In a similar way to how it happens in other parts of the world, on special public occasions, improvised poets (often semi- professionals) perform in extemporary poetry contests.
In the island, there are four established traditions, each one of which has its own prosody, its rules for the poetic contest and different protagonists.
The typical traditional form of the southern area (Campidano) is called “Campidanese” Poetry.
Within this tradition, the highest form of extemporary poetry is the Cantada Campidanesa, in which four poets, called cantadoris, participate in a public poetic contest. During sa cantada the poets use different poetry meter, all related to the family de is mutetus. The most important of these, called mutetu a otu peis (with eight lines) or mutetu longu (long), impresses for its exceptional complexity. It consists of repetitions, intertwines of verses and reversal of the order in which the words of the same line are expressed.
History and main researches
The historical record relating to extemporary poetry in Sardinia is quite small.
One of the earliest sources dates back to the seventeenth century (Salvatore Vidal, 1638), while the first transcripts of mutetus appear only in the second half of the eighteenth century (Matteo Madao, 1787), but they testify to a much earlier tradition.
The earliest transcripts of mutetus longus, improvised during the contests, date back to the early nineteenth century, while people started to write the whole contests in the second half of the century.
The printing of the first booklets (is libureddus) dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century: today we still have over 700 of these booklets, which represent a rather detailed proof of Campidanese poetry in the last 150 years.
From the informal meetings to the Cantadas
We can divide into three levels the practice of extemporary Campidanese poetry:
private meetings of Sardinian improvised oral poetry’s lovers, public contests among versadoris, and those among professional poets.
The lovers of this kind of poetry delight in practicing poetry in “is ispàssius” (meaning: the “amusements”), which take place in informal situations, often during meals time together, in special occasions such as wedding or birthdays parties, feasts for the closure of the hunting seasons and many other celebration events.
The versadas are contests among improvising poets who use a simple meter called versu.
During the religious festivals, mostly in the summer period, professional poets perform in a poetry contest with the cantadas a mutetu longu.
The stage is set up in one of the town’s squares, on which they set four chairs for the poets.
To their left, two other people sit. They are the bàsciu and the contra, two singers who accompany the poets intoning nonsense syllables with a particular technique of vocal guttural emissions.
Near the chairs of the improvising poets, there is usually a table with some typical sweets and some drinks, like water, wine and soft drinks.
In front of the stage, behind the microphone, there is also a chair on whose back the cantadoris place both hands while they are performing their verses standing up.
The cantada takes place for approximately three hours, and we divide it into two stage. In the first one, poets face each other singing mutetus longus; the second one lasts only about 30 minutes and they sing a versus, accompanied by a guitar player.
Is cantadoris and the audience
Today there are about thirty professional extemporary poets of Campidanese Poetry.
Their training lasts some years and it takes place in an informal way, attending meetings with poetry fans and lovers, reading the libureddus and listening to the recordings of old competitions. The first test of “initiation” takes place in a public contest, in the presence of an elderly cantadori, recognized for his good reputation, who has the final judgment about the value of the aspiring poet.
Today, the audience of sa cantada belongs to a medium-high age group, most of them are over 40-50 years, and it can vary between 50 and 200 spectators each time. The audience participate to the cantada sitting on chairs. They share a high degree of competence with poets, often they are improvisers themselves. Some Campidanese poetry’s lovers follow a large number of contests, traveling even for hundreds of kilometers to attend the cantadas. Many of them record the contests, which they keep in personal archives that sometimes can even include thousands of sound documents.
The “mutetu longu”
The mutetu longu is the main meter form used by poets during the cantadas.
Lines that have a variable number between three and four accents, form the mutetus. We subdivide mutetus into two sections called sterrina and cubertantza not in relation to each other in terms of content.
In its essential structure, the sterrina of the mutetu longu is usually composed of eight lines and the cubertantza is a couplet. The lines of the sterrina do not stay between them, but each of these rhymes with one of the words that make up the cubertanza, according to a zigzag pattern called “a ischina ‘e pisci “(meaning: like a fishbone).
In its enunciation, the mutetu longu has a high degree of redundancy. During the performance, the poet declaims the poem in a more articulated form that includes the repetition of various verses (torradas), some of which with a displacement of the order of the words that compose them (arretroga).
https://youtu.be/faEOB7vks6Y
Rules of the contest
Four improvising poets participate to the Campidanese Poetry’s contest.
The cantadori or fundadori (the one who founded it) opens the competition, and he chooses S’argumentu, the subject of the contest. He presents the theme in an unclear and veiled way, so that neither the public nor the other cantadoris are able to understand the underlying meaning.
During the cantada the improvisers progressively try to define the meaning implied (su fini) of the argumentation, always through a cryptic and allusive language.
At the same time, they challenge each other in a dialectical confrontation in which the focus is the competitive aspect. During the flow of the cantada, the hidden topic becomes clearer until, at the end of the contest, they reveal the metaphor.