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_____________________________________________________________ Volume 22 October 2007 Number 2 _____________________________________________________________ Editor John Miles Foley Managing Editor Holly Hobbs Associate Editor John Zemke Editorial Assistants IT Manager Peter Ramey Mark Jarvis This page is intentionally left blank. EDITORIAL BOARD Mark C. Amodio Joseph J. Duggan Vassar College Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Old and Middle English French, Spanish, comparative Patricia Arant Alan Dundes (✝) Brown University Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Russian Folklore Samuel Armistead Mark W. Edwards University of California/Davis Stanford University Hispanic, comparative Ancient Greek Richard Bauman Ruth Finnegan Indiana University Open University Folklore, Theory African, South Pacific Dan Ben-Amos Thomas Hale University of Pennsylvania Penn. State University Folklore African Mary Ellen Brown Lee Haring Indiana University Brooklyn College, CUNY Folklore, Balladry African Chogjin Joseph Harris Chinese Academy Harvard University of Social Sciences Old Norse Mongolian, Chinese Bridget Connelly Lauri Harvilahti University of Cal./Berkeley University of Helsinki Arabic Russian, Finnish, Altai Robert P. Creed Lauri Honko (✝) Univ. of Mass./Amherst Turku University Old English, Comparative Comparative Epic Robert Culley Dell Hymes McGill University University of Virginia Biblical Studies Native American, Linguistics Thomas DuBois Martin Jaffee University of Wisconsin Hebrew Bible Scandinavian Univ. of Washington EDITORIAL BOARD Minna Skafte Jensen Shelly Fenno Quinn Odense University Ohio State University Ancient Greek, Latin Japanese Werner Kelber Burton Raffel Rice University Univ. of Southwestern Biblical Studies Louisiana Translation Françoise Létoublon Université Stendahl Karl Reichl Ancient Greek Universität Bonn Turkic, Old and Middle English Victor Mair University of Pennsylvania John Roberts Chinese Ohio State University African-American Nada Miloševic-Djordjević University of Belgrade Joel Sherzer South Slavic University of Texas/Austin Native American, Anthropology Stephen Mitchell Harvard University Dennis Tedlock Scandinavian SUNY/Buffalo Native American Gregory Nagy Harvard University J. Barre Toelken Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Utah State University comparative Folklore, Native American Joseph Falaky Nagy Ronald J. Turner Univ. of Cal./Los Angeles Univ. of Missouri/Columbia Old Irish Storytelling Susan Niditch Andrew Wiget Amherst College University of New Mexico Hebrew Bible Native American Walter J. Ong (✝) St. Louis University (Emeritus) Hermeneutics of orality and literacy Basque Special Issue Bertsozale Elkartea, Special Editors This page is intentionally left blank. Contents John Miles Foley and Mark Jarvis eCompanions ...................................................................................................i Editor’s Column.............................................................................................. 1 John Miles Foley Basque Oral Poetry Championship ................................................................ 3 Alfredo Retortillo and Xabier Aierdi A Sociological Study of Sung, Extempore Verse-Making............................. 13 Jon Sarasua Social Features Of Bertsolaritza .................................................................. 33 Joxerra Garzia Basque Oral Ecology.................................................................................... 47 Ainhoa Agirreazaldegi and Arkaitz Goikoetxea Verse Schools................................................................................................ 65 Joxerra Garzia In the School Curriculum.............................................................................. 69 Joxerra Garzia History of Improvised Bertsolaritza: A Proposal......................................... 77 Andoni Egaña The Process of Creating Improvised Bertsos ............................................. 117 Joxerra Garzia Toward True Diversity in Frame of Reference........................................... 143 Laxaro Azkune Interview with Joxe Agirre Esnal ............................................................... 157 Josu Goikoetxea Interview with Andoni Egaña Makazaga.................................................... 169 Estitxu Eizagirre Interview with Maialen Lujanbio................................................................ 187 Oral Tradition, 22/2 (2007): i-ii eCompanions John Miles Foley and Mark Jarvis In 2002, as part of an effort to promote the understanding of oral traditions as multimedia events, the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition launched the first eCompanion, created to accompany John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem. This facility contains audio, video, photographic, and text-based support for that volume, and advocates using the media in an integrated fashion—with the book in one hand and a mouse in the other. Two years later the CSOT extended the concept of eCompanions to the articles that constitute its journal Oral Tradition. As with the first such facility, eCompanions for OT presented resources that could not fit comfortably, or at all, between the covers of a printed text. Again the model consisted of adding electronic to textual media. With the migration of OT to the web, eCompanions were attached to individual articles, so that the entire experience of each contribution—the pdf file and online multimedia—is available in composite, integrated form. Examples include audio and photographs accompanying a study of Gaelic song, video and photographs to illustrate Javanese dance, supplementary images associated with Kabuki drama, and audio of an Appalachian folktale performance. These eCompanions are meant to accomplish what the article by its very nature cannot: to fill in some of the background of real-life context and experience that is by convention eliminated from even the most carefully prepared textual document. Hopefully, they will help the reader to become a better, more faithful audience for the oral tradition under consideration. Now, with this special issue on Basque Oral Poetry we are able to provide a great wealth of visual and temporal media. Photo, audio, and video resources are presented in a slideshow accompanying the individual articles. Audio and video resources are indicated by icons in the slideshow. Click on the slide to 1) see an enlarged photo, 2) hear audio, or 3) watch video. As a convenience, each slidehsow includes a visual index accessible by clicking the word “index” in the upper right-hand portion of the slide. Clicking on the thumbnail image in the index will advance the slideshow directly to that resource. Each slide has a distinct URL, so links can be created directly to a particular slide. In order to provide this capability, the browser history is incremented as the slideshow progresses. This means that clicking on the browser’s back button will take you to the previous slide rather than returning you to the table of contents, so we have provided a convenient link to the TOC below each slideshow. We hope you will enjoy the new eCompanion mode and we welcome suggestions for additions, modifications, and other improvements to journal.oraltradition.org. Oral tradition is a ii FOLEY AND JARVIS vast and complex phenomenon, and we need your help to make this site as useful as possible. Please send any feedback to John Foley. Center for Studies in Oral Tradition University of Missouri Editor’s Column We have decided to begin this collection on improvised bertsolaritza with two very different, yet at the same time complementary, points of view. In the first article, John Miles Foley offers his vision––or to put it another way, his experience––of one of the highpoints of modern-day bertsolaritza: the finals of the Basque National Bertsolari Championships 2005. This account reflects the most visible and spectacular part of a performance that, as Foley himself so rightly states, cannot be fully understood solely on the basis of what happened or what was said on that particular day in that particular event. Much like an iceberg, the hidden part that supports and gives meaning to this festive tradition is much larger and runs far deeper than its visible counterpart. The second article deals precisely with one of the basic pillars of this hidden part, outlining the conclusions of a sociological study carried out over recent years with the aim of exploring, in greater depth, the structure of the bertsolaritza audience, followed by an assessment of the phenomenon and expectations for the future. We believe that these two perspectives offer anyone striving to understand the phenomenon of sung improvisation in the Basque language an unbeatable insight into the matter at hand. In subsequent articles we aim to explore those aspects that, in our opinion, constitute the key characteristics of present-day improvised bertsolaritza. The third article analyzes the sociocultural characteristics of bertsolaritza, located within the context of the community that sustains it––the Basque community. The fourth article aims to describe the ecology of Basque oral poetry, offering a brief overview of the genres that it contains. The fifth and sixth articles deal with the vital task of transmitting the art of bertsolaritza. The first of these outlines the current situation of the bertso-eskolak, or bertsolaritza schools, while the following one explores the place that both improvised bertsolaritza and oral poetry in general should occupy in the Basque school curriculum. The seventh article is a summary of the