Tale
Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands
Elsie Clews Parsons · 1923
Synopsis
Tales taken down by dictation in the language of the storytellers, with the English facing, each time with the name of the speaker and his or her island of origin. They include the hare and the wolf, in which the smaller always wins by cunning, kings who pose riddles, younger sons who set off to seek their fortune, and a long series of tales of hunger in which eating is what is at stake in the story and cunning takes the place of food.
Context
These tales were collected in New England and not in the islands, from Cape Verdean emigrants settled in New Bedford and Providence, who had come to work on the whalers and then in the cranberry fields. The collector took them down in Creole, with the names of the storytellers and their island of origin. The book is thus a document on a diaspora as much as on an archipelago, and it shows what a tale becomes when it crosses the Atlantic and ages far from its language. The edition was financed from her own funds, like all her other collections, and appeared in two volumes ten years apart.
Who it is for
Short tales in Creole with an English translation. The interest lies as much in the context of emigration as in the stories themselves.
Prizes and reception
This collection is the main early source on the Cape Verdean tale, and it is used by linguists working on the creole of the archipelago.