This is an interesting one: a piece of oral poetry, transcribed from a performance by a griot*, Nouhou Malio, in Niger. To quote the introduction: The Epic of Askia Mohammed recounts the life of the most famous ruler of the Songhay empire, a man who reigned in Gao, an old city in present-day eastern Mali, from […]
Posts tagged with ‘oral poetry’
How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee
2 September 2011 – 11:54 am
For those of you who don’t know, Stewart Lee is a stand-up comedian. This book is built around the transcripts of three of his shows, each heavily footnoted with his own technical comments: why he thinks things are funny, notes on delivery, where jokes came from, his comedic influences and so on. Preceding each transcript […]
God’s cock and hen
25 July 2006 – 9:40 am
I woke up this morning to see something fluttering against the inside of the window-panes. Without my glasses, I couldn’t think what it was – it seemed too big for a moth and too small and whirring for a bird. It turned out to be a wren. They’re such nice things, but they are slightly […]
Haida oral poetry – talk at RFH
29 October 2004 – 2:49 am
I went today to a talk with Margaret Atwood and Robert Bringhurst about his translations of Haida oral literature. ‘Oral literature’ is technically an oxymoron, I guess. The Haida, btw, were a Native American people living on islands in the Pacific Northwest – off the coast of what’s now British Columbia. The subject matter itself […]