"Za špitalom nekdo hodi..." - Contribution to the Topic of Interethnic Relations in Folk Tradition

Abstract

The author is here concerned with a Slovene narrative song, first recorded in 1957. The assumption is that this is a song by an individual composer but sung by people in general. In the Slovene artistic poetry there seems to be no textual example while in German folklore there is. All this refers to the well-known soldiers' song with the initial verse "Leise tönt die Abendglocke", written during the 1870-71 German-French war and widely popular in Germany. The author quotes by way of example a variant from the Rheinland area (DVA A 68288) and believes that the German song was during the first World War heard by Slovene soldiers and that in the post-war time it was brought to Slovenia in translation. Comparing the German and Slovene texts, one can notice that the Slovene version is a rather free rendering of the original and was even subsequently changed by singing. At the end the melodies are compared: the basic structure remains invariably the same, while at individual points there is a difference among variants, German as well as Slovene, adapted for singing in the native folklore tradition. The song is a fine example of how material from another country can through creative freedom be appropriated and more or less modified in the tradition of another nation.