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We are pleased to present the English translation of a short story written in Balochi, together with an introduction to the life and work of the author. We also include the Balochi text of the story in Latin and Arabic script. It is our hope that this story will be a wake-up call to many who want to see change in Balochistan, but are reluctant to sacrifice their own comfort to help bring about that change.

We are pleased to present the English translation of a short story written in Balochi, Beyond the Wall, together with an introduction to the life and work of the author, Danish Dagh. We also include the Balochi text of the story in Latin and Arabic script. It is our hope that this story will challenge its readers to refrain from judging other people and to begin questioning things they may have believed without ever considering whether they are right or wrong, to start thinking in new terms, to “go beyond the wall”. We also wish to extend our thanks to Carina Jahani, Uppsala University, for putting us in touch with the author and giving us valuable suggestions on our draft translation, as well as for writing the author introduction.

Balochi is spoken in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, the Gulf States, Turkmenistan, India and East Africa by at least 10 million people. Balochi is not an official language in any of these countries. Some attention was given to Balochi in British India during colonial times, and there has also been more of a movement to read and write Balochi in Pakistan than in Iran, where any use of regional languages in written form has been a suspect activity ever since the days of the Pahlavi monarchy. For this reason, as well as because of the lower level of education in Pakistan than in Iran, Balochi has remained stronger in Pakistan than in Iran. In today’s Iran, many Baloch parents speak Persian rather than Balochi to their children. The purpose of this article is to discuss the status and vitality of Balochi, mainly in Iran and Pakistan, and to describe the desire to preserve and promote Balochi among its speakers. Balochi as a language with a long oral literary tradition, as well as recent attempts towards developing a standard written language will also be addressed.

This volume presents papers demonstrating the current state of research on oral traditions among different groups in the Iranian-speaking cultural sphere. The articles offer from a variety of perspectives, encouraging the exchange of ideas between different academic disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literature, religious studies and folklore studies concerning methods and models applied to studies of oral traditions in Iranian languages and cultures.

This article describes strategies for clause-combining in oral and written Balochi narratives in three different types of texts: purely oral texts which have not been edited before publication (O-texts), written texts based on oral counterparts (OW-texts), and purely written texts (W-texts). Two texts in each type were selected and analysed.

The issue of syntactic complexity in the three types of texts was viewed from the perspective of coordination and subordination. The six texts in this study indicate that both oral and written narrations in Balochi are complex, although in different ways. The O-texts are made up of longer sentences than the OW- and W-texts. The volume of direct speech in the texts is also significantly different between the O- and OW-texts, where direct speech is frequent, and the W-texts, where it is rather infrequent. As for the conjoining of coordinate clauses, the oral texts and the written texts show opposite preferences. While conjoining with a conjunction is the preferred strategy in the OW- and W-texts, the O-texts prefer conjoining by juxtaposition. Subordination is more complex in the W-texts than in the OWtexts, which in turn are more complex than the O-texts.

Based on the results of our analysis, we do not describe the difference between oral and written narrative texts as a binary opposition but rather as a continuum with spontaneous oral narratives being at one end and written narratives at the other end. Written texts based on oral narrations share some characteristics with both forms and lie between the two ends of the continuum.

Today we are accustomed to thinking of the Bible as a single entity, i.e. as ‘the Bible’, a well-defined corpus containing a set number of books. In late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, however, the situation was much more fluid. This fluidity showed itself not only in the fact that parts of the Bible would often circulate independently, but also in that Bible texts were often known in vernacular languages both in direct translations, but also in interlinear glosses and poetic paraphrases. It is in this context that the Unified Gospel is to be seen. Unifications of the gospel texts are often called Diatessaron (through the four), and, although this name has not been used for the Persian text presented in this book, it can still be seen as belonging to the Diatessaron tradition.

The Unified Gospel presented here was compiled in Persian by a certain Armenian who calls himself Yahyā Ibn Ayvaz-e Tabrīzī-ye Armanī. The actual time of the compilation cannot be determined from the existing manuscripts. The main manuscript for this edition is kept in the National Library and Archives of Iran. It was finalized on 9 Rajab 1111 A.H. (corresponding to 31 Dec. 1699) by a scribe named Khusraw, son of Bahrām. Other manuscripts, which are introduced in detail in the Persian introduction, have also been taken into account in this edition. In addition to the actual Gospel texts, there are numerous exegetical comments by the compiler, which are of great value for a deeper understanding of how the text was interpreted in former times. The language also shows certain archaic features, both in the vocabulary and the syntax, which indicate that the original work most likely dates to pre-Safavid times.

It is not entirely clear for whom this Unified Gospel in Persian was produced. The compiler finds that the people of his time had turned away from God and instead sought worldly affairs, spending their time reading stories and poems full of deceit and darkness instead of reading the Gospel. The Gospel was not available to them in Persian, a language of which they had better knowledge than the languages into which the Gospels had already been translated. This was the reason why the compiler/translator undertook the work which resulted in the present manuscript, which is particularly valuable due to the large number of comments to the Bible text added by the compiler.