Avdo Međedović
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Avdo Međedović (or Avdo Medjedović) was a Bosniak guslar (singer or oral poet). He was the most versatile and skillful performer of all those encountered by Milman Parry and Albert Lord during their research on the oral epic tradition of Bosnia (then part of Yugoslavia) in the 1930s. At Parry's request Avdo undertook to produce an epic of similar extent to the Iliad, since Parry needed to investigate whether a poet in an oral tradition would be able to maintain a theme over such length. Avdo dictated, over three days and many cups of coffee, a version of the well-known theme The Wedding of Smailagić Meho. This was eventually published by Lord with a parallel English translation.
FIELD NOTES, Mary Knight: Homer in Bosnia http://www.nyas.org/publications/sciences/pdf/ts_03_93.pdf
"If Homer’s poems were composed orally, as Parry maintained, how could one account for their superhuman length? The Iliad, for instance, runs to 15,690 lines. Reciting the poem without pausing takes roughly twenty-seven hours. How could a poet improvise a work of such magnitude? But it seems that the guslars of the early twentieth century were well up to the task. Over several days one singer Parry studied, Avdo Mededovic, sang an epic of 13,331 lines and dictated one that was 12,323 lines long; moreover, he had several others of similar length in his repertoire."
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Lord, Albert Bates (1960), The singer of tales, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
- Avdo Međedović, The wedding of Smailagić Meho tr. Albert Bates Lord; with a translation of conversations [with Nikola Vujnović] concerning the singer's life and times, by David E. Bynum. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974.
- Parry, Milman & Adam (editor) Parry (1971), The making of Homeric verse. The collected papers of Milman Parry, Oxford: Clarendon Press
[edit] External links
- John Curtis Franklin, "Structural sympathies in Ancient Greek and South-Slavic heroic song": introduction (with photograph of Avdo) and link to full version of paper
