De la voz a la letra: Problemas lingüísticos en la transcripción de los relatos orales. I: La puntuación

Abstract

The editor of oral narratives must face certains problems when turning what was originally oral discourse into a wrítten text. The original narrative changes its nature and function as a result of this transformation: the individual word, the performing act, language with a specific social function —playful expressiveness, as well as living and creative preservation of myths, archetypes and tradition— becomes writing, that is, language with no voice, intended for individual reading, and endowed with a different, although no less important, function as a learned and enduring witness to those myths, archetypes and tradition. If writing is a system which attempts to represent language, does the punctuation in the transcription of the oral really represent the narrator's prose, or, on the contrary, is this punctuation exclusively the editor's contribution, narrative thus creating a new written version? In this article, the author examines the punctuation guidelines adopted by different editors of traditional Hispanic ballads —romances in Spanish— in their search for the most faithful rendering of the oral narrative.