How to Read a Folktale: The 'Ibonia' Epic from Madagascar

Forthcoming in July 2013.

How to Read a Folktale offers the first English translation of Ibonia, a spellbinding tale of old Madagascar. Ibonia is a folktale on epic scale. Much of its plot sounds familiar: a powerful royal hero attempts to rescue his betrothed from an evil adversary and, after a series of tests and duels, he and his lover are joyfully united with a marriage that affirms the royal lineage. These fairytale elements link Ibonia with European folktales, but the tale is still very much a product of Madagascar. It contains African-style praise poetry for the hero; it presents Indonesian-style riddles and poems; and it inflates the form of folktale into epic proportions. Recorded when the Malagasy people were experiencing European contact for the first time, Ibonia proclaims the power of the ancestors against the foreigner. Lee Haring has revised his 1994 translation to emphasize the poetic qualities of a folktale. Ibonia becomes a key to understanding the very nature of this type of storytelling. A new introduction and detailed notes open for the western reader the wild, archaic, alien world of Malagasy symbols. How to Read a Folktale connects this exotic narrative with fundamental questions in anthropology, folklore studies and literary criticism.

 
Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He specializes in the oral literatures of the Indian Ocean islands, and his Malagasy Tale Index is a standard reference work in the field. He has conducted folklore fieldwork in Kenya, Madagascar, and Mauritius. In Verbal Arts in Madagascar he mapped the interrelations of the island’s riddles, proverbs, poetry, and oratory. His book Stars and Keys: Folk-tales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean shows the cultural interrelations of five sets of islands – Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, the Comoros, and Seychelles – through translating and commenting on over a hundred stories. In Mauritius he has published the bilingual field manual Collecting Folklore in Mauritius in English and Kreol; in India he has published two tale collections. He has taught in graduate folklore programs at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Connecticut.