10. The Transitional Text

One of the important differences between an oral traditional singer and a nontraditional one is the fact that the traditional singer does not think in terms of a fixed textuality, whereas the nontraditional singer does. If a traditional singer in the course of a lifetime becomes a nontraditional poet—as, I believe, one could argue in the case of Petar Petrović Njegoš II—at what point does this singer's sense of fixed textuality develop? [1] Can we pinpoint the moment when he becomes a nontraditional poet? In The Singer of Tales, I phrased the problem somewhat differently by saying that I could not conceive of a singer thinking at one and the same time in terms of both fluidity and fixity. He might go from one mode to the other but could not be in both at the same time. [2]

I have now come to realize, as I have analyzed themes in terms of textuality, that the traditional epic singer, composing characteristically in comparatively short passages—that is, themes—actually does work with a mixture of more or less stable core and optional lines. By "more or less stable lines" I mean that they are not fixed in wording—not irrevocably fixed, that is, although they do tend to stability. Stability does not necessarily mean fixity. This is true, of course, of most of the lines of a traditional song; core lines and optional ones are alike in their lack of fixity. After all, fluidity of wording is the true mark of this style. The core lines are those found in all (or nearly all) the occurrences of a theme; the optional lines may or may not be used in any single instance of it. The latter are of at least two kinds. One {212|213} functions as expansion or ornamentation, the other in adapting a theme to the specific context of a given song.

Singers vary greatly in the comparative stability of the core lines and in the number and character of the optional lines. It would not be accurate, therefore, to say that in composing any instance of a theme a singer is thinking in terms of both fixity and fluidity; for a more or less constant core of lines is ornamented or expanded according to the wishes of the singer at the moment or adapted to fit a particular situation in a particular song. All I am doing is describing in greater detail the fluidity of the traditional style. None of the lines is really fixed and predictable; the number and content of even the core lines is to a degree variable. In short, we can predict, let us say, that two out of a given three core lines may be found in any given instance of a theme, but we cannot predict with certainty which two nor exactly what form they will have. This is not fixity of text, nor does it require a sense of fixed textuality on the part of the singer.

It is common in the Homeric poems to find passages that recur nearly verbatim. George Goold drew our attention to such passages, arguing that they were fixed and memorized. [3] First, the passages are not quite as unchangeable as Goold implies, and second, with George Boiling, I believe that their exactness, when it occurs, is the result of editing. [4]

All this may suggest a possible answer to the question posed earlier, namely, at what point does a singer pass from being traditional to being nontraditional? Could it be that point when he does begin to think of really fixed lines, when he actually memorizes them? If so, then we might be able to observe and even measure that "moment" in the texts of a singer, that is, when we find that a singer has memorized passages verbatim. This line of investigation needs to be followed both rigorously and extensively. [5]

Two other aspects of the question What is a transitional text? have been brought to my attention and deserve further discussion. One is suggested by the work of such a selector, editor, and "reteller" of folktales as Italo Calvino, the reference by some of my friends to whose work on folktales as possible transitional texts brought this question to mind. The second aspect concerns the writing rather than the singing or dictating of formulaic verse texts, for example, Andrija Kačić-Miošić's Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskoga, "A Pleasant Discourse of the Slavic People." [6] {213|214}

In connection with Calvino's work, a question arises how one could tell his version of a folktale, his retelling of it, from the "naïve" version of the traditional teller. This is a question that could be applicable to other retellers who are themselves men of letters. Calvino's work, it must be remembered, is prose tale, but some of the principles involved may be applicable to verse narrative as well. His situation brings to mind that of the Montenegrin poet Petar Petrović Njegoš II, and we shall look too at three stages of Njegoš's poetic output to see if the middle one may be thought of as transitional.

Calvino came into this discussion first by way of the question whether his retellings of Italian folktales could be considered as transitional texts. Now, Calvino's retellings are primarily translations of dialect texts into standard Italian. So to the second question, How can you tell Calvino's retelling from the "naïve" original? the ready answer is that one is in dialect, the other in standard Italian. In one way, then, and very superficially, it is easy to distinguish Calvino from his original. But Calvino did something more than just translate; he also made changes. He himself stated his method in his introduction to Italian Folktales in the section entitled "Criteria for My Work":

The term transitional text is a grab bag often used to avoid the stigma of an oral text. We should once and for all eliminate the connotations as well as the tendentious prejudices from both "transitional" and "oral" and establish the facts. Calvino's example leads us into the "spider's nest" and is a good one with which to begin, even if, or perhaps precisely because, it is not verse epic but folktale. We are thereby not encumbered with problems of verse, or of formulas.

The first fact that strikes one is that there are comparatively few purely transcribed folktale texts published. We are much of the time proceeding on the basis of modified texts. One comes to realize that many generalities about oral traditional literature stem from doctored texts, from texts that have been "edited," changed, or "improved," most commonly by a nontraditional person or, at best, by nontraditional persons who have steeped themselves as well as they can in the traditional material but who often have other axes to grind. They too want to use tradition for their own purposes, which are not necessarily those of tradition. This can be seen in such statements as "I have chosen what is beautiful or what is striking" or "I have tried to eliminate the rough spots." Yet the tradition includes much that is not so beautiful, much that may be mediocre, many rough spots. It is true that it would be an injustice to the tradition to stress those elements, but in some way we should be made aware of what the whole tradition is like. This is particularly true if we want to talk about "transitional texts." {215|216}

How can one recognize a text that is in a transitional position between an oral traditional text and a literary text, if one never has an opportunity to see a real oral traditional text? Myles Dillon in the introduction to his translations of several Irish folktales indicated his awareness of this problem. He said that he had translated everything including the repetitions, which are usually omitted! [8] There certainly is a way of distinguishing the "naïve" version from the edited or retold version, unless some of the most characteristic elements have been omitted, as is frequently done. I repeat, how can we proceed unless we have some actual knowledge of the oral traditional text?

There is no doubt that Calvino steeped himself in the traditions of the Italian folktale. Although he says that he "plunged into that submarine world totally unequipped, without even a tankful of intellectual enthusiasm for anything spontaneous and primitive," he soon became completely immersed. His characterization of the "innermost particularities" of that world, "infinite variety and infinite repetition," captures the essence not only of the folktale but of all oral "literature." He describes his journey through folklore thus:

How could such a sensitive and impressionable apprentice to the folktale fail to put his own stamp on the stories he retold? In his collection, Calvino has edited, making changes in style and content, oral traditional stories {216|217} written down from traditional storytellers and then retold in nineteenth-century Italian, which Calvino has himself retranslated into twentieth-century Italian. The collectors from whose texts Calvino worked, for example, Antonio De Nino and Domenico Comparetti, [10] were cognizant of variants, as was also Calvino. Let us look at De Nino's comments: We have seen what Calvino has said in his introduction about his criteria. We can observe him at work as well through his notes, where, indeed, he tells us what he has done.

In the case of "The Florentine" (Il fiorentino), No. 76 (from Comparetti, 44) and "One-Eye" (Occhio-in-fronte), No. 115 (from De Nino, 61), both versions of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus, Calvino has felt free to place his imprint on the tale. His inventiveness is particularly striking in "The Florentine." He says in his notes to this story: "I have accentuated the character satire (of the misery of the Florentine who has nothing to boast of) in the way the story seems to demand." This characterization includes the addition of the Florentine's false explanation of how he lost his finger, which he had himself cut off when the giant's ring stuck fast to him and threatened his life: "As for the finger, he said he had cut it off mowing the grass." [12] By a flash of Calvino's wit, the reader is suddenly transferred from a realm inhabited by giants to the very contemporary and mundane world of mowing the lawn.

See what he says about No. 164, "The Dove Girl": {217|218} Calvino began with one version, then departed from the text, yet still following "other Southern versions," and ended by borrowing an episode from elsewhere. He did not make up anything new (except for the final outcome) but consciously used and manipulated traditional material.

Or take No. 161, "Rosemary" (Rosmarina), where Calvino says, "The girl's dancing to the flute music is the only thing I added, but a dance rhythm is already in the Palermo original." Calvino's notes are invaluable for assessing his relationship to the "original." Calvino also appears as himself in them, as in No. 180, "The Peacock Feather" (La penna di hu), when he says, after a very moving comment on the theme of the sacrifice of the youngest and on the ugly cry of the peacock, "I followed this Sicilian version with an unhappy ending (no resurrection of the boy), which seems in keeping with the spirit of the tale. But I replaced the pipe made from a bone of the dead boy with a reed sprung from the grave, as in many other versions. [15]

Finally, it is necessary ourselves to compare some of his "originals" with his own Italian. Because both De Nino and Comparetti translated their texts collected from the Abruzzi and Pisa, respectively, from dialect to Italian, I have chosen a text from Giuseppe Pitrè's extraordinary collection from Sicily. This text, a variant of the Cinderella story, is Gràttula-beddàttula, No. 42 from Pitrè's collection, No. 148 in Calvino's Italian edition. [16] I have analyzed only the first page or so of the Sicilian and the Italian simply as an example of what Calvino did with a dialect "original."

The first short paragraph of No. 148 is a translation, but where the Sicilian {218|219} speaks of "the biggest," "the middle one," and "the littlest" (la cchiù grànni, la mizzana, and la nica), Calvino calls them "the first," "the second," and "the third" (la prima, la seconda, and la terza). It is not clear to me why he made the change.

In the next paragraph Calvino substitutes ragazze 'girls' once where Pitrè has figghi 'children', perhaps to avoid using figlie 'daughters' twice in succession—a stylistic change. The traditional text does not mind the repetition, but the nontraditional editor considers it stylistically unacceptable. Later in the paragraph Calvino adds to walling up the doors con noi dentro 'with us inside', which is not in the Pitrè text, but omits cu saluti from Pitrè's e quannu piaci a Diu nni videmu cu saluti 'when it please God that we see you in health'. These changes seem arbitrary.

In the third paragraph Pitrè uses Lu patri 'the father' and Calvino il mercante 'the merchant', perhaps trying (as with the "first," "second," and "third" above) to avoid "folktale-ish" diction. A little further along, Pitrè's tutti li survizza di fora 'all the services of the market' becomes in Calvino simply le commissioni 'the shopping' or, translated, 'the errands'. The most striking difference so far, however, occurs at the end of the paragraph (the other differences are minor stylistic ones in the translation from dialect to standard Italian), when the father asks each girl what she wants him to bring her. In Pitrè, Rosa replies, "Tri bell' abbiti di culuri differenti" 'Three beautiful dresses of different colors,' and in Calvino the answer is "Un vestito color del cielo" 'A dress the color of the sky.' Giovannina in Pitrè wants "Zoccu voli vassia," which means, I believe, 'Whatever your lordship wants,' but in Calvino she wants "Un vestito color dei diamanti," 'A dress the color of diamonds.' The significant answer, of course, comes from Ninetta, and Calvino's translation is exact, except for transferring vossignoria 'your lordship' (Pitrè vassia) from the second sentence to the first ('Please bring me, father, a beautiful date-palm branch. If you don't may your ship move neither forward nor backward'). [17] The changes of colors are perhaps an attempt to heighten the tone of the story, but Calvino's omission of the obedient daughter's modest reply is a loss to the modern version of the tale. Whatever the reasons for the changes I have indicated, the purpose of pointing them out has been to illustrate something of the character of Calvino's editing of the original folktale's language and style.

Calvino had been asked by those who commissioned his work to do for Italian folktales what the Grimm brothers had done for the German. Compared {219|220} with the Grimms, especially Wilhelm, of course, Calvino was rather conservative. If we turn our attention then to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and ask whether they are made up of a group of transitional texts, the answer might be in the affirmative, from a quite different point of view, using criteria different from fluidity and fixity of textual sense or even from that of manipulating of texts from a nontraditional set of standards. These texts of the Grimm brothers created a Märchenstil, which was based on oral traditional tale style. This style was itself, however, to be the foundation for several kinds of literary "folktale"; for example, on the one hand the unsophisticated style of the kind of tale told to children and, on the other, the highly developed and self-conscious literary genre, neither being genuine, traditional folktale. It can be argued, I believe, that the Grimms' texts were transitional in that sense between traditional folktale and purely literary "folktale." In this sense, Calvino's texts, made on the model of the German collector-editors, are transitional texts. The case would be better if it turned out that Calvino had created in Italian a literary folktale style. But that consideration leads to another: it is possible that Calvino's texts might be considered transitional in still another way, namely, within his own writing and in the passage of narrative in his experience from oral traditional (that is, the bona fide folktales from oral tradition which he read and heard) to his own fantasy novels, such as The Baron in the Trees . The chief problem in that approach is that an outsider's "experiencing" of a folktale by reading or even hearing it, and even when it included many variants, as Calvino's did, is not the same as the telling, or even writing, of tales in the tradition of an insider. In this case, the base from which Calvino's transitional texts departed was not firsthand.

It might well be that Old English poems, such as The Phoenix, which were amplified translations or adaptations of Latin originals, for example, De ave phoenice attributed to Lactantius, can be thought of as transitional texts, using the formulaic style and traditional poetic devices of the oral traditional poetry but leading through the Latin influence to a fully developed Old English nontraditional poetry and poetics. Latin originals were translated into Anglo-Saxon poetry, but the Anglo-Saxon poets continued to compose in their traditional style and poetics for a very long period, in spite of their Latin sources. If anything, their style became more markedly and more mechanically formulaic as they lost the art of free oral formulaic composition in performance.

Robert E. Diamond and Geoffrey Russom have found indications of specific elements differentiating between oral and written style. [18] They have {220|221} shown that the translators, unlike the poet of Beowulf, have not been skilled in making Anglo-Saxon verses but have employed "fillers," for example, using the traditional style but without complete command of it. Their verses are mechanical, almost regressive in the sense that they resemble those of traditional singers not fully practiced in their art. [19] As I have observed earlier, "it may be that the transition at one end of the scale, that of learning, is paralleled by the transition at the other end, when the style is no longer dynamic, the tradition being no longer in its prime. On the other hand the new style has not yet perhaps asserted itself." [20]

But before we can go much further in trying to define and describe transitional texts, we must be clear about where they are moving from. There is one firm base, I believe, from which we may depart: oral traditional narrative and its style. I may be overestimating the firmness of the base, but I think I can defend the emphasis and describe the style and the process of composition and transmission of oral traditional narrative, be it prose or verse. After all, whichever the form, we are dealing with storytelling, and, except for the use of prose rather than verse, some of the principles of composition and transmission of stories are the same in both forms.

One should bear in mind from the outset that within the tradition the processes of both composition and transmission are by no means static; they are as dynamic as living organisms. De Nino's description, given above, stressed in its own way how difficult it was to make for an anthology a version of a tale that exists in so many variants even in the mouth of the same teller and when tales are constantly being interwoven in tradition. The problem was to harness untamed horses, to make the dynamic static. It is the dynamic process that we must first understand, a process that the traditional teller and the traditional audience comprehend instinctively.

But if there is movement, it is neither frenetic nor chaotic. There are varying tempos involved, and the mixtures are explicable through association of ideas and, we might add, also of sounds. And directing the flow and the tempo, as it were, are the tellers of tales themselves, men and women of varying talent and from various walks of life. Sometimes this variety of ability is forgotten and the teller is thought of as a passive hander-on of {221|222} tradition. If this creative role is properly understood as the reason why there are so many "variants," then the inevitability of many different levels of quality of creation and of performance becomes quite clear. Variation and interweaving are creative processes not due to lapses of memory or to confusion or mindless mixing. Such do occur, of course, at times, as does corruption, but less frequently than is imagined. Lapse of memory, after all, implies a fixed something to remember and also a mental attitude that allows of only one way of telling the "same story."

We have, then, in tradition (1) a dynamic process of composition and transmission of narrative, which produces variants and interweavings; (2) traditional tellers of varying talent who use the process subconsciously and thus create those variants and interweavings that exist only at and during performance and are, between tellings, merely latent potentials; and (3) an aesthetic peculiar to that process and its results, namely, the variants and interweavings. Just as the process is dynamic and creative, so too the aesthetics are caused not by restraints but rather by the possibilities inherent in traditional associations of idea and sound and their overtones established by past usages and shared by all the members of that tradition, both tellers and listeners.

With those elements—a process, tellers, and an aesthetic—in mind, let us look at what "transitional" might mean. One might expect, first, that there would be some kind of change in process; second, that there would be some kind of change in personnel; and third, that there would be a change in aesthetics resulting from the first two changes. As the tellers are, I believe, the key to the process, because they probably originated and surely operate it, and they and the process they operate are the keys to the aesthetics, let us look at the tellers of tales, or other figures who produce texts, who may not be tellers themselves, but mediators.

I have divided those who deal with texts into insiders (that is, members of the traditional group, including singers) and outsiders (that is, those who are not members of the traditional group, who, therefore, approach the text without the assumptions and sense of values that members of the group share with one another). I have further divided all these people into (1) collectors, collector-editors, and editors, (2) retellers, and (3) imitators.

The outsiders, who come to the tradition and have an effect on some texts, are probably the first to try to harness the wild horses. Collectors, collector-editors, and editors deal directly with oral traditional texts, working with someone else's creations, which they record or modify in some way, Calvino as an editor is in this group. They do not themselves create the primary texts, except insofar as they may put into writing, through dictation, what the creator tells them. There are many kinds of collectors and {222|223} collector-editors. What determines their species is that they write down a text and for the first time bring the idea of the static into the tradition. But most of the time, text in hand, they have left their informant and the tradition behind, in reality practically untouched. Collectors in such cases have frozen an infinitesimal part of tradition and carried it away to study, to enjoy, to show to others. Ideally they have written down their texts exactly as the story tellers have told them. If they have done so, then those texts are oral traditional, dictated texts. These people have, then, some respect for the primary text and either maintain it scrupulously or change it in varying degrees and for a variety of reasons. Their texts constitute the first move in the direction of a written literary text, because they manipulate an oral traditional text with other than traditional criteria and for nontraditional purposes: the text thus produced is intended for a nontraditional audience. It is not a transitional text, but it has moved away from the purely oral traditional one.

Milman Parry is a prime example of an outsider who respected the exact text of the epic singer. He collected some lyric songs and some tales as well and was as scrupulous in regard to their texts as he was with the epic songs. I believe that I myself and David Bynum qualify also as collector-editors. Like Parry's, our goal in collecting and editing has been to record texts as accurately as possible and to present them in print as exactly as possible.

In the nineteenth century in Sarajevo the Austrian Kosta Hörmann, a collector-editor, to judge from his texts and from his commentary and the later work on his manuscripts by Đenana Buturović, seems also to have been a respecter of texts. [21] In the last quarter of that same century, Luka Marjanović was a careful field collector among the Moslems in northern Bosnia in the Bihačka Krajina, but his editing left something to be desired. I have given in Chapter 1 an account of the practices of Marjanović as an editor and have noted examples of the changes he made in the published texts from the poems as they were written down in manuscript by dictation. The style of the poets has been changed according to an outsider's judgment of what is proper. Marjanović's texts, therefore, cannot be used with full confidence to study traditional style because they have in part been detraditionalized.

Another significant group consists of people who retell stories. They may be collectors also. They create their own text, without using any of the "original." When we are talking about folktale we say that the retellers are telling the story in their own words: that means that they ignore even more {223|224} than some types of editors (and even collectors) the characteristic traits (such as repetition) of the oral traditional text. It is impossible to check the retellers' text against the "original" because the original, that is, the one or ones they heard, were not set down at the time. The retellers do not produce an oral traditional text, essentially because their style is not the traditional style of the traditional group—to which they do not belong. Are their texts transitional? I honestly do not see how they could be, because they have already made the leap by choosing as their creators nontraditional persons, who bring their own styles to the texts. The tales went into another world to be born again in these new forms. Their creators, being outsiders, had different criteria from those of the tradition. The retellers, as a matter of fact, belong only in the world of the folktale, because retelling in one's own traditional diction is what we mean by oral traditional composition and transmission.

At this point the question arises—and this might have a bearing on Calvino's case—Are there not outsiders who have made themselves as familiar with a given tradition as an insider? I am not sure that is entirely possible, but I expect that the answer should be a somewhat, even slightly, qualified, affirmative. Obviously the degree of familiarity would depend on length of stay in the tradition, sensitivity to it, and other personal characteristics. What we are talking about in essence is an outsider becoming an insider.

In addition to the collectors and editors and retellers, there are those who imitate the oral traditional style more or less effectively. If the content of their poems is pseudotraditional, they might be classified as transitional. Their texts may look as if they were oral traditional, but their subjects and stories are not genuine traditional subjects or narratives. If, however, the content of their poems is nontraditional, I would classify them as written literary texts.

Let us now consider the insiders. By insiders I mean members of the traditional community, those who listen to and know the traditional songs and stories. They are the singer's audience. This group includes, of course, the singer or storyteller. The traditional singer may himself create a new song, a "transitional" text. I am thinking here of such a singer as Filip Višnjić, who made up songs about the Serbian uprising at the request of Karadžić. These were new songs, that is, they were about events that had actually happened. When songs consist of traditional themes, they are traditional even if new and even if never sung by anyone else again. But when Višnjić tried to recount history, departing from the traditional themes (although his style was certainly authentic), he created a nontraditional song. No other singer could learn it and sing it without memorizing it. Was it "transitional"?

Whereas singers like Višnjić never learn to write and never produce new {224|225} songs beyond an occasional tour de force at someone's request, the traditional singer who becomes a written poet goes all the way. The prime example is Njegoš, to whom I return later.

There is a transitional period in the life of epic in Serbo-Croatian beginning with Andrija Kačić-Miošić's Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskoga, "A Pleasant Discourse of the Slavic People," in 1756 and including Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864), Vuk Vrčević (1811-82), Sima Milutinović-Sarajlija (1791-1847), and Luka Marjanović in the later nineteenth century. Songs were collected, edited, and created. Collecting and editing were done to some extent by all of these figures, even Kačić (1704-60). Karadžić, Vrčević, and Marjanović were primarily collector-editors, not themselves singers or creators, although I am not sure but that Karadžić may have made up some songs, and perhaps Vrčević did also. Milutinović and Njegoš wrote epics of their own, that is, written literary epics, and they also collected traditional songs and created new ones.

After Kačić in particular, although beginning even earlier, it seems that everyone began to make up epic songs. It was a period of great creativity of sorts. From Kačić's time, the line between oral traditional epic and the new songs in its style became very blurred. The forces behind this thrust were didacticism and nationalism. These two forces met in an interest in history or expressed themselves in a preoccupation with history. Kačić wrote a history of the South Slavs in a medium all could understand, the traditional epic decasyllabics. Milutinović and Njegoš, to say nothing of Karadžić, were also interested in the history of their own people, the Serbs and Montenegrins. The cults of the gusle and of the hero were under way. A tradition of local songs of stealing sheep or wives was rapidly becoming a history of Montenegro. The Serbian uprising was being documented in epic song at the request of Karadžić. The Orthodox South Slavs were rising against the Turks. New things were happening in history and in the culture as well. Modern Serbian and Montenegrin literature was being born. The Middle Ages in Serbia and Montenegro—in fact, in most of the Balkans—had lasted into the eighteenth century. Toward its end, a new cultural spirit was beginning, which was to grow and reach full strength very quickly in the nineteenth. And history meant epic song to these men. They sought to sing and write history as it was known to them and to fill in the gaps with their own creations. The old style was being recreated or remade, sometimes gradually, to suit the new requirements.

The transitional period, then, in the general culture of the area formed the natural background for the creation of several kinds of transitional songs together with the collection of hundreds of authentic oral traditional epics {225|226} from the tellings and singings of traditional singers and poets. As transitional figures, Andrija Kačić-Miošić, the Franciscan monk in the Catholic regions of Dalmatia, Croatia, and among the Catholics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Montenegrin prince-bishop Peter II Petrović Njegoš among the Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins stand out, although they were not alone.

Although Kačić was a collector-editor by reason of two oral traditional songs he included in the Razgovor (which he himself identified as such), it is primarily as an outsider writing pseudotraditional songs and nontraditional poems in the oral traditional style, or an imitation thereof, that we are interested in him. As I have described in The Singer of Tales,

There are two questions about Kačić that one must keep separate. The first concerns formula density. Rudy S. Spraycar has demonstrated by means of computer analysis a high degree of formulicity in the poetry of Kačić, a literate monk, as high as the formula count in a sample of the poetry of the oral singer Salih Ugljanin. [23] That there are many formulas in Kačić's Razgovor is not surprising, as its poems were deliberately written in the oral style, based on the epics that he had often heard. To differentiate between the songs of a Salih Ugljanin and the poetry of Kačić, other aspects of style must be considered. The second question is whether Kačić's poems, or some of those in epic decasyllabics at least, are transitional texts. The two questions are related, but it is only the second that concerns me here.

There are 157 poems in the Razgovor, a few of which are written in symmetrical (4 + 4) octosyllables, but most in asymmetric (4 + 6) epic decasyllables. I have investigated only the decasyllabic poems for this chapter, but I have observed the octosyllabic ones also. Moreover, among the decasyllabic poems I have been particularly interested in those that are like the oral traditional epic songs in content as well as in meter.

Of the first fifteen poems, two (Nos. 2 and 3) are octosyllabic and thirteen {226|227} are decasyllabic. The openings of Nos. 1, 5-15, and possibly 4 are like the openings of oral traditional epics. No. 1 begins:

These lines certainly not only look like familiar openings of oral traditional epics but actually are such. We need to follow the song further, of course, and shall. But it would be interesting to look for their parallels in early pre-Kačić seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts. Kačić had a great influence on the oral traditional epic in the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, as we shall see. To be on the safe side, let us look for earlier examples. Compare the opening of No. 1 with that of Valtazar Bogišić's No. 117, Kako Ivan Krušić senjski kapetan hitro ugrabi Jelicu svoju sestru zarobljenu iz rukih Muje Jeleškovića Turčina, "How Ivan Krušić, Captain of Senj, Cleverly Rescued Jelica, His Sister, Captured by Muja Jelešković, a Turk":

Though the openings of Kačić's songs may be oral traditional beyond any doubt, as we proceed we see new nontraditional elements appearing. The second stanza of Kačić No. 1, which has the title Pisma Radovana i Mjelovana, "A Song of Radovan and Mjelovan," betrays an element foreign to the oral traditional epic, namely, consistent end rhyme:

The frame of the song is an exchange of letters. Radovan's letter to Mjelovan goes from line 7 to line 28; line 29 introduces Mjelovan's reply in {227|228} the traditional fashion—odpisuje starac Mjelovane: "Old Mjelovan wrote in reply:"—a regular and very familiar formula. Mjelovan's answer goes from line 30 to line 72, the end of the poem. An exchange of letters is a common theme in traditional epic, but it is generally part of a larger action, not a song in itself.

Moreover, the content of the letters is nontraditional; as a matter of fact, it is a contrived literary conceit. Radovan writes: Mjelovan answers:

This is not heroic epic. The line is the traditional epic decasyllable with an attempt at consistent rhyming couplets, as illustrated above, or an ababrhyme scheme, as in: There are, of course, a number of traditional formulas or formulaic lines, such as the first seven lines of the poem and line 29, the formulaic introduction to a reply in writing, which constitute the frame of the exchange of letters. All these familiar marks of the traditional style and even theme are there to be sure. But to return to the content of the letters themselves, it is not traditional epic story. Whence does it come?

A literary epistolary genre was well developed in Dubrovnik and on the Dalmatian islands already in the sixteenth century. One thinks immediately of Hektorović's Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje, "A Fishing Excursion and Fishermen's Incidental Conversation," of 1556, which is in the form of a {228|229} letter from Hektorović to an aristocratic friend of his in Dubrovnik. [26] The letters in Kačić No. 1 stem from that literary genre, not from the traditional epic, although the formulas of the frame are traditional. Hektorović and other epistolary writers wrote in literary dodecasyllables, not decasyllables. And the dodecasyllable, like rhyme, was an Italian import, with a long history through the Middle Ages in Italy and the Renaissance.

Kačić's poem is an imitation of the traditional style, a conscious writing in it, to make the content available, as Kačić himself said, to the larger public, the traditional audience whose style he is imitating. The use of that style was not because there was no other vernacular literary style he could use, as was the case in Anglo-Saxon. The content of the letters themselves actually reminds us that there was another vernacular literary style with a long literary tradition behind it. There was, indeed, known to Kačić a highly developed literature in a richly ornamented style, one that he used in his octosyllabic poems, one in which he had been brought up and which was several centuries old by his time. It had been formed under influences from Italian literature in the aristocratic milieu of the coastal cities. Kačić's use of the epic decasyllable is really a conscious imitation, not a natural and necessary development from traditional oral usage.

Traditional singers did not take up the singing in rhymed couplets, although there were eventually some poets who wrote and adapted traditional formulaic decasyllable to a consistent rhyme scheme, as did Kačić. In time also some singers occasionally memorized written poems in rhymed couplets, such as some of Kačić's poems themselves and a later Kosovo song in rhymed couplets which became very popular in Montenegro and Serbia. I last recorded it in the district west of Niš in 1967. The introduction of pervasive rhyme is not a change that would have come from within in the South Slavic tradition. It was brought in from outside; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the traditional stylistic elements were brought into the literary tradition. Such a poem as Kačić No. 1 in Razgovor seems to me for these very reasons to be literary rather than transitional.

I do not know whether consistent rhyming is characteristic of written literature in all cultures; each case should be studied in its own context and history. I am thinking especially, of course, of the Nibelungenlied. Anglo-Saxon verse and the Old Norse Eddic poetry, the oldest Germanic poetries we have, do not have rhyme. [27] If the Middle High German Nibelungenlied's {229|230} rhyming comes from literary influence, where does that influence come from? As I have said, the South Slavic case is clear. Italian influence in the early sixteenth century, if not earlier, in the Petrarchan sonnets of "The Collection of Vinko Ranjina," [28] with twelve-syllable lines rhyming both in the middle and the end of a couplet, developed also in the octosyllables of Gundulić's Osman in the seventeenth century, [29] and was applied to the epic decasyllable both by Filip Grabovac and by Kačić in the eighteenth. Each culture has its own history.

Grabovac preceded Kačić in the literary use of decasyllables in writing history in the early part of the eighteenth century. Grabovac used them in his Cvit razgovora naroda i jezika iliričkoga aliti rvackoga, "An Anthology of the Entertaining Discourse of the Illyrian or Croatian People and Language." Of his three poems in decasyllables, two are developed-narrative, heroic epics, buthe composed them throughout in rhymed couplets. The content in this case is traditional; the meter of the line is traditional; but the rhymed couplets are not. Although rhymed couplets occur occasionally in oral traditional epic, the songs do not consist solely of them. Their use makes a difference in the formulaic diction. Though the first line of the couplets is usually formulaic, the order of the words in the second line is sometimes changed to accommodate the rhyme, or the wording is forced and nonformulaic. A single example suffices for the moment. The lines are an accommodation of a very traditional pair of formulaic lines to the nontraditional written literary rhyme. These are traditional lines: Biše 'it was' is awkward and distorts the natural flow of the traditional formulas. One can see in such examples the traditional style changing to a {230|231} literary style before one's very eyes. Because of the traditional type of content and the many traditional formulaic lines on the one hand and the nontraditional rhymed couplets on the other, one might call these poems by Grabovac transitional. For me, however, I must confess that the rhymed couplets in themselves place the poems in the literary rather than transitional category.

Kačić's poems were composed in quatrains. This is itself a nontraditional element, but it does not of necessity distort the formulas in the way in which rhyme does. Some quatrains consist of rhymed couplets; in some the rhyming follows an abab pattern, some have only a few rhymed couplets, and some are unrhymed. The quatrains themselves and the rhyming schemes were drawn by Grabovac and Kačić from the literary tradition in which both were brought up. They were, after all, in our terms, outsiders, with a written literary training and style of their own. They chose to use the traditional decasyllabic line and the formulaic style of the oral traditional epic so that what they wrote would be accessible to those for whom those stylistic elements were natural.

Both Grabovac and Kačić were clearly well versed in the oral traditional style. This is so true of Kačić that many of his poems are indistinguishable from pure oral traditional songs. In those, he shows himself as an outsider who has become an insider, or who can compose as one. He has written traditional songs. In the poems in which he uses rhyme in any consistent way, however, we may have imitation and transitional texts. One should be aware of the fact that not all of Kačić's poems are alike. Poem No. 4 on the four holy namesakes, four Saints Sava, is strongly medieval. The content is not characteristic of oral traditional style; the quatrains contain two rhymed couplets. Kačić praises a hermit Sava in Palestine; then he describes the martyrdom of two other Savas, one a monk martyred by King Atanarik, the other a captain in Rome, whose sufferings are set forth in detail. Kačić finally comes to the Serbian Saint Sava, founder of Hilandar monastery on Mount Athos. Some of the familiar formulas appear, such as in the enumeration of the four saints: (But cvitak kalopere belongs in lyric, not epic.) {231|232} (The second line is not traditional epic.) (But with ruža izabrana we are again with flowers and lyrics.)

And other formulaic lines such as the familiar Malo vrime postojalo biše, "A little time had passed" (97), followed in rhyme by the unfamiliar za biskupa Sava učiniše, "[when] they made Sava bishop," make us realize that the formulaic style is there in the background. To me, this poem is more "written literary" than transitional, although I can understand why some critics might disagree.

There are instances of familiar motifs, or short themes. For example, changing clothes happens from time to time in traditional epic, when the hero prepares himself for departure or battle. Sava in this poem changes in lines 73-74: Or there is a theme associated more with hajduks than with saints:

In No. 5, "The Song of Radoslav," a subject we know from the "Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja" in particular, [31] rhyming is only sporadic. The subject, namely, the ousting of Radoslav by his son, involves the gathering and moving of armies and is more heroic than the song previously considered. As a result the formulaic language is more familiar than in No. 4. Yet we are aware that it is not as purely traditional as, let us say, No. 42, although the latter has a few moments that are not traditional. Song No. 42 is about Janko Sibinjanin's defense of Belgrade from the Turks in 1456. It seems to me that Kačić's poems like Nos. 5 and 42 are excellent candidates for the transitional text.

I turn finally to Petar Petrović Njegoš II (1813–51). Unlike either Kačić or Calvino, who, although they were deeply immersed in oral traditional art, were not themselves actual practitioners of it, Njegoš began in his early youth as an oral traditional poet. He had learned to sing epic songs to the gusle, as had his father also.

It is not necessary here to treat Njegoš's career as a poet in full; for I have already given an account of it elsewhere. [32] For our present purposes it is important to note that Njegoš learned to read and write in the monastery at Cetinje in 1825. He studied under tutors, one of whom was Sima Milutinović-Sarajlija, to whom his development as a poet can be attributed. In general, Njegoš was, however, largely self-taught. Part of his library and correspondence has been destroyed and dispersed, but what remains helps to provide a knowledge of his wide reading, which included, for example, Homer, Pindar, and the ancient Greek tragedians. [33] He traveled, moreover, to Russia, Austria, and Italy. When he returned from Russia in 1834, he founded the first school in Montenegro and brought in the first printing press in 1835. Education was under way.

When Njegoš was still very young, before he was twenty, he began to make up songs himself. Milutinović published five of them in the second edition (1837) of his Pjevanija crnogorska i hercegovačka, "A Montenegrin and Herzegovinian Songbook," and noted that the first of these songs was written before Njegoš became prince-bishop (vladika) of Montenegro in 1833, succeeding his uncle, Bishop Petar I Petrović. It is in these new songs, {233|234} five of which are characterized by Vido Latković as folk epics, [34] that we trace the beginnings of written or literary influence on Njegoš's purely traditional style. One of the songs, No. 25, Crmničani, "The Crmničani," opens in a traditional way: Another, No. 56, Mali Radojica,"Little Radojica," begins: Except for muški plaču 'manfully wept', this is all traditional epic wording; it would be familiar to anyone knowing the traditional songs.

In still another song, however, Nova pjesna crnogorska, "A New Montenegrin Song," there are elements not belonging to traditional style which reflect the cult of the gusle and the influence of Serbian nationalism. After a contrived invocation to the vila asking that she "bring together all voices into the gusle," the song itself opens with a statement of the date, "In one thousand eight hundred / and half of the twenty-seventh year," an element not found in truly traditional epic. [37] Because of these nontraditional features we are justified in considering the period of Njegoš's output of "new songs" written by himself and not learned from singers, as transitional between the oral style and the written.

Later in life, Njegoš became a fully literary poet and used the ten-syllable line for his great poems, Luča mikrokozma, "The Ray of the Microcosm," and Gorski vijenac, "The Mountain Wreath." The philosophical and mystical poem The Ray of the Microcosm is described by William Jovanovich in his {234|235} preface to Milovan Djilas's book Njegoš thus: "Like Paradise Lost it attempts to comprehend the unresolved struggle between good and evil that is told in the myth of Satan's rebellion against Heaven. This is the conflict within each man that by extension delineates the affairs of all men." [38] This poem reverberates with echoes of Plato; the church fathers, especially Origen; Philo; Dante; Neomanichaeism; and Milton, as well as with native Montenegrin influences. [39]

The Mountain Wreath is about the massacre of Slavic converts to Islam in Montenegro at the end of the eighteenth century, an episode that is not authenticated by historical record. The work is replete with descriptions of the local life, beliefs, struggles, and aspirations of the Montenegrin people. A third work, Šćepan mali "Stephen the Small," is a historical drama recounting the rule in Montenegro in the late eighteenth century of a charlatan who posed as the legitimate czar of Russia.

Thus the remarkable life and literary career of Njegoš embraced all three stages, the oral traditional, the transitional, and the fully literate styles.

We have now considered various kinds of evidence for the existence of transitional texts. Calvino set out to translate, into modern Italian, folktales that had been collected in dialect from the lips of oral storytellers. His style reflects the directness and vividness of the original tales. Because he scrupulously recorded the collected source for each tale, one is able to compare the "original" with Calvino's version. It is apparent that he injected his own sense of style into his translation. We have seen, for example, that he elevated the "three beautiful dresses of different colors" to the more highly charged "a dress the color of the sky" and that he changed the modest request of "whatever your lordship wants" to "a dress the color of diamonds." In his helpful notes he states when he combines in one tale its different variants or when he adds whimsically satiric touches of character, as in the ending of "The Florentine." He was, therefore, not a mere conveyor of the tales he translated but a writer of texts that are reasonably to be regarded as transitional between their oral originals and a written literary version.

Kačić-Miošić in his Razgovor ugodni narodna slovinskoga not only introduced two songs taken from oral singers, identified as such, but also added many songs of his own, which are highly formulaic in style. Kačić was not himself a singer, but a literate Franciscan monk. It is difficult to distinguish some of Kačić's songs from oral poems, and some of these may be regarded as transitional in style. Many of his poems, however, reveal signs of the pen, {235|236} namely, the use of rhymed couplets and quatrains. As this usage can be traced to previous learned tradition, it has seemed best to consider such poems as examples of a style that has already passed into the literary and learned, rather than the intermediate, transitional stage, of writing.

In the literary production of Njegoš it has been possible to identify all three stages of composition, the truly oral epics of his earliest youth, the transitional style of some of his "new songs," and the fully literate style of his masterpieces, The Ray of the Microcosm and The Mountain Wreath .

Our forays into the works of these three writers have shown that there is such an entity as the transitional text. The proof of its existence, however, has depended on an intimate acquaintance with the underlying oral tradition and likewise upon familiarity with the possible learned influences at play in each instance. To judge the bounds of the transitional stage one must have a firm foothold in both the oral and the learned literary traditions.

There is one field, I think, to which the foregoing remarks about transitional texts have less relevance than to others. That is the Homeric poems; for it is clear, I believe, that they are not transitional texts but the work of an oral traditional singer. The world of Homer was a far cry from the world of the Latin-surrounded medieval vernacular poetry or from that of Kačić or Njegoš with their learned traditions. On another level, the Slavic oral traditional literatures, including the Russian byliny, the Ukrainian dumy, as well as the South Slavic, both Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian heroic songs, as noted down in the past two centuries, have served as a primary source for our knowledge of the way in which still-living traditions function in their societies.

One of the most striking things to note and to emphasize in this connection before I conclude is that the great poets in any of the oral traditional literatures with which I am acquainted—Homer, Avdo Međedović, the Beowulf poet, the poet of the Oxford Roland (and, I should like very much to add, of the Nibelungenlied)—stand out in their traditions because they go beyond such strictures as a rigidly formulaic style. One feels this in Homer, of course; one feels it as one listens to Avdo singing his tremendous songs, the lines of description and narrative pouring forth with an impatient intensity that at times reminds one of Homer; I have felt it, as have others also, in the way in which the Beowulf poet tells his story. These poets were not thinking of style; they were creating it. They were full of their story and completely engaged in the all-consuming task of telling it grandly.

In conclusion, the prospect of further elucidating the processes of the development of vernacular oral traditional literature is exciting as new {236|237} insights are brought to bear on the poetry and prose of the Middle Ages and later times. In spite of the great progress already made, we have still far to go. But the rewards are great; in my mind, perhaps the greatest is simply to become more intimately acquainted with the extraordinarily intricate and variegated literatures themselves.