Oral Origins

The Odyssey, as (presumably) created by Homer was composed primarily in dactyllic hexameter, which was very much the thing at the time. This means the lines of poetry had six beats each, with each measure being a triplet, so the rhythm would have been: BUM-da-da BUM-da-da, BUM-da-da, etc., wash and repeat. This might very well be musical in Greek, but in English the result tends to be awkward at best, or, as one anonymous translation reviewer put it, akin to “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.”

So, over the years, translations of The Odyssey have taken strange forms, such as putting the tale in rhymed iambic pentameter, as George Chapman did in 1616 (which was very much the thing in his time), and though quite entertaining, it’s not considered very accurate to the original. In 1961, Robert Fitzgerald received wide acclaim for a translation that did away with attempts at rhythmic symmetry, casting Homer’s words into unrhymed poetry with lines of unequal length. Then there are plenty of translations that throw out poetry altogether, weaving the tale as a piece of prose. In fact, more than 24 translations of The Odyssey into English are available on the market. Would Homer recognize any of them as his own work?

This question is not just about what gets lost in translation. The epic ballad had to get written down in Greek before it could even be translated hundreds of years later into a tongue that didn’t even exist in Homer’s time. And in fact, the idea of fixing in print a story intended for oral performance, the presentation of which probably would have been tailored to the audience and the taste of the performer, would very likely seem alien or even ghastly to Homer and his contemporary bards. When the notion of putting information in writing first took root in Greece, with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, Socrates argued against it as a meaningless crutch that would seem to give students information without actually giving them knowledge. He believed discourse to be a far superior tool, describing it in dialog with Phaedrus as the “...living word of knowledge which has a soul and of which the written word is properly no more than an image...”

Nowadays we take writing for granted. Our society is surrounded and shaped by text, which is our primary means of storing information. Yet, for the bulk of human history, knowledge and culture were passed on orally through story and song, from teacher to student.

Few societies survive today that maintain an operating oral tradition, but interest in the oral packaging of information is more than a historical or anthropological side-track. A great deal of excitement has appeared over the past couple of decades as social scientists, communications experts and philosophers contemplate the future of the written word, some of whom predict that writing is on the way out to be replaced by oral tradition 2.0—a heady cocktail of sound and image-based hyper-media accessible through the internet, wireless devices and even chips implanted in our brains that allow us to communicate telepathically (yes, this has been done).

At first glance, the way we store and transmit information may not seem to matter, so long as the information is transmitted. However, since Marshall McLuhan first argued that “the medium is the message,” an increasing number of communications theorists and historians, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Dene Grigar, have suggested that the way we handle information has more impact on our society and culture than the information itself. This can be explored by studying the impact of writing on society, which Leonard Shlain argues in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess gave rise to patriarchy over mother-goddess traditions by favoring word-signs over image-signs. Another example is the fascinating transformative power of the printing press on everything from national economies to religious reform. If this train of thought interests you, I highly recommend William Sonn’s book on the subject, Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word.

If we truly are headed to a revival of oral and audio-based information fluency, what might our society be like in the future? Will the written word become an obsolete technology, or will it continue to coexist with the new, being incorporated in unforeseen ways, as most old technologies do? As we contemplate these questions, let’s take another look at the oral tradition of storytelling. This week’s podcast features two American Indian stories told the traditional way—completely from memory. Because human memory is imperfect and limited, there has been a tendency in modern Western culture to look at oral information as inferior to text, which maintains fixity. Yet because of this same quality, I suspect orally-oriented cultures are more comfortable with change and improvisation.

So, if contemplating the death of the written word pierces you with the cold dagger of dread and dystopia, it may be a result of text-based socialization. We are a product of our time and place, and perhaps the stories of the future would seem as bizarre to us as Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey would seem to Homer. Change is inevitable; the real question is whether the change will maximize benefit to civilization, and how much we can do to insure it does. On that note, I also recommend taking a look at the work of Marshall McLuhan: