Original title: Indian Tales
Author: Jaime de Angulo
Number of pages: 268
Published: in 1994
Price: EUR 6 (order now)

Review

The book Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo was created as a result of De Angulo's ethnological work with Californian Indians. While studying their folklore, he came up to a great, though a so simple idea (all great ideas are always so simple and common, but people discover them only at the moment of revelation) to translate the Indian beliefs, their lore, incorporated in their folk tales, into a book of tales...

The Indian Tales as a literary work is distinguished by the ease of the style. The story-telling rhythmics, which has been sucessfully rendered by the translator, leads us often into the area of poetic prose. This confirms that the author has successfully rendered the Indian Tales in their original form, though we must be always aware of their literalization.

The poetic quality of the narration achieved by Jaime de Angulo, reminds us, in many aspects, of the poetic quality of Serbian folk tales. The rhythmics, the freshness of the language, various onomatopeic forms...

The Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo is a book for children that would be precious for the literature of any nation, including Serbian literature as well. Therefore, we should point out the translating effort of Marijan Franjic, who has presented us this work, for Jaime de Angulo presented it to all children of the world, but only by his translation Mr. Franjic has brought this present to us.

Literary critic,
Đorđe J. Janić
Belgrade, 1994.