Ibrahim Basic^[*]

Although he spent the greater part of his life in the Stolac area, Ibro Basic^[*] was born in Vranjevici^[*] in the district of Mostar. At the age of fourteen he left his father's household to become a servant to Ahmet-efendija, a wealthy landowner from Opijac: in Dubrava, with whom he remained for about ten years. He then entered the service of Salihagha Behmen on the occasion of his new master's wedding. After three or four years he himself married and lived for a time with his bride, Djula Dzanko, in her village of Osanjica^[*] . Subsequently they left the village and Ibro found work as an attendant in a coffeehouse (kafana ).^[51] During this period Djula became quite ill and her brother took her home to live with him in the hope of improving her health.

[50] See further Foley 1986a.

[51] Although he does not tell Nikola anything further about the coffeehouse experience, it seems safe to speculate that during this time Ibro had an opportunity to hear many, singers perform. He may well have learned from them and perhaps even performed there himself. A fragmentary description from Parry text no. 291b and an elaborate episode from no. 6598 indicate that he had at various times been paid for singing publicly. I employ the standard Parry Collection notation in citing the texts by number (for a digest of material collected through 1951, see SCHS 1:21-45); the italicized numbers indicate texts that were recorded from actual oral performance, the Roman numbers those taken down in writing from dictation.

Ibro soon followed her back to Osanjica^[*] but became bedridden himself with a tumor in his leg.^[52] He remained in the village for some eleven years after his recovery, living with a Ratkusic^[*] family. Djula died shortly thereafter, and a childless remarriage lasted only four years. By 1934-35, when Ibro was about seventy years of age, one son had moved to Belgrade and a second was with his father working at their modest woodcutting trade.

Ibro began to learn to sing at the age of eight or ten,^[53] first from his father, a skilled guslar who was part of the local tradition in which a singer characteristically performed in villages near his own. While in the service of Ahmet-efendija Ibro also often traveled to nearby villages and heard guslari sing. In those years, he recalls, he was able to hear most songs only once and remember them well enough to perform them. Along with his father, Ibro also encountered five more singers of varying age and reputation in his early years. From Sule Tabakovic^[*] he learned Djerdelez Alija and the Ban of Karlovo (Parry nos. 291, 291a , 6596);^[54] from Ibro Coric^[*] , Grga Antunic^[*] Attacks Raduc (no. 6692 ); from Osman Marijic^[*] , Hrnjicic^[*] Mujo and the Ban of Karlovo (no. 645) and The Wedding of Smailagic^[*] Meho (no. 12491);^[55] and from Selim Basic^[*] and Selim's father, Alagic^[*] Alija and Velagic^[*] Selim (nos. 291b , 1283, 6597 ).^[56]

In addition, we hear in conversation no. 6598 of a semi-legendary guslar of a previous generation, a certain Isak of Rotimlja by name, who was summoned for only the grandest occasions and was always splendidly rewarded for his performances.^[57] Isak's legendary accomplishments include invitations to play before beys and pashas, a paradigmatic triumph in a song contest with a lesser singer named Gacanin, and requests for his presence at weddings of all religious denominations. Ibro seems never to have actually met Isak, and the complete lack of historical context and personal contact as well as the stories of his remarkable feats lead one to believe that this greatest of singers belongs to the same world of folktale inhabited, for example, by the Anglo-Saxon scop

[52] This illness is a very "heroic" one, reminiscent in its hyperbole of Salih Ugljanin's account of how to behead a man (SCHS 1:63-64, 2:5).

[53] On the special gift of youth in learning to sing, Ibro says (Parry no. 6598 ): "A child of four years naturally remembers more than if he were twenty. The child is a great wonder; he can learn and retain it in his head. It's in the nature of a child." Cf. Lord's description, "Singers: Performance and Training" (1960, 13-29).

[54] In text no. 291b he credits Selim Basic^[*] , his father, as the source of this song; this is the only contradiction about sources, however.

[55] This last text, recited without the gusle and imbedded in the very lengthy conversation no. 6598 , demonstrates the important pacing function of the instrument. Hypersyllabic lines abound; compare SCHS 1:107-16 and 117-26.

[56] Ibro explains that he heard the last song first from Selim himself and later from Selira's ninety-year-old father, who claimed to have been a "standard-bearer" (bajraktar ).

[57] In text no. 6598 Ibro says that "Isak was the best singer in Hercegovina" and that he was always paid because, unlike all the other guslari , "it [singing] was his profession" ("to je njemu zanat bijo").

Widsith.^[58] At any rate, Isak seems to serve for Basic^[*] , and for other singers, as a folk anthropomorphization of the epic singing tradition that they also embody.

Other sections of Ibro's conversations with Parry's native assistant Nikola make it clear that the guslar considered his songs "true," and yet that he also had a concept of what has often been called "ornamentation." For example, when asked whether the story had truth (istina ) in it, Ibro says: "All is true, I believe, yes, even though some things are added (as you know)^[59] to make it more fitting [zgodnije ]; but there were all sorts of things then—there were heroes (and in yet earlier times there was a great number of them), and there were horses and swords and all. It was not then as it is today" (no. 6598 ). In other words, in singing he is recalling or re-creating a heroic age when the events that make up his and others' songs actually took place, and although that time is far removed from the present day, he believes in its reality. In order to portray that age and those events in the most "fitting" way possible, he and others "add" the stateliness and grandeur of the epic tradition. This concept of the truth and its embodiment echoes Lord's (1970, 28) memorable observation on the relationship between historical truth as we know it and its representation in oral epic tradition; he notes that the stories are primary because "their matrix is myth and not history; for when history does have an influence on the stories it is, at first at least, history that is changed, not the stories."

Ibro also gives us an insight into the singer's craft in his response to Nikola's probing about the "accuracy" of repeated performances of a song—whether he composes and re-composes "word for word" each time—and about the very nature of a "word" (rijec or rec ) in a song. Consider this excerpt from conversation no. 6598 :

Nikola : What is, let's say, a rijec in a song? Give me a rijec from a song.

Ibro : Here's one, let's say, this is a rijec : "Podranijo od Kladuše Mujo, / Na vrh tanke nacinjene kule" ["Mujo of Kladusha arose early, / At the top of the slender, well-made tower"].

Nikola : But these are lines.

Ibro : Well yes, but that's how it is with us; it's otherwise with you, but with us that's how it's said.... But here's one, let's say, that is [a rijtc ]: "Podranijo od Kladuše Mujo," let's say, a rijec for "podranijo" ["arose early"]; "Prije zore i ogranka sunce" ["Before dawn and the sun's rising"], that's a rijec for "podranijo, uranijo, podranijo," so.

Apart from clearing up the confusion over what guslari really mean when they claim to perform songs "word for word" (rijec za rijec ) each time,^[60] these observations illustrate how the singer conceives of the units in his songs. Simply

[58] See further Foley 1978b.

[59] Nikola was also a practicing singer, and Ibro here assumes his knowledge of the role of ornamentation in the making of a song.

[60] Compare the very different and limited perspective of G. S. Kirk (1962, 100) on the South Slavic guslari : "These particular poets pay lip-service to the ideal of complete accuracy in reproduction, and are under the impression that they come very close to it. They are, in fact, far too optimistic; and their very confidence and lack of self-criticism prevents them from trying to achieve a higher standard of accuracy, which certainly lies within their power. The truth remains that even within their simple and unsophisticated oral tradition, with its incomplete formular technique, poems—not merely 'substance' or 'technique'—are transmitted, though with some variation and contamination."

put, his words are poetic lines, units that epitomize what Parry called an "essential idea" and which are governed. by the metrical structure of the tradition. Ibro is telling us that the idea "arose early" equals, or can be expressed by, a decasyllabic expression in a song, and implicitly that lines, groups of lines, and perhaps metrical segments of lines are his rijeci . Units of typographic description, demarcated by white spaces that serve as silent reading mnemonics, have no place in his "emic" or "ethnic" grammar of poetic diction. We would do well to keep his quite sophisticated observations in mind as we embark on a study of Serbo-Croatian oral epic phraseology.^[61]