Imatges de pàgina
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ignorant fall an easy prey. 6 This mob of wretches, unworthy of any kind of employment, resembles a flock of vultures battling over a corpse. Still higher rises the tone of our author's eloquence when he deals with the injustice of judges. Too many.cadis are there, he says, who rob the poor and even devour the substance of orphans. Giving the name of fees to the bribes they exact, they sell the decisions of their courts. Cursed be ye,' he cries, who sell justice for silver, who make over to swindlers decisions which should be divine! In return for a present, ye trample justice under foot, ye barter religion for worldly interests.' And that in spite of the fact that law is of divine origin, having been brought down from heaven by the angel Gabriel, in order that the best of men might communicate to the adorers of the true God his supreme decisions.' Still worse than the unjust cadi is the tyrannical pasha, in dealing with whose crimes Nabi's indignation reaches its highest point. The dignity of a pasha, he tells his son, 'is an evil which lasts as long as life; it produces nothing but trouble, and sorrow, and hardness of heart.' If a pasha works injustice,' he ruins the edifice of his faith;' if he does not, his power will not endure. Many pashas has the poet known who were naturally pious and upright, but an irresistible attraction necessarily forced them into injustice. For without that the prestige of a pasha would be destroyed, his orders would not be listened to, his slender revenues would not suffice for his expenses.' Very often a pasha has bought his office by means of borrowed money, which he is obliged to repay out of the bribes he receives and the spoils he extorts. Sometimes he is by nature an extortioner and a tyrant. In such a case, woe betide his province! His officers are so many bare and hungry oppressors who go about pillaging, leaving behind them universal ruin and desolation. Instead of listening to what the villagers have to say, they chain them together, and drive them in long lines to the pasha. No one says a word in defence of the poor prisoners; they are treated at once as criminals. Terrible is the result of all this injustice and oppression. Once flourishing districts have become deserts; the owl and the crow have taken the place of the labourer. The prosperity of the provinces no longer supplies the sources of the national revenues; it is by iniquity alone that they are fed. When laws are respected,' he goes on to say, they stifle rebellions and stay the course of all disorders.' Under their august auspices, who would dare to spoil the weak? Who would vex the the great Omar long

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rayabs and drive them into revolt?' Well did ago say, 'The shocks which disturb an empire arise from neglect of and contempt for the decisions of the law.' Let it be remembered that all this was written two hundred years ago by a Turk high in office, who was not alluding to the treatment of the Christian subjects of the Porte, but was merely describing the ordinary course of Turkish injustice.

Now let us leave this dreary subject for one that is of a more attractive nature. From the satirist we will turn to the humourist, from outbursts of savage indignation to sallies of exuberant mirth. As a specimen of Turkish humour may be taken the pleasantries of the Hodja (teacher and preacher), Nasr-Eddin. This reverend wag has been called the Turkish Eulenspiegel, but in Eulenspiegel there are no traces of the simplicity and even stupidity which are combined in Nasr-Eddin's case with wit and humour, and which render him the counterpart rather of the German Claus Narr. According to some accounts he was Bajazet's court jester. At all events he seems to have been a contemporary of Tamerlane, and his burial-place is pointed out in Ak-Shehr, the town in which the defeated Ottoman sultan was secluded by his Mongol conqueror after the battle of Angora in 1402. Some writers, however, are incredulous as to his existence in the flesh, at least as the author of the jokes which are current as his, but which probably have been fathered upon him, as many of our own 'merry jests' have been attributed to a possibly humourless Joe Miller.

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For the jokes contained in the jest-book which bears his name are in many cases of a venerable age, being traceable back to a farremoved period of Indian antiquity. This, however, is a statement which may be made about almost every popular jest-book. The wags of one country or century borrow from those of .another, and the same old joke keeps reappearing at intervals, like a revolving light, as the course of time flows on. But of this fact, of course, Nasr-Eddin's Turkish admirers are unconscious, and they are many in number. For the tales told about him, his quips and cranks, his wise saws and his witty repartees, his platitudes and his imbecilities, are all equally dear to the Turkish mind, whether it be highly cultivated or utterly uninstructed, whether it animate the frame of a noble or of a boor. And the work is more intelligible to a Western audience, says its French translator, than are most of the literary productions of the Turks, which are generally full of hyperbolical expressions, and linked comparisons long drawn out, and prolonged periods in which the thread of the argument is lost in a maze of elegant expressions, such as none but lettered Turks can appreciate and admire. There are 125 anecdotes in the book, and they are told in a very curt and plain-spoken manner. Many of them are of the nature of our Gotham stories, or of the skits current among us on Irishmen. Thus, on one occasion, having been told by his wife that coldness in the extremities is a sign of death, and finding his own hands and feet numbed by frost, the Hodja thought he was dead, and lay down at the foot of a tree. Up came wolves and ate up his ass. "It's lucky for you,' cried the

Übersetzt von W. von Camerloher und

• Meister Nasr-Eddin's Schwänke, &c. Dr. W. Prelog. Triest, 1857. Les Plaisanteries de Nasr-Eddin Hodja. Traduites du turc par J. A. Decourdemanche. Paris, 1876.

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prostrate Hodja, that the ass's owner is dead.' One night he shot out of window at what he thought was a robber, but it turned out next morning to be his own caftan hanging up in the garden. Perceiving that an arrow had pierced it, Thanks, O Lord,' he cried, 'that I was not inside it, for otherwise I must have been killed.' Another night, seeing the moon reflected in a well, he thought it had tumbled in, so he lowered a bucket to pull it out. The rope getting entangled, he pulled so hard that he broke it, and fell backwards. When he came to after the shock, he saw that the moon was all right in the sky. God be praised and thanked!' quoth he; I've hurt myself, but at all events the moon is put back in her place.' Another set of anecdotes illustrate the Hodja's cleverness instead of his stupidity. He was twice asked by people who wished to puzzle him what became of the old moons. On one occasion he replied that they were minced into stars, on the other that they were sliced into lightnings. His opinions are shared by many peoples. In the island of Sylt, for instance, it is believed that old maids will be employed in the next world to cut up old moons into stars. A peasant once presented the Hodja with a hare which was turned into soup. Next week the peasant called, and was hospitably treated. A few days later came several neighbours of the man who had given the hare, and they also received a meal. But when some fresh visitors arrived, claiming hospitality on the ground that they were neighbours of the neighbours of the man who had given the hare, all they got from the Hodja was a cup of water apiece, together with the information that it was the sauce of the sauce of the hare.'

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Some of the jokes will be recognised as very old friends, attributed to all manner of alien sources. We find the Hodja, as a preacher, telling one half of his congregation, who said they knew what he was going to tell them, to instruct the other half, who said they did not. We see him, in domestic life, locking up his axe, and explaining to his wife, who always laid the blame on the cat when dainties disappeared, that he was afraid the cat would eat it. And we hear him cry to his pupil in a wolf's hole, who wants to know what is going on, when the wolf is trying to get in, and the Hodja is holding it back by its tail: If the wolf's tail breaks, you'll soon find out.' The well-known story of the one-legged fowl, also, appears under this historical form. The Hodja once cooked a goose, and set off to present it to Tamerlane. But before he reached that monarch he was so hungry that he ate one of its legs. When the fowl was presented, Tamerlane complained of its one-leggedness. All geese are one-legged,' asserted the Hodja, and he pointed to a flock of geese beside a spring, each standing on one leg. Thereupon Tamerlane ordered a drum to be beaten, which startled the geese into bipeds. According to our versions of the story, the Hodja should have told Tamerlane that he ought to have had a drum beaten before the

cooked goose. In the Turkish variant the final repartee is: 'So might you be made to go on all fours-an allusion to the force of the stick, the drum being beaten thereby. A few of the stories are less familiar, turning on points which are peculiar to Mohammedan lands. Here is one, for instance, which is characteristic though not over-exhilarating. Arriving one evening at Sivri-Hissar, just at the moment when the long fast of the Ramazan had expired, and all the world was gazing with rapture at the new moon, which was bringing with it the feast of the Baïram, the Hodja expressed his wonder at the sight. In our town,' quoth he, nobody pays the slightest attention to the moon even when it is as big as a wheel, but here everybody comes out to see it even when it is as thin as a toothpick !'4

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Now let us take a couple of more important Turkish story-books, each of which contains moral tales as well as merry jests, and, on the whole, leaves on the mind of a foreign reader a favourable impression with regard to the character of the people among whom it enjoys a wide popularity. That people did not invent either of them. The stories they contain are not fruits of Turkish fancy. They have merely been borrowed from Indian, Persian, and Arabic sources, and adapted to the meridian of Stamboul. But just as Persian stories passed from Aryan to Semitic lips, and became domiciled in the alien land to which we are indebted for the entertainments of the Arabian Nights, so did the seventy tales told by an Aryan parrot in days long gone by (Sukasaptati), after passing through the hands of a Persian translator (Nakhshebi), become naturalised among the Turks, early in the fifteenth century, under the name of the Parrot Book; and so did those contained in a missing Arabic story-book, probably borrowed from Persian sources, find their way, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, into Turkish literature, and by that means into the minds of the Turkish people, under the name of the Tales of the Forty Viziers.6

Into the history of these books, and of the long wanderings from their original Indian home of the stories they contain, we will not now enter. Readers who are curious on the subject may be referred to the erudite introduction prefixed by Benfey to his translation of the Pantchatantra. It will suffice for our present purpose to select a few of the tales they contain, so as to show what sort of stories are told by Turkish lips, and give pleasure to Turkish ears.

As is usual with Eastern story-books, the tales of the Parrot and ♦ For Indian originals and Western parallels of the Hodja's conceits, see Reinhold Köhler in Orient und Occident, i. 431-448.

Tuti-Nameh. Das Papagaienbuch. Nach der türkischen Bearbeitung zum ersten Male übersetzt von Georg Rosen. Leipzig, 1858.

• Die vierzig Veziere, oder weisen Meister. Zum ersten Male vollständig aus dem Türkischen übertragen und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Dr. W. F. A. Behrnauer. Leipzig, 1851.

of the Forty Viziers are set in a framework which is in each case a species of novelette. By telling its stories, the Parrot delays the surrender of a parleying wife until her husband returns. By their forty apologues, the Viziers shake every morning their monarch's intention to slay his son, against whose life the queen, the prince's stepmother, urges a poisoned story every night. As the Viziers have to contend with the influence of a malignant woman, an oriental Phædra who wishes to destroy the Hippolytus who has repulsed her advances, they naturally tell stories to the disadvantage of women. But the Parrot's tales are generally to their credit, as are many of those which the queen tells in defence of her sex. Here is one of

this class from the former collection:

There was once a youth of evil nature, Mukhtar by name, for whom his parents found a true and loving wife, called Maimune. After a time he bade her leave her native city of Shiraz, and follow him to his father's house in Yezd. On the way the travellers halted one evening beside a well. About midnight Mukhtar arose, flung his wife into the well, and set off home, carrying with him all that had belonged to her. But the Almighty saved Maimune on account of her innocence.' Escaping from the well, she made her way home to Shiraz, where she attributed her state of destitution to an attack by robbers, who had flung her into the well, and had apparently made away with her husband. After which she went on living as before in her father's house. Meanwhile Mukhtar fared ill. His parents died, he ran through their property and that of his wife, and he was at last reduced to beggary. In the course of his wanderings in search of alms, he came to Shiraz, and took up his abode in a cemetery. Thither Maimune chanced to go one day, and there she found her cruel husband in beggar's rags. 'She did not tax him with his crime, but greeted him lovingly, without upbraiding him or even thinking of what had happened. "Do good to him who has done thee harm," says a moral precept, and in accordance with it did she act.' Mukhtar expressed sorrow for what he had done, and begged for pardon. Not only did she grant it, but she took him home, and again entrusted herself to him. After living at Shiraz for a time, he asked her to follow him to Yezd. A second time the husband and wife set out, and again did they pass the night beside the fatal well. And again in the middle of the night did Mukhtar arise, and as his wife lay sleeping he murdered her, and threw her body into the well. And then he took all that had belonged to her, and with it made his way safely to Yezd."

Another story of the same class tells how a kindly woman was married to a miserly man. 'Don't give anything to anybody,' he used constantly to say, but she paid no attention to his words, and was always liberal to the poor. At last he swore that if she ever Parrot-Book, 21st Evening.

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