Distributed Proofreaders is proud to have contributed Project Gutenberg’s 75,000th title, Folk Tales from Tibet, collected and translated by Captain W.F. O’Connor, and published in 1906.
Captain (later Sir William) O’Connor was an Irish diplomat and British army officer who served from the 1890s until his retirement in 1925. He spent many years on military missions in India, Tibet, and other South Asian countries, as well as Iran and Siberia, and was even a captive of the Persian army for a time. He was first posted to Tibet in 1903 as part of the Younghusband Expedition, which was essentially a military invasion designed to prevent the Dalai Lama from allying Tibet with Russia.
In his preface, O’Connor doesn’t mention this invasion, recounting only that he spent two years in Tibet, where he “made many friends amongst all classes of Tibetans – high and low, rich and poor” from whom he “learned that there exists amongst this fascinating and little-known people a wealth of folk-lore, hitherto inaccessible to the outside world.” He included 22 stories in Folk Tales from Tibet, and did his best to include only those that he believed were genuinely Tibetan, rather than those that had been “imported bodily” from Indian or Chinese sources.
The stories are filled with folk wisdom very similar to that in Western stories, serving as cautionary tales about hubris, foolhardiness, greed, and other human foibles. Many of the stories feature anthropomorphized animals, as is common in folklore the world over. In one, “How the Hare Got His Lip Split,” a wily hare plays a series of nasty tricks on a tiger, a man and his horses, some ravens, and a shepherd boy and his sheep. Among the human characters are a quarreling king and queen, a set of thieves, an old Lama and his servant, and a deformed boy. O’Connor tantalizingly notes in the preface that “some of the very best and most characteristic stories are unfit for publication in such a book as this,” leading one to wonder if there might have been an Arabian Nights quality to them. (He does assure the reader that he has separately preserved omitted stories that “possess any scientific interest.”)
The collection’s subtitle notes that it includes “illustrations by a Tibetan artist and some verses from Tibetan love-songs.” The Tibetan artist is not named, but his or her artwork is richly colored and quite striking, despite O’Connor’s misgivings that the illustrations are “somewhat weak in details” because he was “unable personally to superintend their execution.” But O’Connor does not spare himself; he modestly apologizes for the “crudeness and lack of artistic finish” of his translations of the love songs, which are rendered in a very English rhyme-scheme.
Congratulations to the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg who made this 75,000th Project Gutenberg title possible!
This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.