Questões sobre Poesia Oral: crítica, ensino e tradução

Abstract

In this article, Olabiyi Yai examines the limits of Western critical paradigms for understanding oral poetry. Drawing from the observation that literary criticism has historically been grounded in writing, the author demonstrates how categories such as “text,” “author”, and “work” prove inadequate for approaching poetic forms whose existence is constituted through embodiment, performance, memory, voice, and communal interaction. Yai argues that the processes of rendition and translation often reduce the aesthetic and cultural complexity of these forms, thereby reinforcing their marginalization within literary studies. In this response to that, Yai calls for a renewal of literary criticism and literary teaching grounded in the epistemologies of oral traditions, recognizing performance, translation, and sociocultural context (community) as constitutive dimensions of poetic creation. Ultimately, the essay advocates a form of criticism that engages with diverse regimes of knowledge production, thereby expanding the very boundaries of the concept of literature.