Kângë Kreshnikësh
Albanian legendary epic poetry / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Kângë Kreshnikësh ("Songs of Heroes") are the traditional songs of the heroic legendary cycle of Albanian epic poetry (Albanian: Cikli i Kreshnikëve or Eposi i Kreshnikëve). They are the product of Albanian culture and folklore orally transmitted down the generations by the Albanian rhapsodes (lahutarë) who perform them singing to the accompaniment of the lahutë (some singers use alternatively the çifteli).[1] The Albanian traditional singing of epic verse from memory is one of the last survivors of its kind in modern Europe,[2] and the last survivor of the Balkan traditions.[3] The poems of the cycle belong to the heroic genre,[4] reflecting the legends that portray and glorify the heroic deeds of the warriors of indefinable old times.[5] The epic poetry about past warriors is an Indo-European tradition shared with South Slavs, but also with other heroic cultures such as those of early Greece, classical India, early medieval England and medieval Germany.[6]
The songs were first time collected in written form in the first decades of the 20th centuries by the Franciscan priests Shtjefën Gjeçovi, Bernardin Palaj and Donat Kurti. Palaj and Kurti were eventually the first to publish a collection of the cycle in 1937, consisting of 34 epic songs containing 8,199 verses in Albanian.[7] Important research was carried out by foreign scholars like Maximilian Lambertz, Fulvio Cordignano, and especially in the 1930s by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, two influential Homeric scholars from Harvard University. Lord's remarkable collection of over 100 songs containing about 25,000 verses is now preserved in the Milman Parry Collection at Harvard University.[8] A considerable amount of work has been done in the last decades. Led for many years by Anton Çeta and Qemal Haxhihasani, Albanologists published multiple volumes on epic, with research carried out by scholars like Rrustem Berisha, Anton Nikë Berisha, and Zymer Ujkan Neziri.[9]
Until the beginning of the 21st century, there have been collected about half a million verses of the cycle (a number that also includes variations of the songs).[10] 23 songs containing 6,165 verses from the collection of Palaj and Kurti were translated into English by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck, who in 2004 published them in the book Songs of the Frontier Warriors (Këngë Kreshnikësh).[11] In 2021 Nicola Scaldaferri and his collaborators Victor Friedman, John Kolsti and Zymer U. Neziri published Wild Songs, Sweet Songs: The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. Providing a complete catalogue of Albanian texts and recordings collected by Parry and Lord with a selection of twelve of the most remarkable songs in Albanian including the English translations, the book represents an authoritative guide to one of the most important collections of Balkan folk epic in existence.[12]