"A folklorist needs to respect the story teller, the words of the story teller, and the context of the performance. In recording, transcribing, translating, and presenting the tales, we need to do the same. It is, in fact, an ethical question." - Joseph L. Mbele

Translating stories from Matengo into English was only part of the problem. To write his book Matengo Folktales, Joseph Mbele also had to grapple with making a text out of an oral tradition. A story is never told the same way twice, he says, but on a printed page, the words and their order are permanently set. A folklorist like Mbele must decide whether to describe a storyteller's performance, complete with voices and gestures, mimicry and drama, or to write only the words, as close to verbatim as translation allows.

Mbele was born 50 years ago in Lituru, a farming village in southwestern Tanzania settled by the Matengo people, of Bantu origin, around 1850. He now lives in Minnesota and teaches folklore to American students at St. Olaf College. With an almost missionary zeal, he kindles in others the interest in oral literature he developed when he was a college student. During the 1970s, Mbele made tape recordings of traditional Matengo stories, as told to him by his father, his late brother, a group of school girls, and a woman who lived next door. The characters in these stories were usually animals riddled with human foibles and virtues, like the trickster who cheats the cheater, the hero who rescues the weak, and the monster who captures children in rice fields and carries them away. After tape recording the stories, Mbele translated them into English as Matengo Folktales, published in 1999.

As he worked to preserve the essence of each story, Mbele became concerned with the challenges of turning a performance into a written text. A good storyteller, he says, improvises by adding new lines or omitting traditional ones, depending on the inspiration of the moment and the response of the audience. If the listeners appear to be tired, for example, the storyteller may shorten the story or emphasize an especially entertaining part, such as a song or a battle.

If the storyteller growled to portray a lion, or stretched her arms and curled her fingers into claws, should the writer describe those gestures? Or should he leave all of the non-verbal entertainment to the reader's imagination?

Mbele decided to record only the words actually said by the storyteller, but within the context of a larger tradition. In Tanzania, he says, the storyteller and the audience share an aesthetic grammar, a set of understandings and expectations about each story. The essential elements of this grammar must be included in the written text. The text can then serve as the foundation for the story, like the script of a play or the figured bass line in a piece of Baroque music, and the storyteller can build freely upon it.

Sometimes, improvisation has no direct relationship to either the words or the action, Mbele says. When his father was telling a story, for example, he might leave the room at a point of climax.

"He would walk out and get his tobacco in the other room, come back in and wrap his tobacco. All this time, he is silent, while the people are dying to hear what happens next." Such events may be recorded as footnotes in the written text, although Mbele chose not to include such footnotes in Matengo Tales.

Mbele says his methods as a folklorist are still evolving, but at this time, he follows two separate sets of rules. Once a story has been written, he says, the only proper way to quote it in writing is verbatim. Not a word may be changed. But if the written story is used as the basis for oral storytelling, then the storyteller is encouraged - even required - to tell the story spontaneously. The words should not be memorized, and the story definitely should not be read.

"The performance of a story should always be structured to please a particular audience," he says. "The best storytellers use the grammar of their art, which they share with the audience, and they try to excel within the tradition."