A few years ago I posted about a book available from Open Book Publishers, but I had no idea how wide a net they cast or how many interesting fish they caught. Now Owlmirror has started posting links to two particularly attractive sections of the site: Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures (see Owlmirror’s recommendations here) and World Oral Literature Series (here). All pdf’s are free (though you have to pay for physical books), and David Eddyshaw has already downloaded Oral Literature in Africa. Enjoy!
Addendum. Today I found in the mailbox an Amazon package with 50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories
I’m finding a lot of good stuff in Oral Literature in Africa.
The chapter on proverbs is particularly interesting. Among much else, it flags up the fact that proverbs in Africa can be very allusive and nigh-on incomprehensible if you don’t know the context: you can understand all the words and still have no idea what they mean. (Unfortunately a lot of collections of African proverbs omit this vital information. It’s very frustrating.)
One I do understand in Kusaal, but only because someone actually told me, is
Ku’om zɔtnɛ bian’ar zug. “Water runs on mud.”
which actually means “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Finnegan makes the highly plausible suggestion that the vagueness and opacity of sayings like this is actually part of their usefulness: you can get your point across without being too blatant about it, so nobody has to feel offended. “It’s just an observation, guv …”
A lot of interesting material on the various ways different African cultures actually use proverbs in practice.
Very interesting chapter on drumming, also explaining why it does indeed belong in an account of oral literature. (The drummer clan are the traditional genealogists and historians of the Dagomba, which makes perfect sense once you know. The Dagomba traditions are more extensive and reliable than those of the Mamprussi, despite the fact that the Mamprussi kingdom is the senior, because the Dagomba drummers are better organised.)
I also liked the long rant at the beginning of Chapter 12 about Western exoticising and misinterpretation of African oral prose genres.
The references to Azande culture make it sound horrible. Obsessed with status and performance, continually on the watch for rivals seeking to undermine you. As bad as academia.
The Zande term sanza means both proverb and spite (or jealousy) and, in addition, refers to the whole range of circumlocutory expression in which there is a hidden as well as a manifest meaning, usually malicious.
The Azande have many proverbs […]
Mind you, the references seem all to be to Evans-Pritchard’s classic works from the 1960’s. Perhaps they’ve got better since …
That bit about, “circumlocutory expression in which there is a hidden as well as a manifest meaning, usually malicious,” actually makes a fair amount of sense. Many Azande believed (at the time of Evans-Pritchard’s fieldwork), that it was possible to place a hex on someone else just by speaking too negatively of them. So there were cultural taboos against direct verbal attacks on anyone other than dire enemies.
By the way, I love the sound of the word “circumlocutory.”
Why is there a History of the Book section, with only six books? (One of them is
In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917), so it must be of interest to someone.)
It would be great to have that anthology in Russian, but I haven’t found anything similar. Is the Anglo-Saxon world better at anthologizing than other cultures? I have also had difficulty finding decent anthologies of short stories or modern poetry in German, other than Reich-Ranicki approved collections.
Are there no German, French or Russian equivalents of Penguin anthologies?
@Vanya: I just commented to a friend yesterday about the use of “Anglo-Saxon” to mean “English-speaking”:
The context was my friend pointing out that “Saxon” has a history of use by racists to mean something roughly equivalent to “white.” I think it was somewhat advantageous for them that no listener would have expected all whites to be literally of Saxon descent; the term is merely suggestive, perhaps even metaphorical. So a racist speaker or listener had some freedom to draw the line between ethnic in-group and out-group wherever exactly they found it convenient. It occurs to me that this imprecision over who is white enough to be encompassed is shared between the old endonym “Saxon” and the more current exonym “Anglo.” Depending on the context, I who have no British or Protestant blood, might or might bridle at being lumped in with the “Anglos.”
@vanya
Have you tried reclam Verlag? Their site search is not perfect (and the production and typography is sometimes basic) but here is a title from amazon:
https://www.amazon.de/Russische-Erz%C3%A4hlungen-Puschkin-Pelewin-Taschenbuch/dp/3150202043
I have also seen these sort of books from Fischer klassik or Suhrkamp Insel. …
It occurs to me that this imprecision over who is white enough to be encompassed is shared between the old endonym “Saxon” and the more current exonym “Anglo”
The English are merely “Saxons” in Welsh and Gaelic: Saeson, Sasannaich (though I believe that the latter was originally applied to lowland Scots too, as opposed to Albanaigh, the true people of Albion.)
The Guns of Navaronne
One -n-, and I automatically associate that title with the Skatalites (though I think I did see the movie long ago).
In New Mexico, Anglo is both an exonym and an endonym, and includes everyone who is neither Native or Hispanic.
Bacha posh in Afghanistan: factors associated with raising a girl as a boy
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2019.1616113
Just thought I’d point out that two of the books previously listed as “Forthcoming” at the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures page are now available:
Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic (Khan and Noorlander)
Jewish-Muslim Intellectual History Entangled: Textual Materials from the Firkovitch Collection, Saint Petersburg (Adang, et al)
Still forthcoming:
Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE.
Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (eds)
A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic
Esther-Miriam Wagner (ed.)
Hexapla Hebrew
Benjamin Kantor
I thought I had posted about the Hexapla, but apparently not; it’s been mentioned in comments several times, e.g. in 2005, 2006, and 2017 (DE: “Similarly, the Hebrew transcriptions in Origen’s Hexapla use the Greek consonants just like the LXX, including φ θ χ for unequivocal stops, which by then must surely have been out of step with contemporary Greek”).
@Vanya: I have also had difficulty finding decent anthologies of short stories or modern poetry in German, other than Reich-Ranicki approved collections.
No good reason to deprecate RR. He put his money where his mouth is, whereas other lit crits tend to do the opposite.
I recently had the devil of a time locating a complete 5-paperback box set of Deutsche Erzählungen des 20. Jahrhunderts by RR as editor. I finally found and ordered one (new) at Augusta Antiquariat for 36 Euros. Mostly the boxes have been broken up into single volumes. I’ve had one volume for decades.
As PlasticP wrote, you should check out reclam, Fischer …. for the newer anthologies. Otherwise, the times being what they are, you must have recourse to used book seller brokers such as ZVAB dot com. Where I just now found the set for 40 Euros.
In the time since I wrote the comment of January 31, 2021 at 6:19 am, two more of the formerly forthcoming books in the Semitic Language series have become available:
A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic
Esther-Miriam Wagner (ed.)
Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE
Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (eds)
The list of forthcoming books has been expanded:
The Neo-Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho
Oz Aloni
Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew
Nick Posegay
Hexapla Hebrew
Benjamin Kantor
I wondered if Kantor had perhaps published anything else relating to the Hexapla. Kantor’s academia.edu page is not hard to find, and his doctoral dissertation is in fact:
The Second Column (Secunda) of Origen’s Hexapla in Light of Greek Pronunciation
As those who are familiar with the Hexapla already know, the second column is the Hebrew transliterated into Greek characters.
I am amused to see that the wiki article on the Hexapla is itself an instance of scholarly polyglottism and transliteration gone awry, referring at one point to Origen’s “condemnation by Epiphany of Cyprus and Vikentiy Lirinsky.” Okay, Ephiphany for Ephiphanius (or -os) isn’t a big deal, but who’s the Slavic fellow? Turns out to be the Russified-and-then-back-transliterated monicker of Sanctus Vincentius Lerinensis/Lirinensus (“St. Vincent of Lerins” to us Anglophones, although our name for him is I suppose just as anachronistic as the Russian one).
Yes, and Henri Crouzel > A. Cruzel.
It was user Jairon Levid Abimael Caál Orozco, who, in the dreary morning (or maybe sunny evening, depending on the part of the world where you were) of 22 October 2017 translated this from Russian Wikipedia: Scholary work by Origen and its methods
According to A. Cruzel (1992), Origen never tried to “determine” his theological thought and was completely dependent on the biblical text, which he followed in his comments step by step, so his own theology was a matter of exegete. The basis of his exegetical activity was the deepest conviction that the whole Bible contains meanings besides direct reading, which was the basis for his condemnation by Epiphany of Cyprus and Vikentiy Lirinsky
The Russian book (Саврей Валерий Яковлевич, Александрийская школа в истории философско-богословской мысли, p 511 and 513) cites:
Crouzel H. Origen / / Encyclopedia of the Early Church. Oxford, 1992. Vol. 1. P. 620
for two passages about Origen:
Epiphanius Salaminius, Panarion omnium haeresium, 64. 5.
Vincentius Lirinensis, Memorabilia, XVII
…and for the claim that Epiphanius was the first to accuse Origen,
Bienert W. A. «Allegoria» und «Anagoge» bei Didymus dem Blinden von Alexandria. Berlin, 1972. S.7.
But I am not ready to add links to WP because you do it (fix links, format it pretty), and then you read the source and the source is discussing a different actor with a similar name….
P.S. sorry, I think it does not belong to here. I thoguht my note will be shorter. But I won’t delete it.
I particularly enjoy our Ksaverij < Xaverius < Xavier < (Basque). One would not expect an almost predecessor of Athos, Porthos, Aramis and a King's Guard and a fellow [how do you call people from Navarre and Béarn [and Gascony]?] to have this -ij.
OK, I fixed Crouzel, Epiphanius, and Vincent. Thanks!
The recent mention of the Hexapla (in A Greek Papyrus in Armenian Script) reminded me to check if Hexapla Hebrew is available yet. It is not, but this is:
Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew, by Nick Posegay
I note that The Neo-Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho, by Oz Aloni, is no longer listed at all. Not sure what happened there.
Weird. But thanks for keeping us updated!
I checked the web archive of the page, and as recently as a few days ago (Feb 04), the page had Aloni’s work as forthcoming. It looks like there was a manual edit that removed the line and link from the page when the book was supposed to be in the section for published works.
The link itself works:
The Neo-Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho, by Oz Aloni
Since I last checked the page, it seems to have changed/been redesigned. All current works appear here (the old link redirects here):
Semitic Languages and Cultures
After Aloni’s work, there is a perhaps surprising list of new publications:
Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq: A Comparative Anthology with a Sample of Glossed Texts, Volume 1
Geoffrey Khan, Masoud Mohammadirad, Dorota Molin, Paul M. Noorlander
Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq: A Comparative Anthology with a Sample of Glossed Texts, Volume 2
Geoffrey Khan, Masoud Mohammadirad, Dorota Molin, Paul M. Noorlander
Sefer ha-Pardes by Jedaiah ha-Penini: A Critical Edition with English Translation
David Torollo
Diachronic Variation in the Omani Arabic Vernacular of the Al-ʿAwābī District: From Carl Reinhardt (1894) to the Present Day
Roberta Morano
Studies in the Masoretic Tradition of the Hebrew Bible
Daniel J. Crowther, Aaron D. Hornkohl, Geoffrey Khan
The Bible in the Bowls: A Catalogue of Biblical Quotations in Published Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Magic Bowls
Daniel James Waller
I don’t see any “forthcoming” section anymore. I don’t know what’s going on with Hexapla Hebrew, but as best I can tell, Kantor is still listed as Cambridge Faculty
https://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/research/project/grammar-biblical-hebrew
I also found an article by him from 2019, about a Hexapla fragment from the Cairo Genizah:
The Oldest Fragment of Origen’s Hexapla: T-S 12.182
It occurs to me that working with ancient manuscripts may take a long time, for various reasons. Dealing with the bureaucracies of museums and libraries and other institutions; being very slow and careful with fragile documents once accessed, and so on.
Thanks for your interest! There are two main works that I am developing with respect to the Hebrew of the Secunda in the Hexapla, one is a critical edition and the other is a grammar.
The critical edition (with Peeters) should be out within a year or two.
The grammar of Secunda Hebrew (with OBP) is well underway but will be a while before it is completed.
It was important to finish the critical edition before the grammar, as you can imagine 🙂
Thanks for the update, and the good news!
It’s been a year, and more works have been added. The link hasn’t changed since 2022-11, but here it is anyway
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/series/2632-6914
New works (following on from the list posted 2022-11):
The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew
Aaron D. Hornkohl
An Introduction to Andalusi Hebrew Metrics
José Martínez Delgado
The Linguistic Classification of the Reading Traditions of Biblical Hebrew: A Phyla-and-Waves Model
Benjamin Paul Kantor
Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text
William A. Ross (editor) and Elizabeth Robar (editor)
The Standard Language Ideology of the Hebrew and Arabic Grammarians of the ʿAbbasid Period
Benjamin Paul Kantor
Synopses and Lists: Textual Practices in the Pre-Modern World
Teresa Bernheimer (editor) and Ronny Vollandt (editor)