Beginning from the End: Strategies of Composition in Lyrical Improvisation with End Rhyme

Abstract

Having studied why rhyming couplets are such an effective vehicle of lyrical communication in contemporary Cretan tradition for over a decade, the first time I attended a freestyle rap battle in Helsinki the expression seemed profoundly familiar to me. At first sight differences between the two oral poetic cultures might seem striking: language, style, communicative contexts, and social implantation-in two socially and linguistically distinct corners of Europe. Nevertheless, the major argumentative images developed within the improvised flow of rapping tended to be verbalized in a couplet form very similar to that in Crete. In addition to the structural similarity of these core units, both traditions share the role of end rhyme as a primary parameter in composition, as well as the argumentative ambition. These qualifiers also characterize the rhetorical structure of several other traditional forms of contest poetry, which I have recently been able to verify in the performance of improvised gloses in Mallorca. The target of this paper is to analyze the structural and rhetorical principles that seem to be emblematic of extempore composition in all three of these rhymed forms of oral poetry. 1 The analysis focuses on the methods that improvisers employ in the construction of end rhyme patterns and in structuring the semantic hierarchy of verse units in the spontaneous composition of verses in these traditions. End rhyme is a poetic device that ties verses together with parallel sound patterns situated at the ends of the lines. Although Richard Bauman (1977:18-19) specifically states that "the structural principles underlying the parallel constructions may serve as mnemonic aids to the performer of a fixed traditional text, or enhance the fluency of the improvisational or Oral Tradition, 31/1 (2017):123-154 1 The research presented in this article was completed within the framework of the postdoctoral Academy of Finland project "Rhymed Registers, Oral Composition, and the Aesthetics of Improvisation: End Rhyme and Stanzaic Form in the Finnish and European Oral Poetry." I wish to thank and express my profound respect to all the verbal artists who have so far enabled me to grasp something of their art. I thank all the discussants of the Seminar-Workshop Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance, May 26th-27th 2014, Helsinki, Finland, where a preliminary version of this paper was presented (Sykäri 2014d). I am grateful to Frog, the editor of the pre-print papers of the Seminar-Workshop, who helped me to develop my arguments in the English language in this paper as well. Jaume Guiscafrè Danús has assisted my research of gloses in indispensable ways and he also kindly reviewed my interpretations of the glosada referred to here. Joan Mut and Kasper Salonen have provided their skills for transcribing and translating examples. Finally, my warmest thanks extend to the three anonymous peer-reviewers, whose insightful comments crucially improved the final paper.