In Slavonic tradition too poetry is concerned with the renewal of memory.
In the Lay of Igor (4) we read how the great poet Boyan ‘used to recall
(pomnyasˇe t ı ̆) the words and the dissensions of the early times’. Salih Ugljanin
in two of his oral epics, The Song of Baghdad and The Captivity of Dulic ́
Ibrahim, used the formulaic line davno bilo, sada pominjemo, ‘long ago it was,
and now we remember it’. In a Bosnian version of an Albanian song about
Marko and Musa, he sang:
This will ever be remembered (s’ pominje) to the end of time,
as long as mankind and time endure,
and as long as these endure, Marko will be remembered,
Marko Kraljevic ́ will be remembered.^29
By an inversion of the standard notion of being mindful, the poet may
instead speak of not being unmindful. One of the Homeric Hymns begins ‘I
will bethink me, and not be unmindful, of Apollo the far-shooter’. Another
concludes, ‘there is no way to adorn sweet singing while heedless of you’.
Similarly there are early Irish poems beginning ‘It is not fitting to forget.. .’,
and the British praise-poem for Gwenabwy mab Gwen begins ‘It would
be wrong to leave unremembered him of the far-reaching feats’.^30 If this
is not itself an Indo-European formula, it could readily have developed
independently in Greece and the Celtic area from the primary one.
Poesy as constructionIt is not enough to recall. The poem must be crafted. In many Indo-European
traditions poetic composition is expressed by words meaning ‘make’,
‘fashion’, and the like, or by terms drawn from specific manufacturing crafts
such as carpentry or weaving.
In Greece from the archaic period we find the most basic words for ‘make’,
τε3χειν and ποιε4ν, used of poetic creation; ποιητ became the ordinary
word for ‘poet’.τε3χειν is a poetic vocable, in other words an archaism. Its
application to ‘making’ poetry has been linked with the cognate Old Irish
duan‘poem’, from *dh(e)ughna ̄-.^31 In other languages too we find the plainest
words for ‘make’ employed for poetic composition: in Latin facere (uersus,
carmen, etc.), in India kr
̇
, as in RV 9. 114. 2 mantrakr ́
̇ta ̄m‘of song-makers’.(^29) SCHS ii, nos. 1. 9, 4. 8; i. 360–4, lines 159–62.
(^30) Hymn. Hom. 3. 1; 7. 58 f.; cf. Pind. fr. 94b. 36; K. Meyer (1913), 16/18, 20; Y Gododdin 292,
cf. 75.
(^31) Durante (1960), 234 ~ (1976), 170; Bader (1989), 24. τε3χειν:Od. 24. 197, Pind. Isth. 1. 14,
al.; Nünlist (1998), 86 f. ποιει
ν: Solon 20. 3, Theognidea 771, etc. On the whole range of
manufacturing imagery applied to poetic composition in Greek see Nünlist, 83–125.
- Poet and Poesy 35