Arabic Folk Epic and Western Chanson de Geste

Abstract

In the year 1892, Lady Anne Blunt published her translation of one portion of the Arabic popular romance, the S?rat Ban? Hil?. She called it The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare. Lady Blunt, and her husband, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, were Romantics. The latter once wrote, "to cast off the slough of Europe, to have done with ugliness and noise, to bathe one's sick Western soul in the pure healing of the East. The mere act of passing from one's graceless London clothes into the white draperies of Arabia is a new birth."