FROM HASANAGINICA TO PARRY'S COLLECTION

When Alberto Fortis, 1774, wrote down the original and then translated into Italian the Xalostna pjesanca plemenite Asan-Aghinize he did not even imagine what consequences it would have in the European, South Slavic and Bosnian cultural space. As is well-known, already the following year, in 1775, Johan Wolfgang Goethe translated the ballad from Italian into German, and under his influence interest in translating it spread to other European countries and literatures – to France, England, Spain, Russia, Poland, Sweden and others. With his reputation of a great writer which he had already gained by publishing his first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, and with the position of central authority in German literature, Goethe doubtlessly influences extreme openness and favorable attitude of German romanticism toward folk literature (German:  voksliteratur) in general, which would be incorporated in poetic views of this movement, and particularly toward the folk literature of South Slavs.

The impression elevated to the level of enthusiasm about Hasanginica which can be seen from the assessment that it is „one of the most beautiful ballads in the world“ would further influence Goethe's associates and fellow travelers, above all the Brothers Grimm, to address Slovenian educator Jernej Kopitar to help them motivate Serbian educator Vuk Karadžić to embark on a comprehensive project of collecting all oral materials. As one of advocates of Pan-Serbism, now transformed into the idea of Greater Serbia, Karadžić did not stop only at Serbian oral tradition but was one of the first who appropriated and “serbicized” other peoples' contents, as he did with  Hasanaginica. On the other hand, his project would have an enlightening influence on raising awareness of the importance of oral tradition in South Slavic regions, which resulted in a great project of Matica Hrvatska in Croatia and many similar attempts in Bosnia of the time. Several partial attempts (Ivan Frano Jukić, Fra Grga Martića and Mehmed Kapetanović Ljubušak) were followed by the first significant collection of Bosniak oral epic literature – literature which had been appropriated, consciously ignored and omitted as unvaluable – Narodne pjesme muhamedovaca u Bosni i Hercegovini (Folk poems of Muhamaddans in Bosnia and Herzegovina), I–II, (1888–89) by Kosta Hoermann.

At about the same time when Hoermann's associates recorded and delivered epic poems of an extremely rich oral tradition, Bosnia and Herzegovina was visited by an interesting and consummate researcher Friedrich Krauss, who often used pen names Suljo Serhatlija and Selim Vilimov, and who left behind a very comprehensive collection of Bosniak and Bosnian oral materials, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, the USA. As a devoted apologist, particularly of Bosnian epic literature, he claimed, half a century before Milman Parry. That “a day and a half long journey by train from Vienna, a Slavic people lives” who is able to create long and powerful epic poems similar to those of Homer in the 7th century B.C. and in German The Song of the Nibelungs in the Middle Ages.

Epic poems of Bosniaks were also known to Matija Murko, a Slovenian folklorist who spent years studying Bosniak oral epic literature in the early 20th century, and who was one of the crucial motivators for US homerologist Milman Parry encouraging him to search for epic poems long as the Iliad and the Odyssey among South Slavic Muslims. Equipped with necessary information on other collecting-research activities in South Slavic regions, and following the arisen interest in Bosnian oral tradition caused, of course, by the discovery of Hasanaginica, as early as on 6 July 1933 young Parry arrived in the “living laboratory of oral poetry”, in Stolac and in other towns in Herzegovina, northwest Bosnia and Sandžak. He stayed there until 15 December 1933, came again on 27 June 1934 and stay as long as until 11 August 1935. In one field note, Parry hoped that, with his associates, “he would bring back to America a collection of manuscripts and discs which will be unique in the world for studying the functioning and life of an entire oral narrative poetry”. (https://library.harvard.edu/collections/milman-parry-collection-oral-literature). He indeed brought over 12,500 recorded text and over 3,500 sound recordings and stored them at the Harvard University It was to be only the initial part of the large future collection, named after Parry's tragic death – Milman Parry Collection of South Slavic Oral Literature.

The collection was supplemented several times after the Second World War by Parry's student and associate Albert Lord and Lord's associate David Bynum and in its final form it included several hundred thousands of verses and lines. It has thus become if not the most comprehensive then certainly the best-known collection of oral literature in the world. It earned such reputation due to results of a research partly revealed in Lord's book The Singer of Tales, which led to fundamental changes in some humanities:

• By discovering epic singer Avdo Međedović from Bijelo Polje, who could perform epics longer than 10,000 verses without any problems, has definitely led to the abandonment of Homeric issue, i.e. the long existing dilemma about the authorship of Homer's epics;

• By discovering and elaborating ways in which oral texts are created and in which they function, the theory of formula, which was used both in narratology of oral texts and elsewhere;

• Directing attention from abstract and mystical conception of people as the authors of oral creations to a living individual. Performer and oral poet, as Parry and Lord named him;

• Thus, Avdo Međedović is for them a great poetic genius such as Homer; most other oral poets they discovered also deserve a special attention;

• An oral tradition which had been ignored and appropriated for a long time has been discovered and presented to the world's academic public, which led to violent reactions by both neighbors and others;

• The Eurocentric narrative about European culture which began with great Homer has been considerably shaken; Avdo Međedović, as our Homer of the 20th century, comes from the very margin of Europe, from the Balkans as the European other;

• Parry has deconstructed another European myth, that of the superiority of written over oral culture, indicating the decisive value of oral culture, particularly literature, in the development of European civilization.

Parry's collection, as a crown and brilliant finale, closed the circle of centuries-long journey that begins with Hasanaginica, which triumphantly conquers European cultural space, and ends with Parry's and Lord's presentation of Bosniaks' oral tradition as a cultural and literary value of the highest order. We would like to believe that the exceptional literary value of ballad Hasanaginica had a decisive influence on redirecting attention of Europe and the world to South Slavic, particularly Bosniak tradition. If there had not been the magnificent Hasanaginica, we would not have Parry's collection as well as many other works.