The creation of basque oral poetry by four American bertsolaris

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Article: English. Online

Author(s): Barandiaran, Asier
Title: The creation of basque oral poetry by four American bertsolaris / Asier Barandiaran
In: Oral Tradition, Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 1986-, 161-204
Subjects: Bertsolaritza ; Arriada, Jess ; Goñi, Jesus ; Goikoetxea, Martin ; Kurutxet, Johnny ; United States
Content: Testu osoa

Type of material: Article
ISBN / ISSN: 1542-4308
Notes: Bibliografia: 201-204 or.

In this article I analyze Basque oral poetry, or bertsolaritza, by four poets who live in the United States. We start with a remarkable fact: all four bertsolaris come from the Spanish region of Navarre. They include Jesus “Jess” Goñi, born in Oronoz in 1947; Martin Goikoetxea, born in Gorriti in 1948; Jesus “Jess” Arriada, born in Arizkun in 1935; and Johnny Kurutxet, born in San Francisco in 1946 but raised in Esterenzubi and resident there until the age of 20. The overall situation in the USA has been well described by the researcher Joxe Mallea in several publications (2003, 2005). Within that context this paper specifically examines the production of the American bertsolaris.1 The corpus I will use for this analysis consists of a selection of 237 bertsos composed by these four oral poets and recorded and transcribed in the USA.