HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

418 ALBERT B. LORDhowever, that a South Slavic development from an octosyllabic to adecasyllabic metrical base is reflected here.The Serbo-Croatian tradition has assimilated many Turkish wordsfor "horse" into its poetic vocabulary. While one can find the epithetdobar, as in the following line from the songs of Avdo Avdic inGacko:"a junaci bez dobrije' konja" 11/and heroes without good horses,/more common are such formulas as:"birdem stiże dva konja alata" 12/straightway two sorrel horses came up/"a izadje do konja alata" 13/and he went out to the sorrel horse/"preturi se na konja alata" u/he placed himself on the sorrel horse/where the Turkish alat (al 'red' and at 'stallion') are appositives. TheSerbo-Croatian singer could, indeed, have used dobroga in the linesabove: "a izadje do dobroga konja" or "preturi se na dobroga konja,"but he preferred the Turkish word for a "sorrel horse."The Ukrainian tradition, the last of the four under consideration, isespecially instructive because of its metrical variety. In a famouspassage Alfred Rambaud described the singing of a duma to theaccompaniment of a kobza or bandura as "un instrument à cordesqui rappelle la mandoline par son fond arrondi, mais qui est beaucoupplus grande." 15 Of the musical line he wrote:Une phrase musicale se compose pour ainsi dire de deux membres: le premierest une espèce de récitatif où la note fondamentale de la gamme sereproduit avec insistance autant de fois qu'il y a de syllabes dans les paroles àchanter, sauf pour les deux dernières syllabes qui s'achèvent en deux notesplus prolongées, sur le quarte ou la quinte; l'autre membre est, à proprementparler, la phrase musical; il est plus développé, le chanteur se plaisantà le moduler et à lui imprimer le caractère mélancolique qui dominedans toute cette mélodie. 1611The Milman Parry Collection of South Slavic texts, collected in Yugoslavia in1933-1935, now in Widener Library, Harvard University: no. 903, line 892.12Parry Collection, no. 6588, line 420.13Parry Collection, no. 903, line 494.14Parry Collection, no. 903, line 496.15Alfred Rambaud, La Russie épique (Paris, 1876), p. 438.16Rambaud, La Russie épique, p. 439.