Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/427

 COLLECTANEA.

The Story of Indra Bangsawan.^

Many years ago, when I was in Singapore, I acquired a certain amount of knowledge of the written Malay language, which is very difiFerent from the lingua franca spoken in godown and bazaar. One or two manuscript volumes of the tales read by the Malays I brought home with me, and quite lately I began to translate one of them, chiefly to revive what I knew of the tongue. It then occurred to me to print my translation, as there is a considerable literature of this sort current in the Malay-speaking countries and very little known to English readers. The people, who are partly our fellow-subjects and partly under the Dutch government, read these stories to this day, tell them from house to house, transcribe them, and so hand them on, and to a certain extent they un- doubtedly believe in them. It may interest scholars to trace the origins and travels of these traditions, to note the alterations that have taken place, the mistakes in transcription, and the probable piecing-together of various separate tales.

Mr. John Crawfurd in his Malay Granwiar, dated 1852, says, " Malay literature, besides the paniuns or riddles already men- tioned, consists of romances in prose and in verse, called by the Sanskrit name of Charitra, or the Arabic one of Hakayat. .... In force, originality, and ingenuity, these compositions are far below the similar production of the Arabians, the Persians, or even of the Hindus. The Dutch grammarian Werndlij, the father of Malayan philology, in his most judicious grammar,^ has a list of some seventy such works, and the catalogue might easily be

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' G. H. Werndlij, Malaische Spraakliiiist, 1736. Later editions 1823, 1826-7.

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