Hasanaginica in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature

Apstrakt

Among the many thousands of songs and texts collected by Milman Parry from 1933 to 1935 in Bosnia, Croatia, Hercegovina, and Serbia are five versions of the song we know from Alberto Fortis as Xalostna pjesancza plemenite Asan-Aghinize, and from Vuk as Hasanaginica. These five documents offer a fascinating window on the life of the song in folk tradition some 160 years after its publication by Fortis. They include two songs that are not, in fact, about the wife of Hasanaga, but that tell recognizably the same story about the wife of Mustajbeg. Four of the five texts were taken down by dictation from Muslim women in or around Gacko; one was written out in his own hand by Danilo Ružić, an Orthodox Christian man from the Mostar region. While Parry recorded many thousands of phonograph discs, it is important to note that none of these songs was recorded on the discs; within the Parry Collection, the Hasanaginica exists only as a written text, not as a voiced performance. In fact, Danilo Ružić, the only male informant to provide a version of the song,
claimed not to be able to sing at all. The texts he provided to Parry were, he claimed, versions of songs that he had learned from his father, a well-known guslar, which he (Danilo) had in some cases elaborated or “filled out.”