Remembering B.W. Andrzejewski: Poland's Somali Genius

In Palestine, after a hasty slip-shod military training, Goosh was ordered to an army unit in Egypt in August 1941 to defend the besieged town of Tobruk. He fought well and survived the action without much damage to his person other than a minor wound. Having recovered in a British military hospital, he was recommended to enroll in an officers training school, "but did not complete the course," Goosh tells us modestly "on account of lack of talent in that direction" ("Biographical" 2). Poetry, not soldiery, was apparently the young man's forte. While slipping between internments in Hungary, he managed, incredibly, to teach himself some English "using a German book called `English in 30 Hours Without a Teacher'" ("Biographical" 2). Goosh indefatigably worked up his English proficiency in Palestine by practicing it with Australian and New Zealand soldiers in Palestine and by August 1942 acquired good enough command of the language to serve as an interpreter, a field for which "there was a great demand since most members of the Polish Forces did not know any English" ("Biographical" 3). As powerful as is Andrzejewski's methodological imprimatur on Somalists, his global impact on the modern study of oral poetry is likely to be even more remarkable. Up until he arrived quietly on the scene, the dominating theory in the nature and evolution of oral poetry was that of the "Formulaic School," first advanced by Milman Perry and subsequently comprehensively articulated by his student Albert Lord in his memorable The Singer of Tales. Perry and Lord discovered a handle on a problem that baffled scholars for years as regards the composition and presentation of the Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey: how was it possible, baffled scholars asked themselves, that a poem thousands of lines long (The Iliad counts 15,000 and The Odyssey 12,000) could be delivered extemporaneously in its entirety from memory? While musing over this puzzle, the scholars noticed the plethora of words, epithets, stock phrases, and "ready-made groups of words" that recur repeatedly throughout the poem: "Achilles, son of Peleus," "grey-eyed Athene," "many-counselled Hector," "rosy fingered-dawn," etc. From this and from further content analyses, the scholars concluded, rightly as they were to be proved, that these poems were composed from formulae -- a ready-made store of epithets and stock phrases that the poet has learned beforehand and only links end-to-end into a complete line at the very