First Lines
A Project in Global
Diversity
First Lines
offers spoken and subtitled samples of famous literary passages, spanning the
globe and the centuries. By hearing and familiarizing ourselves with these short
selections, viewers can gain a sense of familiarity with diverse languages and
literatures. The result of this familiarity is to break down the barriers of
distance in space and time. Chinese, Arabic, French, Urdu—these are languages
used by real people, using words, presenting ideas and emotions available to
all of us.
Click the title or author to download
videos. For a short overview of texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arabic,
and Twi (an African language), click here: Combined
Introduction (10 minutes)
First Lines
Ancient languages
Hebrew Genesis (Sandor Goodhart) 20 min.
Greek Homer
(Keith Dickson) 22 min.
Greek From Sappho to John
(Patrice Rankine) 15
min.
Latin Virgil (John
Kirby) 22
min.
Asia
Chinese T’ang Poetry (characters) (Daniel Hsieh) 14 min.
Chinese T’ang Poetry
(sound) (Xianfeng Mou) 9 min.
Chinese Dream of the Red Chamber (Ying Liang) 9 min.
Japanese Bashô (Haiku) (Eiji Sekine) 11 min.
Middle East and
India
Arabic Koran (Mahmoud Guweily)
12 min.
Turkish Islam (Turgay Bayindir) 8 min.
Urdu (India) Zafar (Aparajita
Sagar) 11
min.
Europe
Old English Beowulf (Shaun
Hughes) 13
min.
Middle English Chaucer (Ann
Astell) 10 min.
Italian Dante (Allen Mandelbaum) 14 min.
Portuguese Poems of
Exploration (Silvia Oliveira and Paul Dixon) 14 min.
Spanish Don Quixote (Howard Mancing) 18 min.
Russian Pushkin (Tetyana Lyaskowets) 14 min.
French Baudelaire (Tom Broden)
19 min.
German Goethe (Marek Gryglewicz)
15 min.
German Heine
(Anna Fluegge) 8 min.
Bonus features from
the archives
Italian Boiardo (Paolo Panaro recites from canto 1, subtitles) 14 min.
Italian Boiardo (Charles Ross
reads from canto 18) 9 min.
Africa
Ngemba
(Cameroon) Ndjjwi-mupang
(Nde) 14
min. Includes Lydia speaking francophone.
Twi (Ghana) An African Fable (Paul Asare)
13 min.
Americas
Native American Lakota 14 min.
Cuban Guillén
(Joseph Dorsey) 16 min.
Latino Neruda (Luis Urrea and Angelica Duran) 18 min.
American Twain
(Robert Lamb) 21
min.
Afro-American Preaching and Poetry (James Saunders) 22 min.
Non-spoken American Sign Language Poetry
(Ronnie Wilbur) 11
min.
Theory Post-Modernism and Deconstruction (John Duvall) 8 min.
Those interviewed on these tapes were
associated with the Program in Comparative Literature at Purdue University,
either faculty or graduate students, during the spring of 2006 or 2007 when the
tapes were made. Support for this project came from the Center for
Undergraduate Instructional Excellence, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University.
These clips are available for use by
the general public and in high school and college courses. Videos may be re-edited later. Email me at cross@purdue.edu.
Comparative Literature and the Sounds of Cultural Diversity:
A Rational for First Lines
The method of Comparative Literature was originally
conceived to illuminate large developments in genres (epics, novels, lyric
poetry) that cross time and space. For two generations in American universities
this method succeeded admirably. It provided a way to discuss classical
literature when enrollments in classics programs were rapidly declining.
Medievalists needed to know Latin. Old English and French benefited from
comparative approaches. The field of Renaissance studies required knowledge of
Latin, French, Italian, and English literature. Much modern scholarship was in
German.
Since Comparative Literature became a formal academic
discipline in America in the years following World War II, it has shifted away
from the goals of its founders, mainly German professors who feared the demise
of European literature. Comparative Literature is no longer regarded as a forum
to promote literatures of nations whose cultural influence has faded. As can be
seen today in the work of the American Comparative Literature Association, the
focus of Comparative Literature is far more broadly cultural and global than
formerly. Spanish predominates, as might be expected from an organization whose
name includes Central and South America, but other languages and culture, and
other histories, vie for attention.
The main problem with designing a trans-cultural,
multi-language pedagogy is that no one person reads Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
Arabic, Chinese, Old English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Urdu,
and Spanish. Yet all of these areas are represented in standard anthologies of world
literature assigned to college sophomores throughout our country, often in
general education courses. The omission of any nationality weakens our
perception of the world we live in today. Yet it is immediately intuitive that
English translation must distort and filter our perception of passages that
might be includes in such a course, such as the creation of the world in the
Bible, Homer’s wrath of Achilles, common prayers from the Koran, T’ang Dynasty poetry in China, Dante’s Divine Comedy, French symbolist poetry, Don Quixote, the Russian novel, modern drama since Ibsen (a
Norwegian), and the magical realism of South American fiction.
First Lines: A Project in Global Diversity seeks to solve this problem by
introducing a variety of world cultures by means of selected passages, in their
original languages, from works that are regarded as fundamental, excellent, and
representative within their respective cultures. A popular culture course might
respond to the same problem by using folk or popular songs or scenes from films
or television shows or even commercials, yet by its nature it would be dealing
with the ephemeral, not what is permanent and at the root of a civilization. It
is not a condemnation of any culture to say it is not literary: other arts may
take precedence, like music or dance or other social rituals. Literature can be
understood broadly or narrowly. This project adopts a narrow definition. It
further concentrates on short poems or passages, often opening lines, of much
longer works in order to meet its goal of introducing global diversity through
literary excellence.
When I designed the project I hoped that by seeing and
hearing these explanations of the individual words that make up famous, or
culturally significant, passages and, perhaps, by memorizing the passages,
people could participate in a world of diversity people. The result of the
experiment, to judge by my own experience, is that it is lot harder than I
expected to memorize even short passages in the twenty-two languages represented
in this series. Nonetheless, something else, just as important, emerged during
the taping of First Lines.
It turned out that during the conversations that make up
much of each video, the presenters often say something about learning to feel
culturally at home. Often they talk about things they learned in school at an
early age, or how they feel about their place in the world. It is fascinating
to hear how almost every speaker had to overcome a sense of being somehow an
outsider to what an outsider might think of as a native culture. I first
realized that this series would be something other than just spoken words with
subtitles when I heard Luis Urrea talk about his
experience growing up in Mexico and Los Angeles, but it turned out that each of
the presenters had something to say about discovering how learning creates a
sense of home.
By watching and re-watching these videos, we can
recapitulate learning processes of the speakers even as we learn something
ourselves. The result is to give us a perspective on what diversity means
throughout the world, our international home.
--Charles
Ross
The Program in
Comparative Literature, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University.
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