Eugène Hurel: Tales, Fables and Narratives of Rwanda [PDF]

2023
415 pp.

Text languages: Kinyarwanda, English, German

In 1922 Eugène Hurel (1878-1936) published a collection of Rwandan folktales and proverbs with French translation. Now, about hun­dred years later, the editors present a new trilingual edition of his book. They have transcribed Hurel’s old-fashioned Rwandan texts into modern scientific Kinya­rwanda which marks the lengths and heights of vowel tones, and translated all 40 folktales into Eng­lish and German. The proverbs have been omitted here, be­cau­se there already exists an abundant litera­ture in many lan­gua­ges – both in book form and in the in­ter­net – of Rwandan pro­verbs. They also abstained from reproducing Hurel’s original French trans­lation of the tales, which was of a rudimentary word-to-word char­ac­ter. They have left out Hurel’s own intro­duc­tion which re­flects the racist attitude that was quite com­mon not only to co­lo­ni­alists but, unfortunately, also to missio­naries about hund­red years ago; that attitude should not be publicized any more today.

Undoubtedly, the folk tales contained herein belong amongst the most valuable trea­sures of the Rwandan culture, which defi­nitely should be preserved for posterity. With this tri­lingual edition of Hurel’s book, Rwandan folktales shall made avai­lable to a wider, not only Fran­co­phone audience.

The Kinyarwanda and English versions of the tales are pre­sented in a two-paged layout (left pages: Kinyarwanda, right pages: English), arran­ged into small numbered paragraphs appearing at the same height on both sides. In the second part of the book, the Ger­man trans­lations of the tales follow in single-paged layout, using the same numbering of paragraphs to enable the reader to look up the Rwandan source of the text.

Many foot­notes give not only lin­guistic, but also cultural, ethnographical and historical infor­ma­tion and explain the meanings of most Rwandan names. In this form, the editors hope that the present book will serve not only students of the lang­uage Kinyarwanda in the Western world, but also those Rwan­dans who are inte­rested in the classical lite­rature of their own country.

In another text edition 20 Ruandan folktales have been published, together with a German translation. Furthermore, a large dictionary Kinyarwanda-German has appeared in our programme:

Matthias Brack / Marie-Goretti Musoni: Wörterbuch Kinyarwanda–Deutsch – mit Einführung in Sprache und Grammatik [PDF]