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E-Companion to How to Read an Oral Poem



Welcome to the e-companion to How to Read an Oral Poem by John Miles Foley (http://www.press.uillinois.edu/f02/foley.html). This resource provides photo, audio, video, and bibliographic support for the various chapters or "words" in that book. The site has been designed to offer examples and additional information that are best presented via the web, the kinds of materials that don't fit comfortably between the covers of a conventional book. In this sense we're trying to take advantage of both media -- book and web -- and to underline the kinship between oral poetry and the Internet (a subject discussed in HROP).

A few tips on how to use what you'll find here. To start, you can navigate most successfully with the book in one hand and your mouse in the other. The various materials can be located by clicking first on Table of Contents and then following the links. The individual items available include: a complete table of contents, photographs to illustrate the Four Scenarios, an audio clip of lines from Beowulf in the original Old English (to accompany the First Word), a video of Lynne Procope performing her slam poem, "elemental woman" (to accompany the Fourth Word), photos of slam poets performing at the Nuyorican (to accompany the Seventh Word), an audio recording of a healing charm from the Former Yugoslavia (with text and English translation, to accompany the Eighth Word), an original-language text and English translation of a healing charm (to accompany the Eighth Word), and an audio recording of The Widow Jana, an epic from the Former Yugoslavia (also with text and English translation, to accompany the Eighth Word). In addition, clicking on Annotated Bibliography will bring you a version of HROP's bibliography with each book and article summarized in a few sentences.

So much for the basic content of the e-companion. We will be adding materials and links as appropriate in the future, seeking to make the site an ever more useful resource for those interested in how to read an oral poem.

We welcome suggestions for additions, modifications, and other improvements to www.oraltradition.org. Oral tradition is a vast and complex phenomenon, and we need your help to make this site as useful as possible. Please send any feedback to John Foley.

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How to Read an Oral Poem

• HROP Home
  Four Scenarios
  First Word: What is Oral Poetry
  Fourth Word: Verbal art on its own terms: Ethnopoetics
  Seventh Word: Reading Some Oral Poems
  
  Eighth Word: An Ecology of South Slavic Oral Poetry
  
• Annotated Bibliography

http://oraltradition.org/hrop/

[ 本帖最后由 朝戈金 于 2009-1-9 01:59 编辑 ]

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Four Scenarios
As an opening gambit, this section of How to Read an Oral Poem features four oral poets: Grags-pa seng-ge, a Tibetan paper-singer; a North American slam poet (the photo is of Aya DeLeon at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe); Bongani Sithole, a South African praise-poet; and Homer, an ancient Greek epic bard. More remarkable in their diversity than for any single shared characteristic, these examples give some small sense of the enormous variety of oral poetry from all different parts of the world and from ancient times to the present day. You can view the poets by clicking on the links below; the page numbers for the corresponding descriptions in the book are given in parentheses.  1. A Tibetan Paper Singer (See HROP, pp. 1-3.)
Grag-pa seng-ge, a Tibetan paper-singer, "reading" an oral poem.
Photograph by Yang Engong.




2. A North American Slam Poet (See HROP, pp. 3-5.)Aya DeLeon slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Photograph by by J. M. Foley.




3. A South African Praise Poet (See HROP, pp. 5-7.)Bongani Sithole, a South African imbongi.
Photograph by Russell Kaschula.




4. An Ancient Greek Bard (See HROP, pp. 8-10.)
An ancient Greek aoidos sings oral poetry to the accompaniment of a kithara. From a red-figure amphora by the Berlin Painter.
The Metropoloitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1956. (50.171.38)




http://oraltradition.org/hrop/four_scenarios

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First Word: What is Oral Poetry?
As explained on pages 30-34 of HROP, even so basic a concept as a poetic line varies dramatically from one oral poetry to another. Relatively seldom, in fact, does it turn out to mirror the syllabic, foot-structured increment with which most modern Western readers are familiar. As illustration of that principle of diversity, I provide here a short reading from Beowulf, in the original Old English language. As you will hear, Old English poetic lines depend not on syllables and feet but on stresses and alliteration. Here is the passage in question, lines 51-54 of the epic poem Beowulf from the Anglo-Saxon oral tradition:

Modern English translation
to say in truth, hall-counselors,
heroes under the heavens, who received that burden.
Then in the strongholds was Beowulf of the Scyldings,
beloved nation-king, for a long time.

Old English original
secgan to sothe, seleraedende
haeleth under heofenum, hwa thaem hlaeste onfeng.
Tha waes on burgum Beowulf Scyldinga,
leof leodcyning longe thrage.

Now click on the link below to hear how these four lines sounded.

Beowulf (lines 51-54)

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Fourth Word: Verbal art on its own terms: Ethnopoetics
Slam poetry really must be experienced in order to be fully appreciated. Like almost all oral poetry, its natural venue is performance. Thanks to the generosity of Lynne Procope, we are able to make available as part of this e-companion her live performance of her poem "elemental woman," which is discussed on pages 97-102 of HROP. The book offers an ethnopoetic scoring or "script" for the live performance and compares it to a published version of the same poem. Or is it the same? Predictably, for all of its coding of loudness, intonation, gesture, and other features, the script falls far short of re-creating the experience. Even though transcriptions can help us understand what makes an oral poem, the page can never entirely simulate the performance.

Click on one of the links below to join Lynne Procope's audience.

Slam Poetry Video: Windows Media (8.2MB) | MPEG (8.9MB)


Useful Links

www.bowerypoetry.com	NYC Urbana Slam
www.a2slam.com	Ann Arbor Poetry Slam
www.austinslam.com	Austin Poetry Slam
www.livepoets.com	A collection of slam video archived over the last couple of years
swco.ttu.edu/aton_html/turkishlist.htm	Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative
www.thewordsmithpress.com	Defending the honor and heritage of self-publishing with tips to writers, performers, and self-publishers. Some of the best performance poets working the English language today.

http://oraltradition.org/hrop/fourth_word

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Seventh Word: Reading Some Oral Poems

The photographs below document the Dead Poets Team Slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which took place on March 30, 2001, and is discussed on pages 156-65 of HROP. The photographs follow the same sequence as did the event, with the emcee, Nathan P., leading off and a portrait of the "aftermath of the ritual" at the other end. Each one is numbered to correspond with the book; page numbers are also provided.

With the book in one hand and a mouse in the other, you can get a sense of how the slam proceeded that night.

1. Nathan P. (p. 157) 2. Thomas Lynch (p. 158) 3. Nathan P. (p. 158) 4. Juan Martinez (p. 159) 5. Aya DeLeon (p. 159) 6. Sparrow (p. 160) 7. Yolanda Wilkinson (p. 160) 8. Dan Ferri (p. 160) 9. Dwaywah Frazier (p. 160) 10. Marj Hahne (p. 160) 11. Jonathan Reeve (p. 160) 12. Jonathan Reeve (p. 161) 13. Marj Hahne (p. 162) 14. Dwaywah Frazier (p. 162) 15. Dan Ferri (p. 162) 16. Yolanda Wilkinson (p. 162) 17. Sparrow (p. 162-163) 18. Aya DeLeon (p. 163) 19. Juan Martinez (p. 163) 20. Monique Baptiste (p. 163) 21. Aftermath of the Ritual (p. 163)


Links

www.nuyorican.org	Nuyorican Poets Cafe web site
www.poetryslam.com	Poetry Slam Inc. web site
www.citylore.org	City Lore web site

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Eighth Word: An Ecology of South Slavic Oral Poetry
Bajanje: A healing charm to cure erysipelas
Lament for Milorad
The Widow Jana
Epic Singers

Bajanje: A healing charm to cure erysipelas Play the audio clip


These two performances of bajanje were given to us by Desanka Matijasevic (DM), longtime resident and prominent bajalica (conjurer) in the Serbian village of Orasac. She is summoning a series of agents or helpers, all coded with the color red, to assist her in curing a patient afflicted with erysipelas, a streptococcus skin infection. As the clip begins, she and Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern (BKH), my co-fieldworker, are discussing the dynamics of such magical spells; sitting alongside them is DM's daughter Nada, who occasionally joins the conversation. The conjurer's most immediate pomocnik ("helper"), her six-year-old grandson, occupies the older woman's lap.  Eager to be part of things, the little boy prompts his grandmother with a partial verse from the charm he has apparently heard many times before: "Kako do-dodje, tak-..." ("As he comes, so [he approaches]"; see version B1, line 5). Anticipating that DM is about to begin and noticing her nervousness in performing for the tape recorder, his mother Nada appreciatively and gently deflects his enthusiasm. "Oh no, granny's starting now, so just listen," she chides, and the first performance is underway. You can follow along by consulting the original-language transcription and English translation (version B1). The first performance ends with two verses that always close this kind of charm, no matter what variations occur within the given version:

U kurjaka cetiri noge, peti rep,
Od mog odgovora j' bio lek.
Into the wolf's four legs, fifth the tail,
Out of my speaking has come the cure.

The second performance of the bajanje against erysipelas was prompted by BKH's question about an alternate form for the magical spell. On our first visit we had heard DM employ mysterious adjectives like aloviti ("wavy" or "powerful") and viloviti ("lively" or "magical") to describe the agents she was summoning from the other world to assist her in rooting out the disease. DM quickly recognizes what is wanted and immediately launches into a version that illustrates the fundamental role (and rule) of multiformity in oral poetry - variation within limits. Listen closely and you will hear many lines and groups of lines from the first performance, but with substitutions and inversions. Rules and patterns unquestionably govern the bajalica's charm-making, but they never fossilize her words, which remain a performed utterance, a living "word." For further discussion, see HROP, pages 190-95.


Lament for Milorad
View the text with English translation
The kind of oral poetry that villagers call tuzbalica is a very important - because highly functional - type of verbal art in the community. When a person dies, the closest female relative composes a mourning poem, based on two sources: the specialized octosyllabic idiom assigned uniquely to this kind of poetry and individualized facts and events from the life of the deceased person. In the case of the example cited here, the task was particularly difficult. Instead of passing away after a full life, the young boy Milorad was the victim of a freak accident: he was struck by lightning while crossing a field on the way home from a regional fair. Nonetheless, his mother manages to turn this tradtional "way of speaking" to an unprecedented purpose, formulating a poem that embodies her and the community's pointed and specific sadness while framing her grief within a familiar frame of reference. Custom calls for the performance to be repeated, always at the gravesite, at gradually increasing intervals for up to five years. For further discussion, see HROP, pages 195-99.


The Widow Jana
Audio plus Original-language text and English translation
Aleksandar Jakovljevic sang this performance of The Widow Jana for anthropologists Joel Halpern and Barbara Kerewsky Halpern in the village of Orasac in 1951. It belongs to the Christian tradition of epic, and to the category of "unfaithful mother" stories, which seem to provide a negative or inverse example of proper behavior for the community. You can listen to Jakovlejvic's performance by clicking on the appropriate link below, as well as follow along with the original-language text and English translation by clicking on the thumbnailed pages. I have provided a copy of the complete article, "Udovica Jana: A Case Study of an Oral Performance," J.M. Foley and B.K. Halpern, Slavonic and East European Review, 54 (1976): 11-23. For further discussion, see HROP, pages 207-8.


Epic Singers
Halil Bajgoric, a guslar from Dabrica in the Former Yugoslavia. Photo by A. B. Lord. Courtesy of the Curators of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard University. (See HROP, pp. 211-13.)



Ibro Basic, a guslar from Stolac in the Former Yugoslavia. Photo by A. B. Lord. Courtesy of the Curators of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard University. (See HROP, pp. 210.)


Useful Links

www.rastko.org.yu/isk/nmilosevic-oral_tradition.html	"The Oral Serbian Tradition," by Nada Milosevic-Djordjevic
home.earthlink.net/~markdlew/SerbEpic/	Serbian Epic Poetry, examples and background

http://oraltradition.org/hrop/eighth_word