The Impact of the Albanian Folklore of Mitrush Kuteli and De Rada

Abstract

In his work, Kuteli chose as pretexts the folkloric ballads such as (“Rozafati”), legendary heroic epos (“Gjergj Elez Alia”, “Muji and Behuri”, “Muji and Zanat”, etc.) and the verses of De Rada (“Skanderbeg and Ballaban”, “Turku rrëmbeu një arbëreshe -The Turkish grabbed an Arberesh”, “The Faith of Costandin”). The presence of some poetry motives from the verses of De Rada in his work “Rhapsody of an Arberesh poem” recreated in “Ancient Albanian Stories” of Mitrush Kuteli is of a special interest not only in the area of text comparison but also in theoretical interest. The issue relates to the trans modeling of the text, concretively with the narration of the poetry. The importance of the recreation of Kuteli is increased from the fact that these works, in contrast to the narrations of J. Kastrati, Dh. S. Shuteriqi, A. Varfi, offered to the young generations of readers a code of communication that overpasses the reading challenges that come from the ancient age of the speech (the case of the verses of De Rada) or its dialect feature (case of northern folk rhapsodies). Kuteli homogenized his work with his authorship (verses) and without authorship (folk ballads). The fact that De Rada had collected the rhapsodies from the folk people themselves, did it play a facilitating role? Can a work of Kuteli be considered an “authorship of second degree” according to the concept of Gerard Genette, a recreational model? These and some other questions will be in the center of this study.