Motyw winy Heleny w tradycji epickiej i w dyskursie

The paper takes up the issue of Helen’s guilt for the outbreak of the Trojan war present in the Iliad and in the oral epic tradition. It puts forward a thesis that in order to blame others or to free themselves from blame epic heroes employ the typical in oral culture technique of conducting disputes. Like other characters in the Iliad, Helen, is also under constant social pressure which seeks to find her guilty and, in effect, to activate a mechanism of making a scapegoat of her. To defend herself, she risks self-accusations in order to make it impossible for other people to bring a charge against her. Helen cares about her good opinion in the Trojan society and particularly in the circle of women.

Translating Folklore: the Myth of Baba Jaga in Afanasev’s Fairy Tales

The main aim of this article is to provide a thorough insight about the difficulties encountered when translating fairy tales from Slavic folklore, in a sense that not only it implies the shift from anoral version to a written one, but also it has to face all the challenges of children’s literature. In order to do this, we have analyzed one of the hundreds of fairy tales present in the work of the Russian writer and linguist Aleksandr Nikolaevič Afanas’ev, Narodnye russkie skazki, an extraordinary collection and classification of a large amount of fairy tales of the Slavic oral culture. Our analysis focuses on the well-known character Baba Jaga, the ‘wooden leg’ witch, who lives in an izbaand rests on hen’s legs in an enchanted wood. In particular, an attempt is made to conduct a translatological analysis of Afanas’ev’s text, within the framework of textual typology considering the translation macro-strategy, the most significant linguistic factors, as well assome potential translation strategies which help the story to fit in the target language and culture in the best possible way.

Malaya Sadovaya in the History of Leningrad Unofficial Culture

Malaya Sadovaya, a short street in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, is similarly the name for a loosely organized social and cultural scene encompassing, among other frequent visitors, a number of young poets. In the history of Leningrad unofficial culture, the Malaya Sadovaya poets represent a significant shift from a primarily “oral” culture of informal public and semipublic readings to a new orientation toward printed works: in 1965, several of the MS poets published a samizdat “almanac” of their work, Fioretti. Along the same lines, Malaya Sadovaya can be seen as marking a path from officially sponsored creative-writing groups to a self-consciously unofficial culture, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) opposed to the mainstream Soviet aesthetic.

2. How the biblical books were written

‘How the biblical books were written’ looks at some of the processes of tradition and composition that led to the final form of the biblical books as we know them today. Throughout the period of the composition of the Bible, orality and literacy are closely interrelated. Yet, even though the writings of the Bible have deep roots in an oral culture and tradition, they are also clearly literary works. The writers and compilers of the Bible used a variety of literary forms in which to cast their works. Within the tradition of biblical writing and compilation, such literary forms became influential and constrained and enabled the way in which the books were written

The Vernacular Alternatives Composed during the Age of Revolutions

Irish-language vernacular verse history proved adaptable throughout the eighteenth century to take account both of new reverses, and of opportunities presented by revolutionary developments in North America, in France, and in Ireland. The oral and the written records were interlinked because manuscript copyists aided memory. Themes from the Irish oral tradition also resurfaced in English-language print form or in political speeches by Daniel O’Connell. Similarly in the Protestant experience narratives composed in the seventeenth century by such as Temple entered into Protestant vernacular culture because they were regularly regurgitated in sermons. When Musgrave composed a Protestant narrative of the 1798 rebellion he could therefore allude to Catholic proclivity to rebel knowing that this was a trope in Protestant oral culture. Musgrave could also dovetail the occurrences of 1798 with Temple’s narrative on 1641 and thus make it comprehensible for his audience.

The materiality of the letter in Seto oral culture

This article focuses on the concept of letter in oral folklore. The main research material is examples from the older folk songs of Seto, where a letter, a book and other items referring to literacy are mentioned. Texts under consideration are poetical and the meaning conveyed in them is not always very clear. The term letter may be related to a message, paper, book, leaf or other material medium in the songs. The boundary between oracy and literacy is therefore thin, given that letters and writing are often imagined and conveyed in a physical context. Literacy in Seto folk songs is sometimes reflected as part of mythological knowledge and a mythological worldview. The written text or objects carrying it may have magical power. In some songs the writing can also be found on plants, which is interesting from a cross-cultural perspective. Similar motives from the folklore and beliefs of other peoples have been used comparatively to understand the content of the songs under consideration. The song of heavenly cows eating holy plants offers an opportunity to draw intercultural parallels and raises the question about the ethnogenesis of the Seto and their relatedness to different Eurasian peoples further to the east.

The Degree of Study of Numerals by Scientists in the World

Numerals are used in a variety of tasks, both in science and in everyday life. Using numbers, we record the results of calculations (twenty, forty years), determine the order between the elements of the plural (the first speaker, the millionth person to live), and express the results of the measurement of something (a mile and a half). In addition, numeric characters can be used instead of words, letters, for example, to encode text. Chinese culture is recognized as one of the oldest written cultures. Yu. M. Lotman considers writing to be one of the forms of memory. In this sense, history can be interpreted as an “additional consequence of the emergence of writing”. “While written culture is about the past, oral culture is about the future. That's why predictions, divination and predictions played a big role in it. "According to the scientist, “the world of verbal memory is full of symbols”, the material is included in the list of objects and is included in the text of ceremonies, not in the text consisting of words. In the written culture, however, the situation is different. Such a culture "seeks to see the Text created by God or Nature, to read the message expressed in it." Numbers play an important role in this "reading of the world-text" by the Chinese. According to А. Karapetyants's Great Dictionary of the Chinese Language (中文大辞典 zhōngwén dà cídiǎn 1962-1968), there are 13,296 dictionary articles beginning with numbers.

Mapping Genocide? Giving Visual Memory to Oral Culture

Yezidi religion and history had been largely transmitted orally until the late 20th century due to the closeness, isolation, and marginalization of the community in their various home countries. It was the advent of digitization that sparked a radical switch and concurrent emergence of a new class of protagonists who used social media as a tool to theorize and generalize sacred knowledge. The new actors often do not belong to the traditional class of clergy in charge of preserving and transmitting this information. In this chapter, I argue that their use of social media to spread deliberate knowledge has contributed to the development of new forms of identity and loyalty among Yezidi groups in Syria and Iraq.