What follows is a dirge heard directly by me, Salvatore Dedola, in a morgue of hospital "Brotzu" in Cagliari on 1 November 2006. I remember six years we have entered in the 3rd Millennium. There are several funeral parlors that dot the basement of the largest hospital in Sardinia, where countless visitors alternate themselves in streams, and mix themselves in the long corridors, all kinds of people, villagers with the more archaic profession, citizens with the more evolved profession. The dirge was sung by a woman about 60 years before the coffin of her husband, who was known for being su prus mannu pillonadori de Sinnai 'the biggest poacher in Sìnnai'.
Sìnnai has a great tradition of hunting in the forest, and for the locals su pillonadòri ('the bird hunter') has no negative notation. Today in Italian we traduce ‘poacher’ because hunting is pillonis 'e tàccula 'thrushes and the blackbirds' is done with nets, while current European laws forbid it. Yet the hunt with the networks dates back to the Paleolithic, is as old as humanity is old.
European laws, passively suffered from Italy and Sardinia no matter how much it wants to eradicate the historical memory of social context, are creating a cultural vacuum that will soon be remembered only in books. The woman, dressed in strict black and his head covered by a veil, she was taken from children and relatives to the mortuary room for three times: in the morning opening, then just after a quick meal, then at the moment when the coffin was carried to Mass. Every time his face was stiff, his face dry. But the moment you step in the morgue that woman turned into lyric poet. She did not cry, sang a lullaby tones and rhythms with the same (or very similar) to those of the Rosary of Santulussùrgiu and Rosaries of many countries in the internal Sardinia.
His words beat
out rhythm of a metric that today we are familiar with the Dante’s
hendecasyllable, but since the woman was not cultured, it is clear that
this metric has been acquired through popular culture and refers to
metric oldest, almost certainly to Sapphic (lesbian) hendecasillable:
_ _׳ _ _׳ _ _׳ _ _׳ _ _׳ _
Given the similarity
between some Greek meters, it is also possible that the meter used in
the heroic verse of the widow to be the trimeter or lyric hexameter:
― ﬞ ﬞ ―ﬞ ﬞ ―ﬞ ﬞ ―ﬞ ﬞ ―ﬞ ﬞ ― ―
But it may well
be the elegiac couplet. In fact, the elegiac is the meter of the elegy,
ie the complaint. It occurs associated, in distich system, to the eròon
(that's the elegiac couplet). It consists of two hemiepe (half-lines)
separated from the diaeresis. Example:
―ﬞ ﬞ ―ﬞ ﬞ ― l | ―ﬞ ﬞ ―ﬞ ﬞ ―
Poor command of language (but it played well the desperation) did not allow the woman to give a complete sequence of concepts, and often kept her from issuing a suite of words harmoniously adapted to the drama of the song. Yet she was such a master of the rhythms of the tradition that when she didn’t find the concept more suited to the metric, she preferred to break the sentence, but continued to sing, and to capture and set here and there the words that his brain in pain and distraught could catch when reached the just point suitable for the metric of the song.
His was the classic
dirge of mourners, prepared to sing the praises of the deceased, and
she did not care much if repeated phrases to sing his own tragedy, but
instead was strictly careful to find the rhymes that the metrics required
in the stanza sung. Her singing expressed about the following concepts,
that I write without the extemporaneous gaps left by the widow; also
- for lack of familiarity with Campidanian dialect - I prefer to rebuild
in Logudorian dialect:
Marídu méu bόnu, cόro méu My good husband, my heart
su méri méu è(st) bόnu, bísu méu, my lord is good, my dream,
partidu sése, andádu dáe Gesúsu you’ve gone, went to Jesus
su cόro méu è(st) mόrtu, non tz’è prúsu my heart is dead, there isn’t more
e prús non sézzi(t) in dόmu, s’ádorádu and do not sit in the hous, the adored
e lássa sá muzzére e sú matádu and leaves behind a wife and the forest
e cáru túe mi sése prús che s’όro and you are my dear more than gold
e όro a méda présgiu cún decόro and gold with at a high price, and dignity
mi hás lassádu in dόmo, prénda mánna, left me at home, great ornament,
ma túe ti n’ánda(s) e béssi dáe sa giánna and you leave me and walk out the door
e cόmo tú(e) ti n’ánda(s), (i)té dolόre and now you leave me, what a pain
e in dόmo túa non ch’ísta sú calόre and does not stay in your house more heat
sa cára méa adoráda bόna e bélla my adored face, good and beautiful,
presciáda e límpia lúghe(t) prús che stélla… valuable light and brilliant more than star ...
………………
These lines are shown in lesbian hendecasyllable. As I pointed out, the reconstruction is my own, written after having listened carefully to the Campidanian lullaby that, according to sobs intentionally issued to every foot of the verse (sobs were used to the rhythm), could be done to interpret the first foot in arsis or in thesis, depending on how you intend to interpret the first syllable of the verse itself, which could be understood in its metric intentions with incipit tonic or atonic. Given the fragmentary nature of the approximate verse of the widow, I knew all the words uttered at the beginning of the verse were tonic in the second syllable.
But that matters little, since there are many Greek (and Latin) meters that use the first syllable in an unstressed way, just to sing the entire phrase and give it the later pace. In this case the procedure is that of coriambic anaclastic dimeter, or the trochaic meters, when it admit inside the tribrac. But in rhythmic units, itself inseparable and indivisible, there were numerous poets (eg Aristophanes in Wasps), using for example twelve first-times, that felt equivalent to rates that exceeded twelve first-times. There was, in short, a difference or anisocronìa of times, which not set aside the equivalent of rhythmic movement. So the range of dimeters (or meters) was not limited to periods of twelve times but also extended to longer periods of dodecasèmi, ie dimeters what might be called "extended" (see Gentili 18-19).