Reviews

This page gathers information about responses to Dr. Kapchits’s books and about the work of colleagues connected with his research. Copyright in these reviews and articles belongs to their authors and publishers, so the full texts are not reproduced here: each item is given with its bibliographic details and a summary of its contents. Short quotations appear in quotation marks with the author named.

Reviews of the books

B. W. Andrzejewski

Review of: G. L. Kapchits. Somali Proverbs and Sayings in Somali and Russian with Russian Equivalents. Moscow: Nauka, 1983. 283 pp. Published in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. XLIX, Part 2, 1986, pp. 420–422.

The doyen of Somali studies judged the Moscow edition first of all by its scale: a corpus of more than a thousand items, which he called the largest ever published — “Kapchits’s collection, which contains over a thousand items, is the largest ever published” (B. W. Andrzejewski). The reviewer dwells on the scholarly side of the work: its critical treatment of the existing documentation, its discernment in handling oral sources, and the author’s ability to enlist the cooperation of many Somalis, among them genuine connoisseurs of their own folklore who helped with difficult points of interpretation and with cultural background. He singles out the accuracy of the Russian translations, which carefully preserve the imagery of the originals, together with the apparatus that supports them — the annotations and the glossary of Somali terms and proper names in the appendices. The one significant omission from the survey of earlier publications, and an unavoidable one, is the collection by Maxamed Shire Maxamed, dated 1974 but, as far as the reviewer could establish, available in Somali bookshops only in 1983.

The substantive criticisms are few. The note on Khadar is judged too short to be of any use to the reader: it would have been worth explaining the miraculous powers that popular belief attributes to him, allowing him to come to the rescue even in hopeless situations. Andrzejewski also questions the note in which the Somali xalaal and xaraam are equated with the Russian terms for food permitted and forbidden during Lent: the rules of conduct differ between Muslims and Christians, and the equation produces what he calls a semantic short circuit. He rates highly the analytical second part of the book, where Kapchits applies G. L. Permyakov’s structuralist paremiology to the Somali material: the framework brings order into what would otherwise remain a shapeless mass of isolated items and can serve as a heuristic device in the search for further material. The book is useful to linguists as well, since it attests archaic grammatical forms that exclude focus indicators in declarative sentences — such forms account for 7 per cent of the corpus. The review closes with the wish for an English edition, since most scholars in the field do not read Russian.

Aliqeyr M. Nur, Oslo

“The Best Book on Somali Proverbs” — on: Soomaali been ma maahmaahdo / Somalis do not lie in proverbs. Ponte Invisible, 2012. Dated 20 August 2012, Oslo, Norway.

The reviewer opens from a distance, with the thought that a nation losing its command of the word loses its civilization. The Somalis, whom Richard Burton called a nation of poets, are generously endowed with language, yet over the past few decades the Somali language and its oral literature have drifted to the margins of public attention; where the proverbial heritage is concerned, the reviewer credits the Russian scholar Georgi Kapchits with reversing that trend. A portrait of the author follows: teaching Somali language and folklore at Moscow State University and at several European universities, twenty-five years as announcer and translator in the Somali section of Moscow Radio, and, at their first meeting in Oslo in 2008, a native-like pronunciation and a speech studded with proverbs.

As for the book itself, it is described as bilingual (Somali–English) and addressed to Somali and non-Somali readers alike. In the introduction the author answers questions about the nature of the proverb, about how a proverb’s truth is to be understood, about what makes the proverbial stocks of different nations alike and what sets them apart, and about the types into which Somali proverbs fall. The first section presents 249 of the most popular proverbs and sayings, selected by a special experiment; the second offers four thousand proverbs of various types. The reviewer’s only complaint is the small font size, which nonetheless keeps the book pocket-sized and handy. His verdict: “the book of the year in regard to those written in Somali” (Aliqeyr M. Nur).

Cabdiraxmaan Faarax “Barwaaqo”

Review in Somali of: Faaliyihii la bilkeyday: Sheekaxariirooyin Soomaaliyeed / A Soothsayer Tested: Somali Folktales. Compiled and translated by G. L. Kapchits. The Way publishers, Moscow, 2006.

The reviewer recalls a conversation with Kapchits in Ottawa, in which the scholar said that young Somalis should be left something they can inherit — and, on seeing the book, concluded that this had been no empty phrase. The collection’s chief innovation, in “Barwaaqo”’s view, is that Somali narrative prose, until then an undifferentiated mass, has for the first time been sorted into genres: mythological tales (7), animal tales (17), novellistic tales (16) and didactic tales (75). One tale receives extended treatment — “Isha Cumar ka lulata”, known to some listeners as “Isha Cali ka laallaadda”: it underlies Xuseen Dhiqle’s famous poem about the lion’s share, and the reviewer quotes the poem in full.

From the same tale “Barwaaqo” draws an unexpected linguistic observation: the way the fox divides the spoils preserves an archaic vocabulary of fractions — badh, waax, falladh, rimic, miil, that is 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and 1/32 — and many people today have no idea that Somalis knew such measures. Turning to the fourth and largest section, he stops at the tale “Gari Ilaah bay taqaan” (“Justice knows only God”) as a parable of impartial judgement, the very thing the Somali lands now lack. His conclusion is that the book is shared by children and elders alike, and that the English translation, contrary to the adage about what is lost in translation, has kept the wisdom of the tales intact: “Waa buug mudan abaal marin” — a book deserving an award (Cabdiraxmaan Faarax “Barwaaqo”) — and one he would like to see added to the school curriculum.

Maxamed Xasan “Alto”

Article in Somali on the Somali Week Festival 2011 in London and Dr. Kapchits’s participation in it. The festival ran from 22 to 30 October 2011 at Oxford House, Bethnal Green, London; the theme of that year was literary translation.

The author describes the 2011 festival as the strongest in the London series begun in 2004: the theme was literary translation, a large number of translated books were presented, and the festival worked together with the Poetry Translation Centre and its director, the poet Sarah Maguire, which prepared translations of selected poems by the invited poets. Among the guests who came from Africa, North America and Europe, “Alto” singles out Dr. Kapchits — an expert in Somali culture, folktales, proverbs and grammar, who has given more than forty years to the Somali language and worked for many years in the Somali section of Moscow Radio: “Waa ruugcaddaa looga dambeeyo afka, dhaqanka iyo hiddaha Soomaalida” — on matters of Somali language, culture and tradition he is the final authority (Maxamed Xasan “Alto”).

On the Sunday evening Kapchits read from his own writings and spoke about the wisdom, imagery and beauty of the Somali language — about the density, the allegory and the figurative texture of proverbs, sayings and folktales — and, in the author’s account, the audience received the lecture warmly. At the closing event on 30 October he addressed the gathering with an appeal to preserve the Somali language and to teach it to children growing up abroad, thanked the organisers, and ended by speaking of the peace the Somalis lack, citing proverbs about concord among brothers.

Work by colleagues

A. K. Zholkovsky. “The Somali Tale ‘A Soothsayer Tested’”

A condensed English version of the article published in Russian in the journal Narody Azii i Afriki, No. 1. Moscow, 1970.

This is not a review but a scholarly article by Dr. Kapchits’s teacher, devoted to the very tale that gave its title to the 2006 collection Faaliyihii la bilkeyday. Zholkovsky sets the tale apart from the rest of Somali folk prose for its philosophical content and finished form: the narration is interrupted three times by ‘acts’ in verse, which places it midway between poetry and the ordinary folktale. On pain of death a soothsayer must foretell the fate of his tribe; three times a serpent helps him, and three times he treats the serpent in a manner matching what has been predicted — in wartime he raises his sword, in the drought he withholds the promised share, in the year of plenty he brings everything he owns. In the closing monologue the serpent explains that this is not a matter of character: a person’s life echoes the structure of the world.

The analysis proceeds by the method of ‘generative poetics’: the theme is formulated as “revelation: life resembles the structure of the world” (A. Zholkovsky), and the article then shows step by step how the compositional decisions follow from it — the devices of simile and contrastive variation, the anti-theme of a formless, meaningless life, the splitting of the plot into a framing and a framed story, the motifs of contract, order and reward, and finally the sudden turn that makes the closing pronouncement not a moral tacked on to the tale but its denouement.

A. G. Belova. Report on the conference “5000 Years of Semito-Hamitic Languages in Asia and Africa”

Journal Vostok (Oriens), 2011, No. 1, pp. 137–142.

A survey of the international conference held on 22–24 July 2010 at the Free University of Berlin. Dr. Kapchits’s paper on the dialectal division of Somali is mentioned on p. 141 — an independent confirmation of his participation.

See also: Articles, Monographs.