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Text as Song: The Oral Aspirations of Anghelos Sikelianos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Sarah Ekdawi
Sarah Ekdawi*
Affiliation:
St. Cross College, Oxford
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Extract

‘Any poem or poet worthy of the name must liberate the pure creative force of the human voice.’

‘The whole of Ancient Greek civilization is a product of poetic utterance: Homer sang; Pindar declaimed; Aeschylus spoke out from behind masks.’

‘Ancient texts — Homer, Hesiod, oracles, Orphic writings and so forth — gradually became the voice of the people.’

These statements were made by Sikelianos in a talk entitled “O which he delivered in 1938, and in which he postulates a historical progression from text to voice, rather than the reverse process. They are the statements of a literate poet writing in a literate age, but delighting, at the same time, in the ability of radio to ‘reassert the spell of orality’ (Havelock 1986: 31). They subvert the idea of literacy as progress and propose, in its place, an ideal of post-textual orality. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between such statements and the poetry of Sikelianos.

Type
Articles:
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 14 , 1990 , pp. 214 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1990

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