Harris Lenowitz
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 392
Get eBook
With their time and place the ancient Mediterranean before the final triumph of Christianity and Islam, the editors have concentrated on a central, primal idea, cosmogony, the narrative of cosmic origins, and have gathered an unprecedented range of texts around it. These materials aren't taken as philosophy or theology per se but as poesis: the making or shaping of reality through speech: myth emerging naturally by way of mouth to ear. To bring across this sense of myth as process, Lenowitz and Doria, working as both poets and scholars, make use of all those advances in translation technique, notation, and sympathy developed over the last few decades. The picture that emerges is one of richness, fecundity at every turning, from the first image of peom on page to the constantly new insights into the possibilities of "origin" -- Preface.