Yashar Kemal's The Legend of the Thousand Bulls is an epic prose poem about Turcoman nomads and their efforts, against all the odds and local hostility, to find a winter pasture….

It is a strange tale, exotic enough to require the occasional footnote. Stylistically, it belongs in the tradition of Eastern epic and Kemal employs all the devices of that genre. Lengthy descriptive passages, studded with historical, cultural and geographical detail, alternate with brief flurries of action and (as Kemal calls them) "cataracts of old reminiscences".

There is an abundance of epithets for every place and person: "His pointed face was like a fox's, but nasty, shrivelled, cringing, beaten, kneaded by bitter tribulations…". The richness of the language makes for a leisurely pace, punctuated by incantatory prose whose repetitions and bizarre rhythms have the almost hypnotic compulsion of a muezzin's call to prayer.

But the attraction is by...