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TemitOpe Ibrahim

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“Song and the lyric poem came first. Prose was invented centuries later. In Israel, Greece, and China came the primal, model lyrics for two and a half millennia. Read the biblical Song of Songs in Hebrew, Sappho in Greek, and Wang Wei in Chinese and be deeply civilized. You will know the passions, tragedy, spirit, politic, philosophy, and beauty that have commanded our solitary rooms and public spaces. I emphasize solitary, because the lyric, unlike theater and sport, is an intimate dialogue between maker and reader. From the Jews we have their two bibles of wisdom poetry, from the Chinese we have thousands of ancient nightingales whose song is calm ecstasy, and from the Greeks we have major and minor names and wondrous poems. However, because of bigotry, most of Greek poetry, especially Sappho, was by religious decree destroyed from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. So apart from one complete ode, we read Sappho in fragments. Yet there survive fragrant hills for lovers and dark and luminous mountains for metaphysicians. Most of ancient Greek lyric poetry is contained in this volume. Do not despair about loss. You are lucky if you can spend your life reading and rereading the individual poets. They shine. If technology or return to legal digs in Egypt and Syria are to reveal a library of buried papyri of Greek lyrics equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gnostic Nag Hammadi Library, we should be able to keep singing and dancing for ten moons straight. For now, we have the song, human comedy, political outrage, and personal cry for centuries of good reading.”

SapphoSong Of SongsPierre GrangeWang Wei
Author:Pierre Grange
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