Българската фолклорна приказка: проза или поезия? (Опит за изследване формата на разказа)
The Bulgarian Folktale: Is it Prose or Poetry? (А Study of Narrative Form)

Summary/Abstract: The nature of storytelling as а form of verbal art intended for oral performance is one of the main premises underlying this study. Yet, folktales usually and up being “translated” into print by collectors and students of folklore, many of whom still tend to conflate the written text with the tale itself. Hence, the article discusses folktales from the point of view of the folklore text as а “record” of а rive performance in the print medium. Answers are sought to issues, such as the distinction between oral narratives and literary prose genres, and whether the poetics and rhetoric of oral stories, of features of their live performance, can be rendered on the written page. In line with recent American studies in ethnopoetics (the culturally specific activities, knowledge and expectations with regard to storytelling), the author presents the results of an ethnopoetic, or „verse” analysis of а group of Bulgarian folktales through а concrete discussion of а transcription of а tape recorded tale. Following the discovery by D. Hymes, D. Тedlock and others, that Native American and British oral narratives have а specific poetic organization, she finds features of such organization in Bulgarian folktales as well. Close attention to both narrative form and contents reveals that oral discourse appears to be organized in lines and groups of lines, rather than sentences, and that oral narratives have specific poetic, rhetorical and numerical patterns, which are achieved mainly through the use of repetition and parallelism at all linguistic levels. Storytellers also follow а basic principle underlying all forms of verbal art, that of “arousal and satisfying of expectation”. It is argued that folktales (and oral narratives in general) reveal features of measured verse, in contrast with the metric verse found in “true” poetry. There is evidence that the Bulgarian folktales are structured according to the main principles of poetic and rhetorical organization in terms of lines (with а line usually corresponding to а predicate): repetition of equivalent linguistic features: arousal and satisfying of the audience’s expectation. The use of pause, intonation, voice quality and pitch, particles, turns at talk, repetition and parallelism of parts and whole words or phrases, present the main features of this kind of poetic organization of „prose”. They also function as linguistic markers of distinct segments, or units, of the oral discourse. Narrators are believed to be quite aware, consciously or not, of these rules of form, and so is their audience. The ethnopoetic frame of reference and verse analysis, with the close attention to linguistic detail and narrative form, reflect more adequately the nature of folktales as а form of verbal art orally performed. Furthermore, it is this kind of analysis which can uncover both the general ethnopoetic rules and the way different meanings and shades of meanings are conveyed through individual use of all linguistic resource

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