Collaborative editorial project · 2005–2006
New Khmer Folktales
Four inexpensive, illustrated, Khmer-language volumes made for readers in Cambodia and published in Phnom Penh by the Buddhist Institute.
The complete books
Read the four volumes
Each complete volume is available here as a PDF. The images below are pages from inside the books.
The project began as a single academic collection of roughly thirty tales in Khmer and English. Davis chose instead to make the work more directly useful to Cambodian readers: affordable, illustrated books published only in Khmer.
The four resulting volumes organize the stories around judgment, place, tricksters, and gender. They were edited by Davis with Sor Sokny, Tan Bunly, Chor Chanthyda, Hel Rithy, Sok Ra, Phat Chantamonyratha, Hun Chantasocheata, and Som Vanna, and published by the Buddhist Institute in 2005 and 2006.
The work also trained the first cohort of Khmer graduate students to pursue and receive master’s degrees in Cambodia. With Davis and the project’s other co-lead, the students traveled to most of the country’s provinces and collected stories from professional storytellers in each location.
The stories were carefully transcribed, translated, illustrated, and prepared for publication. Working with Javier Sola, the project used Khmer Unicode for work of this kind at a time when the technology was new in Cambodia—what Davis recalls as its first such use in the country, and possibly the first Khmer Unicode publication.
The students went on to many different occupations. Several later earned doctorates and now work in academic settings.