2023
XVI, 149 pp.
1 drawing, incl. the complete text and with the original Tashelhiyt Berber text in Arabic script (157 pages in facsimile)
Text languages: English / Tashelhiyt Berber
In December 1994, the author found a document containing the Travels of Sindbad the Sailor written in a modest school exercise book (cahier d’écolier). It was a text translated from Arabic into Tashelhiyt Berber, written in Arabic script by Ibrahim al-Kunki, a prominent language assistant of Arsène Roux, a renowned French berberologist.
Al-Kunki, an expert in the Tashelhiyt Berber literary tradition wrote his translation in his own mother tongue, the Ashtuken dialect of Tashelhiyt Berber (south-east of Agadir). His translation has 157 pages (1,555 text lines). When al-Kunki started his translation is unknown, but he must have finished it in or some time before 1955, because of Roux’s handwritten note on the cover of the document saying that he (Roux) finished checking the document for words and phrases in 1955.
Some pages of the manuscript have explanatory glosses or remarks in the margins and at the bottom made by al-Kunki. As said earlier, the whole document is written in in Arabic script, in the characteristic hand of al-Kunki ubiquitously present in the documents of the Fonds Roux. While reading the first pages of al-Kunki’s translation in 1994, the author was fascinated by his translation skills and the fluency of his style. He considered and still considers the work as a very interesting Tashelhiyt Berber literary document and, at the same time, as an important linguistic document made by a highly educated traditional scholar who was an extraordinary competent speaker of Tashelhiyt Berber.
Under these links you will find further Berber text editions with English or French translations, including a catalogue of all manuscripts of the « Fonds Arsène Roux », a studybook of Taschelhit, as well as ethnographic text editions of Central and Southwest Morocco:
