Halil Bajgoric^[*] :

The second of our three gudari from the Stolac region, Halil Bajgoric^[*] , lived in Dabrica, a village so remote that he had to travel for three to four hours to reach the town in which Parry and Lord were recording and interviewing singers from that region. At the first encounter in 1934, Bajgoric^[*] was only thirty-seven years of age, unusually young for a guslar of his accomplishment (Lord was to record more songs from him seventeen years later). Of his personal history this singer says less than most. He relates stories of beys and their descendants in Dabrica and an engaging account of his grandfather's being tricked by a bey into forfeiture of his land over an unpaid loan. This unhappy turn of events in Montenegro led the old man to settle in the village of Blagoja, where both Halil and his father were born. Such family history follows story-patterns well known in the epic songs, such as escape from captivity, and the singer ornaments them with details from the epic tradition, such as lengthy catalogs of items or people. Throughout his conversation with Nikola, Halil time and again summons this kind of traditional idiom to tell legendary stories from his family's and district's past.

Bajgoric^[*] began to learn to sing as a young boy, first in emulation of his father and specifically in order to join him in performing in the coffeehouse or at a wedding or other celebration.^[62] Although his father was, like himself,

a farm laborer and not a professional in any sense, he enjoyed a reputation for being the finest guslar "in three districts." Bajgoric^[*] makes no secret of the fact that he too is held in high esteem by his fellows, nor that he is customarily rewarded generously (albeit in kind) for his performances. While most of the songs in his repertoire came directly from listening to other singers, Halil admits that he did learn one, Tsar Scepan's^[*] Wedding , from a songbook by having it read to him. In fact, he might well have learned more from that same source had not the process been so time-consuming and the selection, in his view, so parochial.^[63] As it stands, then, he designates his father and one Ilija Braduric^[*] , the latter of whom he says with some approbation was literate and could therefore draw his material directly from songbooks, as the sources for his own songs.

In addition, Bajgoric^[*] was among many guslari who spoke of a legendary singer from the past, an idealized figure whom they characteristically distinguished from the men who actually taught them their craft. Gifted with special talents and sought after in many quarters, Hasan Coso^[*] —as Halil called this figure—was a singer of wide experience: "He traveled everywhere throughout the world. And he lived for one hundred twenty years." Despite Halil's efforts to locate Hasan in real time and space (he is said, for example, to have spent most of his life in Dabrica), the nature of the biography reveals that this best of singers, like Basic's^[*] Isak, was more a symbol than a fact: "My God, he died very long ago; from what they say it was probably seventy years ago. He was not even my father's father."^[64] While he claims that his father learned to sing from Hasan, Halil himself denies any personal contact with the man. And although he indicates that his father and Hasan lived no more than a kilometer apart, it becomes apparent that this greatest of singers was unique in the community that surrounded him: "It is said that he could still jump twelve paces a half-year before he died. People say he neither dug nor plowed, nor did he ride a horse, but he always carried a rifle and some goods on a beast of burden, and thus traveling lightly he enjoyed himself and played the gusle. " From these and other indications, it is clear that Bajgoric^[*] effectively understood Hasan as a kind of personification of the epic tradition—an anthropomorphic focus for the stories and wisdom of oral epic not unlike Ibro Basic's^[*] Isak.

The songs passed down from such a paragon are of course "true," Bajgoric^[*] assures Nikola, and he is prepared to gloss any item or feature of the story as he related it. One of these textual footnotes, most of which concern names or minor events in a given narrative, offers a glimpse of the guslar's own

attitude toward traditional diction. On being asked for the origin of the ubiquitous toponym Markovac, Bajgoric^[*] replies that the term designates the mountain village in which the great Serbian hero Marko Kraljevic^[*] was nursed. This assignment of the toponym naturally means that the village bears a name unsurpassed for its honorific and heroic import. But then Nikola confronts Halil with a problem: if this interpretation is correct, how does he explain the verse formula "Pa eto ga niz Markovac kleti " ("There he is below accursed Markovac")? His suggestion of Markovac as the revered cradle of Serbia's most significant hero is at odds with a line he has himself sung; Bajgoric^[*] therefore falls back on the explanation that in a song "mora da se rekne" ("it has to be said [like that]"). As Lord and others have argued, the tradition speaks diachronically in the synchronic performance of the individual guslar , and that person need not—and often does not—consciously analyze and understand the nature of the idiom he is employing by right of succession. It is enough for Bajgoric^[*] to know that "Pa eto ga niz Markovac kleti" constitutes a rec , a traditionally defined and indivisible "word," which he can draw from his compositional lexicon in the making of his song.

Like Ibro Basic^[*] , Halil conceives of the action described in his songs as having actually taken place much earlier, in some sort of "Golden Age," and he offers the observation that most of the heroes involved, such as Aliagha Stocevic^[*] and Mustajbeg of the Lika, lived at approximately the same unspecified period in history. When he sings of these and other heroes, moreover, they are subject to the same traditional ornamentation used by Basic^[*] . At times this compositional flexibility—that is, the multiformity that is the lifeblood of the oral epic tradition—leads to what we might term an outright error or omission, the kind of narrative blemish that has so often influenced Homeric scholars to picture the great poet "nodding." A case in point is Nikola's calling to Halil's attention the omission of the hero's preparations for travel from a second version of a particular song.

Nikola : Yesterday you sang this song, but today when you sang it you skipped over one whole section that is usually sung—for example, when Marko readies himself and his horse for travel.... So did you shorten [the song]?

Halil : It's possible that I shortened some "words" [reci ].

Nikola : Yes, yes. Did you do it intentionally?

Halil : No, I didn't; it was only an oversight [in the] heat of performance.^[65]

On closer inspection it becomes apparent that the "words" that the guslar "skipped over" amounted to the usually paired themes of the hero arming for battle and readying his horse. We may draw two conclusions from these observations. First, Bajgoric^[*] understands the omitted section of the song in terms of reci or "words," the same unit described by Basic^[*] in reference to a

line or group of lines in a song. Second, he not only is aware of the possibility of ornamentation by means of multiforms but also falls victim to the other side of the same process; flexibility of narrative structure means that occasionally a singer will delete one or more elements from what is customarily a sequence. As we shall see again in reference to the works of the next singer, this deletion may take place without the guslar's conscious notice. It is the price one pays for a generative compositional idiom that tolerates substitution and variation within incremental limits.^[66]