classifications and Commentaries to the Tales" which she prepared according to the Aarne-Thompson index. This portion of the text also refers to reference works by Slovak and Czech scholars as well as Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature.

Cooper's appendix, "Tale Collection in Nineteenth-Century Slovakia and the Origin of Traditional Slovak Folktales," offers a valuable overview of nineteenth-century Slovak history, demonstrating, among other things, the effect of "Magyarization" on Slovak culture. Similarly, he discusses the role played by Lutherans in the codification of Slovak as a written language distinct from the Czech and their recognition of the importance of linguistic and national traditions. This discussion provides the background for understanding Dobsinsky's impulse to collect and publish the nation's traditional tales.

All told, Cooper's translations fill a void in the scholarly canon of world folktales. This collection of representative narratives combined with their classifications and a bibliography of relevant scholarship will broaden the scope of comparative folktale research. Like many folktales themselves, this anthology is not meant for children. It will, however, be an asset to any library of traditional narratives.