الغناء والشعر عند الشعوب البدائية

by Cecil Maurice Bowra, يوسف شلبي الشام (مترجم)

Sir Maurice Bowra, the famous author of The Greek Experience, examines the songs of the surviving counterparts of paleolithic man. He uncovers exciting new territory as he traces the beginnings of literature in extant primitive song...the dawn of the creative power that made the transfer of experience, and thus civilization, possible.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology

306 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1992

About the author

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

Reviews

[Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this book didn't live up to my expectations. I was hoping Maurice Bowra, whose books on ancient Greek literature are excellent, would somehow have penetrated into the origins of the human impulse for poetry and song. Instead, "Primitive Song" is basically a summary of how a handful of surviving hunter-gatherer societies in different parts of the world use music and song.

Bowra's method here is similar to that of James G. Frazer in The Golden Bough: he is an armchair anthropologist or musicologist, collecting and sorting the work that others have gathered from the field. There are definitely objections that could be raised to the validity of this type of analysis, as I'm sure both men are missing nuances and contexts that a direct observer would pick up that are not apparent on the printed page. But it can be useful to have a non-specialist try to digest and synthesize a vast quantity of material to look for broader conclusions. With all that said, based on the 3 of 12 volumes I have read so far in The Golden Bough, I find Frazer's conclusions more compelling than Bowra's.

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

fascinating to see that some of my own poems have begun to resemble these very songs from so long ago; something something language as a universal and ever-recursive snake

[Thom Dunn]

The cover shown here would not be inconsistent with my edition, but it nowhere appears on it. "A Fearful Joy" ??