Stefan Strelcyn and his archival recordings of oral tradition of Ethiopia made in 1957/58 (including four Amharic love songs)

Abstract

Stefan Strelcyn – a Polish scholar whose achievements were acknowledged by the Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1967 with a Haile Selassie Award for Ethiopian Studies – initiated African studies at the University of Warsaw. His main field of scholarly activity covered cataloguing manuscripts in various European library collections as well as studying traditional Ethiopian medicine and medicinal plants. However, during his field trip to Ethiopia in 1957/58 he recorded 26 tapes of various examples of Ethiopian orature in Ethiopic classical Ge’ez language and five other languages of Ethiopia: Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, Gurage, and Harari. These recordings have been recently digitized. The first attempt to present their content, as well as a sample translation and literary analysis of four Amharic love poems recorded by Stefan Strelcyn, is undertaken in this article.

Keywords

• Stefan Strelcyn
• Ethiopian Studies
• orature
• Amharic love songs