Abstract
The Story of Arzu and Kamber, one of the folk tales told from the Balkans to Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan, especially in Anatolia and Iraq, has many variants compiled from both manuscripts and oral tradition. New variants of this story continue to be published by researchers. In this article, a variant that collected by us from Dudu Özdamar that is living in Şambayadı neighbourhood of district of Adana, has been discussed. According to the source, who said that she learned this story from her aunt Sultan İşbilir, in Şambayadı that is the research field, there are two places where many other oral narrative products such as stories, folktales, folk songs were told in the past. While the first of these was the houses they lived in, the other place of narration was the fields. However, until today, widespread use of radio and television, the decrease in manpower in agriculture, the decrease in the number of narrators etc. these products are not told in the two performance places. The story that has been collected in July 2004 using a voice recorder in the grocery store where the oral source was working at that time, as it is known, verse-prose consists of a mixed form. The oral source, who says that the parts of poetry in this story, which consists of a mixture of verse and prose, were sung melodiously in the performance venues of the past years, during the collection, these parts of the poems were not sung melodiously due to her old age and the death of her husband. The naming of the text is based on the name of the narrator. It is thought that the variant naming method, which is made only with the name of the city (such as the Bayburt Variant of Arzu ile Kamber Story) in the collection publications of the texts until today, will cause incompleteness or confusion in many respects. Because the city where the narrator of a text was born, grew up, lived or even collected may be different. For these reasons, a naming based on the name of the narrator would be more appropriate when naming a text. Some studies have been carried out in Turkey about the episodes and motifs of the Story of Arzu and Kamber. To avoid repetition, these structural features have not been examined. In the article, apart from the text of the variant in question, introductory information about the variant and the plot of the narrative are summarized. While giving the plot, some evaluations were made about the place and importance of some issues in the story in the Turkish narrative tradition in the way that adoption of the hero, the heroes' mistaking each other as their own whole sister/brother, falling in love with each other, leaving and returning the home of the hero and can't come together and death of heroes. The folk tale text given in the appendix of the article transcribed by adhering to narration style of storyteller and language characteristics of the collection region, in other words, no changes or corrections have been made on the text. As a matter of course, this method will make it difficult to understand some words and phrases in the text. Therefore, while transcribing the text, some explanations according to certain criteria were added to some parts of the text and it is aimed to make the text more understandable.