The File on H.

8

March 14, Buffalo Inn

WE >WERE EXPECTING the weather to get a bit milder, but suddenly winter has returned with a vengeance.

Fortunately, the cold has not prevented us from making more recordings. Some of them are rerecordings of the same rhapsode, and thafs our main triumph.

Our hypotheses about forgetting are being borne out all the time: none of the rerecordings is identical to the first versions. Sung afresh after a week or more (we have no material with a shorter time span), every ballad already bears the first sign of the process of forgetting.

Does this sign foretell the poem’s ultimate disappearancef Is it the germ of the disease that will eventually kill it? Or is it, on the contrary, the serum that will protect the ballad from time’s attrition? From what we know, it seems that the last conjecture is nearer to the truth.

So we are getting evidence of what we dimly suspected back in New York:

The loss of material from oral epic has nothing to do with the limits of men’s power to memorize.

Forgetting is a constituent part of the laboratory.

Just as in the metabolism of living beings, so in oral poetry, death is what guarantees that life goes on.

The question that we first asked — is the forgetting intentional or accidental? — now seems to us too naive. None of the rhapsodes has answered the question so far; but it was not just that no one answered, every one we asked appeared not to understand the question. It seems to me that both kinds of forgetting are part of the process, but are related to each other in ways that remain a mystery (a providential term in this sort of work!).

I must add that omission is only one side of the coin. The other side, which is closely related, is constituted by additions. Lahuta players add lines as often as they leave lines out.

Then we must tackle an apparently vital issue: what is the rate of loss by any given measure of time — by ten weeks, by ten years, by two hundred fifty years, by a millennium … ?

At first glance you would think that the epic corpus is in a state of partial but progressive decay; but the sheer age of the corpus serves to contradict that view.

We did some simple sums, with results that are flabbergasting:

In the ballad about the betrayal of Muj’s wife, the modification of the text in the space of a fortnight came to about one thousandth part of the total At that rate, at the end of two thousand weeks, that is to say forty-odd years, the epic should have disaggregated entirely. But that is far from being the case.

So what has happened?

We scratched our heads long and hard over that problem and came to the conclusion that the greater part of the omissions and additions are no such thing and that they should be renamed pseudo-omissions and pseudo-additions.

In other words, most of the apparently new lines are nothing but previous omissions that the bard has decided to restore, just as the omissions concern temporary additions that the bard, for reasons that he is not necessarily aware of himself, decides to clear away from his text. And so on, ad infinitum.

When we have collected dozens and dozens more recordings, then maybe we will be in a better position to elucidate this strange commerce between memory and forgetting. More material would enable us to distinguish the genuine omissions and additions from those that only seem so.

But even that method is not foolproof. How are we going to know why and by what mysterious means a line that has been forgotten and shrouded in darkness for years may reemerge into the light once again? And that’s leaving aside the fact that the phenomenon does not just occur within the repertoire of an individual rhapsode but, as if carried along by a subterranean stream, an omitted line can be restored by some other rhapsode, in a different time and place. Epic fragments seem able to climb out of the grave where the bard’s body has been rotting away for years, claw their way through the earth, and come alive in another’s song, as if death had not changed them one bit.

Mid-March at the Inn

Brief notes on the role of the ear in oral poetry; eye-ear relations; Majekrah (wing tip): The German Albanologists who first described the ancient gesture o/majekrah (and published a sketch of it) advanced the idea that it may just be a response to a physiological need. Nothing more.

We believe that one has to go into this more deeply. When we asked the innkeeper what meaning the gesture had for him, whether for instance it was related to some ancient ritual or had a symbolic significance, he gave only the vaguest answer, more or less along the lines of the Germans explanation. Apparently the rhapsodes need to shut off one ear while singing: it has something to do with the modulation of their chanting voice, which resonates not in the thorax but in the head; and also to do with their need to keep their balance, to prevent the chanting from making them dizzy.

“You can’t imagine how difficult it is to sing the epic ballads,” the innkeeper said. “Long ago I tried it myself, but I got nowhere. It makes thunder inside your head, like the sound of an avalanche. If you are not used to it, you could go out of your mind.”

There is no doubt that oral epic is primarily an art of the ear. The eye that allows us to understand the literature of today played no great role in the Homeric period. It could even become an obstacle. It is no coincidence that Homer is imagined as a man deprived of sight.

In fact, the rhapsodes are mostly poor-sighted. It’s a foregone conclusion that they all feel a degree of scorn for their eyes. Maybe they let their sight deteriorate in a secret manner that only they possess? (Isn’t it said that Democritus blinded himself because his eyes interfered with total concentration on his thoughts?)

But imagining the rhapsodes as blind men is maybe only an act of faith, proof of the need to put a distance between art and the everyday world. Blindness, or at least poor sight, is an integral part of the machinery that produces epic poetry. After all, aren’t the blind supposed to have memories that are different from those of the sighted?

These are rather attractive ideas, but first of all we should establish whether today’s lahuta players really are poor-sighted or not. We can easily make up some sight-test cards like those used by opticians.

March 21, Buffalo Inn

Wonderful! We’ve done a sequence of recordings, some of them repeats.

We’ve decided to look at the system of oral transmission, that is to say how one rhapsode borrows material from another and how the borrowed material influences the repertoire. To do that we need to establish a corpus of recordings that would allow us to compare, let us say, the ballad chanted by rhapsode A with the version of the same ballad as performed by rhapsode B who did not usually recite that ballad but picked it up from listening to As performance.

No easy task. Especially since lahuta players are such awkward and unbending people.

The diffusion of oral ballads must follow rules of its own, rules that are quite different from the way things get published nowadays. However, oral diffusion must presumably also have its equivalent of overnight hits, failures, and bestsellers.

But thafs only a first step. Finding out what are the changes in a ballad as it passes from one rhapsode to another is not enough. We must also try to find out what happens when the ballad is passed on from one generation of singers to the next. And what happens when the song is transmitted from one period to another, or even over the abyss separating two different eras. And what happens after that.

But there’s still more. Since the epics exist in two different languages, the problems are even more inextricable. The bilingualism of these epic poems makes every one of the issues concerning them infinitely more difficult, and we have no clue at the moment to how to cope with this aspect of the subject. These epics seem to constitute the only art form in the world that exists, so to speak, in duplicate. But to say they are bilingual or duplicate is to underestimate the acuteness of the problem: they exist in the languages of two nations that are enemies. And both sides, the Serbs and the Albanians, use the epic in exactly the same way, as a weapon in a tragic duel that is unique.

A ballad in one of the two languages is like an upside-down version of the same ballad in the other language: a magic mirror, making the hero of the one the antihero of the other, the black of the one the white of the other, with all the emotions — bitterness, joy, victory, defeat—-inverted to the very end.

It would be childish to imagine that each of these nations invented epic poetry independently. One of them must be the originator and the other the borrower. We are personally convinced that, as they are the most ancient inhabitants of the peninsula, the Albanians must have been the originators of oral epic. (The fact that their versions are much closer to Homeric models tends to confirm this view.) But we will not get ourselves involved in this polemic, or in anything that takes us away from our main aim, which is to lay bare the techniques of Homeric poetry. We will deal with the duplication only insofar as it relates to the mechanisms of forgetting, with the formulation of variants, and with the processes of transmission — and no further.

Max has stuck a strip of paper over the mantelpiece saying: WE ARE HOMERIC SCHOLARS FIRST AND FOREMOST

March, at the Inn

The transformation of a real-life event into an epic— Homerization":

That’s a topic we keep coming back to. It raises many issues. For instance, what criteria determined the choice of events to be turned into epic material? How did the embalming process begin, so as to start turning an event into an immortal story? What are the soft parts — — the details and incidents — that got stripped away, and what ancient formulae and poetical models played the role of the embalming fluid?

In order to compare a real event with its Homerized version, we looked for the most recent event we could find that had been turned into ballad material All we found were twelve lines, no more, referring to the Congress of Berlin of 1878. Like some cold-weather hydra staying hidden in the fog, not daring to come any closer to our times, epic poetry seems to have stopped in that year. Why 1878i What prevented its moving forward? What has frightened it off?

It seems that oral epic had long been wary of approaching the shores of the modern world, which is so foreign to it.

We compiled a very detailed file on the Berlin Congress: the agenda, the statements of the participating governments, the attitude of the Great Powers to the Ottoman Empire and to Albania, the decisions taken; and we even made notes on the maneuvers behind the scenes. The real events seem like a still-warm corpse beside the mummified version the ballad gives.

We are looking without success for a more recent event. We are astonished to find barely a line in the oral epics about 1913, the black year of Albania’s dismemberment, a year that ought to echo through the whole of the rhapsodes corpus! Which suggests very firmly that the art of oral epic has indeed become arthritic with age.

March, at the Inn

What shifts and what stays fixed in epic poetry? Is there an unchanging core of material that ensures the integrity of the art form over the centuries?

Up to now we believed that the anchoring role was played by the figures of speech, the models or fixed forms of the language, or, to put it another way, the basic molds into which epic material was poured.

So we were convinced that the ancient laboratory’s linguistic equipment, which was itself unchanging, guaranteed the homogeneity of its poetic production.

However, the more we progress with our research, the more we come to see that, like the laboratory itself, figures of speech and linguistic formulae are also subject to change. Except that the rate of change is so slow as to be imperceptible, just like our own aging.