荷马再发现①：口头诗歌与演述(Oral Poetry and Performace)

Rediscovering Homer: Oral Poetry and Performace (Part I)

荷马再发现之一：口头诗歌与演述

Harvard@home

哈佛远程教学项目

【说明】

这是哈佛大学首批推出的远程教育项目之一：荷马再发现(系列讲座①)

视频讲座的两位发言人：

凯瑟·迪欧（Casey Dué）：曾在哈佛大学古典学系攻读博士学位，纳吉教授的弟子和助教；毕业后在休斯敦大学的古典学教研中独当一面。

格雷戈里·纳吉（Gregory Nagy）：哈佛大学弗朗西斯·琼斯杰出教授，国际著名的古典学家、希腊文学专家、口头诗学理论家、印欧语音韵学家。艾伯特·洛德(Albert B. Lord)的弟子，现任哈佛大学希腊研究中心主任。

讲座内容：
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Oral Poetry and Performance

Milman Parry's pathfinding research on Homeric poetry in the 1920's and 1930's revealed that the Homeric poems were not only traditional but oral, composed in and for performance without the use of writing. Parry used comparative study of a living song culture to demonstrate this fundamental principle of Homeric poetry.

In two trips to the former Yugoslavia in 1933-35, Milman Parry and his assistant Albert Lord collected 12,544 songs, stories and conversations from 169 singers of the still flourishing South Slavic epic song tradition. Their unparalleled fieldwork has been matched only by the work of Albert Lord himself, who took additional trips in the 1950s and 1960s. No two of the songs collected are exactly alike, nor do any two of the singers have exactly the same repertoire.

In 1960 Albert Lord published The Singer of Tales, a masterpiece which was the culmination of his decades of fieldwork and research in the study of South Slavic oral poetic traditions. In it he described in detail the training, techniques and practices of an oral poet in that tradition. And even more significantly, he fulfilled the intention of his teacher Milman Parry, who died a tragically early death in 1935 at the very beginning of his careeer, by comparatively applying their work to the poetry of Homer. The Singer of Tales, as Milman Parry's work had begun to do before his death, demonstrated how the system of oral traditional poetry, within which the Homeric poems had been composed, worked.

What Parry and Lord discovered in Homer was the existence of a sophisticated, traditional, economic and above all oral system that enabled great literature to be composed in performance.

Parry and Lord had a star singer named Avdo Mejedovic, who once at Parry's request performed an epic over 12,000 lines in length, which is comparable to the length of the Odyssey.

They showed how a singer, trained in techniques that were centuries if not millennia old, could draw upon a storehouse of traditional language, tales and heroic figures and compose epic poetry on any given occasion.

In addition to the 3500 aluminum disks of recordings of South Slavic heroic songmaking that Parry and Lord collected in the years 1934-35, and the wealth of transcripts, there was also this one short "kino" recording of Avdo Mededovic, whom Parry considered the "most talented" of all the singers he worked with.

Notice how quickly Avdo moves from line to line. His song is not memorized. He is composing it as he performs, using traditional techniques.

The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature is the largest single repository of South Slavic heroic song in the world. It is currently currently housed in Widener Library at Harvard University. Visit their website to learn more about the history of the Collection and the work of Parry and Lord.

For more about the composition and performance of Homeric Poetry (as understood by a study of the Soyuth Slavic epic tradition), visit "Performance and Performer: The Role of Tradition in Oral Epic Song." It contains video clips excerpted from two lectures given by Professor Albert B. Lord.