Friday, May 9, 2008

Transforming Oral Tradition to A Literary One

While listening to some folks talk about how stories get passed around in Somalia I was wondering what happened to the art of story telling when writing started. Did some mythologies disappear because they did not translate well to the written form? Or did they just never get written because the people who knew them and could write them did not bother to record them since they did not think that they were important? Or with writing did the importance of being able to tell an old story in a new and interesting way dissapear. What about the power of memory?

Just like for the Arabs before they used writing a lot they had a wonderful tradition of creating beautiful oral poetry and memorizing Mahabarata length texts. However, now very people can do that due to the power of writing.

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