The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey as Performed by Halil Bajgorić. Folklore Fellows Communications, 283. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. (eEdition available at http://oraltradition.org/zbm)

An edition and translation of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey (performed by Halil Bajgorić for  Parry and Lord in 1935) augmented by a large amount of supplementary material aimed at providing the reader with a heightened awareness of the epic’s traditional and performance contexts. The poem itself is presented with its original-language verses arranged side-by-side with their English-language translations, and all performatives, hyper-/hypometrical lines, and “mistakes” (from a literary point of view at least) are retained in the text. The text is then keyed to both a “Performance-Based Commentary” that “concentrates on sound, morphology, and traditional structure as well as lexicon, syntax, context, and translation” (77) and an “Apparatus Fabulosus” meant to explain the poem’s structure and idiomatic meanings by glossing them through reference to their counterparts found elsewhere in the South Slavic oral poetic arena. Further
information is provided through sections devoted to a “Portrait of the Singer,” a synopsis of the story (both in traditional terms and with respect to this specific performance), an analysis of Nikola Vujnović’s original transcription decisions concerning this song, the role of music (by H. Wakefield Foster), and a discussion (by R. Scott Garner) of the singer’s particular tendencies in his use of performatives to avoid hiatus.