ترجمه و مترجم

Storytelling

Storytelling is as old as campfires. The need for human beings to cast their experiences in narrative form is probably as old as consciousness itself. Gathered about the tribal fires, bonded by their common struggles for survival, our early ancestors gave voice in story dorm to their fears and beliefs, and thus helped make for themselves a magic defense against trials of life. The earliest stories, travelling from campfire to campfire, across seas and down the generations, registered humanity's slow emergence from animal status. The forms of these stories, like the forms of other rituals, were the structures of each teller's history and identity, part of the creative impulse that made men and women consciously human.

All 'primitive' cultures have their myths and legends, narratives of how things began, how the heroes fought. Though these tales are sometimes funny, their purpose is intensely serious. For the tribe that related them, they were part of the sacred word, matter not of make believe but of belief itself. Since we no longer see the world as primitive storytellers did (though the word primitive is less and less pejorative), a lot of this folklore can seem naïve and strange, a matter of superstition. But increasingly, as the 'modern' continues to sweep over us, we read such lore with nostalgia, and are moved by a sense of things we have lost, our kinship with nature, a sense of community, the certainty of belief.