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The gap is being filled by this book, which presents these folklore texts to the reader. It includes the original tales in Latin-based transliteration and English translation (supplied by phonetic and grammatical commentaries) and explanations of cultural terms and is preceded by an introduction with a review of the Herati dialect. The introduction ends with a vocabulary of dialectal and common words. The words in the vocabulary are presented in the form (or forms) in which they appear on the original tape-recordings, with a reference to a published source (where possible). Throughout the book, the literary Afghan Persian form of the word to which a dialectal term corresponds is given where necessary, while the literary Persian form of the respective word appears only in special cases.
The materials were collected during my field research in Afghanistan in the 1980s from illiterate dialect speakers (this is the category which has preserved their dialect in its most purity and entirety). All the texts were first recorded on tapes and then transliterated. For studying and translating the texts, I also used the help of educated dialect speakers (Afghan college and university students of Herati descent in Leningrad/St. Petersburg). The tales presented in this book were recorded from three dialect speakers: tales 1–6 from Habibolla—a native of Hajmamad-Istâd village in Pashtun Zarghun district (located to the southeast of Herat city); tales 7–10 from Abdol Hamid—a native of Injil district (to the north of Herat city); and tale 11 from Karim—a native of Gaza village in Ghoryan (Ghurian) district (to the west of Herat city).
Since the tales are not told by “professional” narrators but by average dialect speakers, who have been exposed to fewer outside influences, they are characterized by features typical of common colloquial illiterate speech. They lack consistency and contain repetitive phrases and expressions. The narrator may drop the sentence in the middle and either leave it incomplete or start it again from the beginning. Sometimes he would go back a few sentences, breaking narrative logic, and retell the whole portion with a slight change of vocabulary. I have intentionally preserved the original texts in their dialectal purity the way they appear on the tapes. As for translation, I tried to reduce “redundancies and repetitions”