The Maltese ballad, l-għana tal-fatt, its cultural transition and social element

Abstract

The origins of the ballad, which has a long tradition in Europe, can be traced to tribal cultures in precisely determined historical moments, the different phenomena in its concept being widely spread historically and geographically. This cultural mobility and survival has extended across ages, cultures, ethnic groups and media through various genres. This reinforces the view that folklore influences a range of communicative media and, as Dundes argues, helps combat the equating of anything folkloristic with the past. In this dissertation, by identifying and interpreting the social and historical context, I intend to explore the considerable corpus of Maltese dramatic and plain factual ballads l-għana tal-fatt's thematic engagement with human conflict, either within humanity itself or its conflicts with the forces of nature, requiring certain pre-conditions and the corresponding consequences explicated in linear time - moving from the past to the future through the present - and their relation to the literary canon. The last hundred and sixty years have witnessed the enrichment of the Maltese folkloric inheritance of ballads running parallel with the development of Maltese literature, while the performance of ballads was being executed live in the annual Imnarja festival, in agrarian festivals and for the last sixteen years also in the annual Għana festival, on radio and television, helping us gauge its reception also through intercultural communication. Popular ballads' varying themes centre round a real or fictitious character, prominent or not, victim or hero/ine of some adventure, crime or scandal sometimes ending with a moral, issues of nationalism, identity and authenticity. Ballad authors' and singers' rendering of the text brings to the fore the ideals of the society of which they form part, occasionally with a political or partisan end. My corpus is built of chapbooks concerning crime and its judicial punishment, listed in Ragonesi (Mifsud Chircop ed.) and other publications and manuscripts, printed collections in the University of Malta Melitensia, the National Libraries of Malta and Gozo and private collections.