Details
BURTON, Richard Francis. Wit and Wisdom from West Africa. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1865.
8o (198 x 125 mm). Original reddish cloth, sides with blind ornamental design (rebacked with large portion of the original spine laid down, endpapers renewed). Provenance: Dwight Edwards Marvin (bookplate).
FIRST EDITION, containing "a total of 2268 proverbs, idioms, enigmas, laconisms, and words conveying knowledge concerning the people's habits and superstitions." Burton did not believe the "manifestly Semitic modes of thought" required much explanation but took a different view with "the purely Hamitic, whose richness of metaphor and whose peculiar method of envisaging moral and physical phenomena, to say nothing of an ellipsis often forced and sometimes obscure, renders them like a Sankrit or a Prakrit, as compared with an Arabic or Persian book, unfamiliar to us, and beyond or beside, as it were, our views" (Preface, p. xxix). Penzer p. 75.
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FIRST EDITION, containing "a total of 2268 proverbs, idioms, enigmas, laconisms, and words conveying knowledge concerning the people's habits and superstitions." Burton did not believe the "manifestly Semitic modes of thought" required much explanation but took a different view with "the purely Hamitic, whose richness of metaphor and whose peculiar method of envisaging moral and physical phenomena, to say nothing of an ellipsis often forced and sometimes obscure, renders them like a Sankrit or a Prakrit, as compared with an Arabic or Persian book, unfamiliar to us, and beyond or beside, as it were, our views" (Preface, p. xxix). Penzer p. 75.