Laudator Temporis Acti

Gavin Maxwell (1914-1969), The Ten Pains of Death (London: Longmans, 1959), pp. 46-50 (quoting a Sicilian cowherd named Nenè; notes omitted):

While the animals graze I pass the time playing my flute and lying in the shade of a rock or a tree. All the herd boys like me have flutes—we make them ourselves out of thick bamboo stems and when we make a good one we keep it for ever. I can do bird-songs on my flute, too, and you can have a wonderful time doing that, getting the birds to answer you one after another. I play herd songs a lot of the time, and when I meet another herdboy we play part songs. I can sing hundreds of verses of songs—I love them—and I've learnt dozens and dozens from other herdboys I've met in the mountains. The songs go on for ever, and there's as many verses as grains of sand on the seashore. One learns more every day and makes up more every day—I could sing right through the night until dawn without repeating a verse twice.

The songs are beautiful, but a lot of them are pretty dirty—if I'm singing the evening when there's a lot of contadini coming home from work and they hear me singing those ones they tell my father and he tells me off.

[....]

Then there's songs you in alternate verses with someone you can hear but most times can't see. These arc called botta e risposta. We herds don't often meet each other in the mountains—each of us takes his animals to different places because there's not enough grass to go round, but we can play games together even if we're far apart. You hear the voice of another herd singing far away and you wait for the right moment and answer him. If he hears you start up alternate verses like this:

I sing: Who are you that singing up there?
You sound like a yapping puppy.

and he answers: And who are you wailing away down there?
You sound as if you had toothache in every tooth.

I: You know nothing about singing—
You'd better go and learn at school in Palermo.

He: You say I don't know how to sing—
You'd better go to school at Monreale.

I: Don't you come round here again—
Everyone says you're a cretin.

He: It's you that's got to quit this valley—
Everyone knows about you.

I: When you were born behind my door
I thought you were a still-born bitch-pup.

He: When you were born in the middle of my street
There was an awful stink of dung.

[....]

But that would be too short for a real botta e risposta; I've left out a hundred verses in the middle. If one of us stopped as soon as that the other would think he'd had an accident. Sometimes I've sung a botta for the whole night—one's voice sounds better at night. We don't take offence at what we sing to each other—if we did we wouldn't sing them, or else we'd go and beat each other up. If you're clever enough you can invent new verses, but you have to make them rhyme properly.