Page:Turkish fairy tales and folk tales (1901).djvu/11

 play of fancy, compared with which the imagery of the most popular fairy tales of the West seem almost prosaically jejune, and if, as Professor Vámbery suggests, these Népmések provide the sort of entertainment which beguiles the leisure of the Turkish ladies while they sip their mocha and whiff their fragrant narghilies, we cannot but admire the poetical taste and nice discrimination, in this respect, of the harem and the seraglio.

I have Englished these tales from the first Hungarian edition, so that this version is, perhaps, open to the objection of being a translation of a translation. Inasmuch, however, as I have followed my text very closely, and having regard to the fact that Hungarian and Turkish are closely cognate dialects (in point of grammatical construction they are practically identical), I do not think they will be found to have lost so very much of their original fragrance and flavour.

I have supplemented these purely Turkish with four semi-Turkish tales translated from the original Roumanian of Ispirescu's ''Legende sau Basmele Românilorǔ''?F1: yes]. Bucharest, 1892. This collection, which I commend to the notice of the Folk-Lore Society, is very curious and original, abounding as it