Wild Songs, Sweet Songs: The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord

Abstract

Part of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University (MPCOL) is the corpus of Albanian epic recordings, which consists of both audio recordings and texts. The audio recordings include 70 items recorded on aluminum discs by Milman Parry during 1934 and 1935 in the Balkans, consisting of songs and text recited in the Albanian language along with the conversations and recitations in South Slavic languages. The textual materials include 13 notebooks containing more than 22,000 verses of songs, dictated by 38 singers and collected by Albert Lord in various areas of Northern Albania in 1937. The first 10 notebooks were compiled during Lord's travel and the last three collected at Lord's request by two local collaborators. Although MPCOL has labeled the 13 notebooks “Heroic Ballads and Folksongs from Albania,” only Lord's recordings are from his visits in Albania and direct meetings with Albanian singers. Parry's Albanian recordings are from Bosnian singers who sung in two languages, Serbo-Croatian and Albanian, although he planned but never managed to go to Albania.Lord wrote about these recordings in Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs (1954), noting that he intended to publish the Albanian recordings in another volume, which he never completed. Although scholars have had direct access in the MPCOL to the Albanian materials, the materials remained unpublished until Nicola Scaldaferri, David Elmer, Zymer Neziri, and John Kolsti met at an annual international seminar on Albanian culture and language in Prishtina, Kosovo, in 2003, and then continued their work with other meetings in the United States and Kosovo, with support from the University of Calabria and the University of Milan in Italy. Their work culminated in this volume published under the auspices of Nicola Scaldaferri, with additional contributions by Victor A. Friedman, John Kolsti, and Zymer U. Neziri. According to Scaldaferri, the reasons for the publication's delay are various, but are largely due to complex and well-known political events in the Balkans, which resulted in some significant barriers to communication.Why did they title the book Wild Songs, Sweet Songs? Local folk singers refer to the cyclic rhapsodies and heroic songs as kânge t'egra (wild songs), and to love songs as kânge të buta (soft or gentle songs). Both categories of songs characterize this volume's subject matter. The book's first part comprises essays by the aforementioned scholars, which provide very relevant but also analytical data for the methods of recording used by Lord and Parry; skills of the epic singers who sang successfully in two languages; the content and context related to the singers that Lord met; the texts, music, and performances of these recordings; and the admirative mood (used to express surprise or disbelief) of Albanian epic poetry, which makes this genre so distinctive and literally untranslatable in the Balkan context. This section opens many windows to enlighten cultural and professional issues on Albanian epics that folklorists have lacked for comparative studies on Balkan epics.The book's second part is a catalog that lists the Albanian recordings collected by Parry and Lord. Albanian recordings in the Milman Parry Collection are on aluminum discs as well as on wire spools and are listed with the PN prefix. The 13 notebooks in the Albert B. Lord Collection of Epics from Northern Albania are listed with the LN prefix. Because it contains detailed notes for each recording, the book's catalog is invaluable for researchers working with these materials.The book's most important and most voluminous part is the anthology, which brings together the best Albanian materials from the Epic Collections of Parry and Lord for the first time in one volume. The anthology presents the text songs—in the original Albanian and translated into English—of 12 recordings, five by Milman Parry and seven by Albert Lord. There are also two original texts sung in Albanian: one by Salih Ugljanin from 1934 and one by Fatima Biberović (originally from Prizren, Kosovo), which represents the phenomenon of female singers to whom Parry and Lord paid special attention. Another part of the anthology is the “Song of Sirotin Ali,” which Lord collected in 1937 as the longest Albanian epic text from oral tradition transcribed and known to scholarship. Dictated to Lord by Adem Brahimi, it has 2,165 verses. Also part of the volumes are appendices with photos, letters, manuscripts, and maps from Lord's archive, which add documentary value to this volume.With many of its materials published for the first time, Wild Songs, Sweet Songs: The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord offers opportunities for both Albanian and international scholars to compare and observe the differences and peculiarities of the Albanian oral epic—opportunities that were not available for nearly a century.