This week I chose to read Turkish
Fairy Tales. I have not read a lot of
fairy tales other than the American one’s I was brought up with as a
child. I did not know what to expect
when reading a different culture’s fairy tales.
The names of the fairy tales grabbed my attention in an unexpected
way. A few of the stories in this unit
were; The Wizard-Dervish, The Soothsayer, The Liver, and Kunterbunt. None of these names make me think of fairy
tales! I was interested to see what the
stories told and how their names related.
Upon reading the fairy tales, I was easily intrigued. A couple of the stories had a part one and a
part two to read through. The beginning of
each story was always interesting and grabbed my attention. However when I read through part two of the
stories I could not make the connection as easy. I had re-read a couple of the part twos. The stories that were just one part seemed to
make more sense as I read them. Also,
the vocabulary and the sentence structure was a little hard to follow. There were a lot of native terms that I was
unfamiliar with. However, it helped that
there were notes included that described what a Dervish or a tscharschi
was. I overall enjoyed the unit and
would not think their needed to be more or less notes added to the reading. The Turkish Fairy Tales were different than
American Fairy Tales and I enjoyed learning a little bit about the Turkish
culture. I also thought it was
interesting how in the story I wrote about, The Liver, the kiss to the peasant
was portrayed differently than other fairy tales. Usually a peasant kissing a man would be the
main plot and highly dramatized in any story.
In The Liver it was small detail behind the mothers desire for a liver
to eat and the daughters journey in retrieving that liver. This was the most interesting view I found
out of the readings!
Hey Cobi! Since I have already commented on your introduction I got to pick another post by you so I chose to see what your thoughts were on the Turkish fairy tales. It's interesting that you found that the kiss in the Turkish tales was far less important than what it is normally made out to be in any American story - fairy tale or hollywood movie! I wander if there is any particular reason for that. Maybe the Turks value moral lessons over romantics?
ReplyDeleteCobi, I really commend you for going outside of the box and taking a chance on stories with strange names like Liver and Kunterbunt. They are definitely strange to say the least. Some of these stories that we are reading definitely can be a bit challenging from time to time, I myself have also struggled and had to re-read some parts of stories. However, I am glad that you enjoyed them overall. Way to stick with it. I can't wait to see what stories you have next. Keep up the good work!
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