Dainas
Dainas (sing. Daina ) are traditional Latvian folk songs or poems . The term was borrowed from Lithuanian in 1893 at the suggestion of Henrijs Visendorfs. Dainas are very short, rarely longer than four lines, at most six lines long. However, they are important and indispensable for the Latvian culture and ethnic awareness of the Latvians, also for the research of Latvian mythology and beyond that of Baltic mythology and the history of the Latvian language . The Lithuanian dainos (sing. Also daina ) are mostly much longer and more detailed, but with a mythical content that is more difficult to understand ( see Lithuanian mythology ).
Origin and history
In centuries of foreign rule , Dainas represented an important possibility for the Latvian people to pass on their own myths and to realize a national culture. While other peoples of Europe could find their identity in science , philosophy or literature , the Latvians who were a people in the country stayed - the cities were German or Russian-speaking - only the archaic means of oral tradition .
However, while in other European cultures the folkloric elements were largely lost with the development of the written word, especially letterpress printing , the Dainas remained a living and evolving means of expression for the Latvians until the beginning of the 20th century . Quoting and singing these poems is still common and widespread in Latvia today.
With the beginning of the National Awakening of Latvians (see Jungletten ), the collection and processing of the Dainas, which until then had been handed down exclusively orally, began. They also formed the basis of the impressive tradition of the song festivals in the Baltic States, which are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site .
During his stay in Riga from 1764 to 1769, Johann Gottfried Herder collected some Dainas and published them in his two-volume work Volkslieder in 1778/79 (published in 1807 under the title Voices of the Nations in Songs ). Its merit is the elevation of the folk song to a cultural asset. The basis for the systematic research and collection of Latvian folk songs initiated by the Moscow Society of Friends of Natural Science, Anthropology and Folk Studies at the end of the 19th century was formed by the collections of German pastors in Livonia (Bergmann, Ulmann, Wahr, Büttner).
Between 1894 and 1915 the astronomer Krišjānis Barons , the "father of the Dainas", published the largest and still most important collection of the Latvian Dainas - 217,996 songs in six volumes. The Daina cabinet (Dainu skapis) designed by him is now a “national sanctuary” of Latvians.
Today it is estimated that around 1.2 million Dainas are written down.
meaning
Dainas are used by ethnologists , linguists , matriarchy researchers , archaeologists and the like. Scientists increasingly discovered it as a valuable window into the early Indo-European language and cultural history, since the Dainas were only slightly influenced by Christianization and only very late .
The ethnologist and former Latvian President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga is one of those who know the Latvian Dainas . She worked in this area together with her husband Imants Freibergs :
“It must be noted that the Dainas mean more to Latvians than just a literary tradition. For him, they are the embodiment of the cultural heritage handed down from forefathers, who history denied more tangible forms of expression. These songs form the basis of the Latvian identity and singing becomes an identifiable quality of a Latvian. ”(Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Journal of Baltic Studies, 1975)
Two Dainas in the original and translated
- Visu gadu dziesmas krāju,
- Jāņu dienu gaidīdama.
- Nu atnāca Jāņu diena,
- Nu dziesmiņas jāizdzieda.
Translation:
- All year long I collected songs
- Waiting for the Jāņi day,
- Now the Jāņi day has come,
- Now the songs are sung.
- Kas to teica, tas meloja,
- Ka saulīte nakti guļ;
- Vai saulīte tur uzlēca,
- Kur vakaru norietēj '?
Translation:
- Whoever says that is lying
- That the sun sleeps at night;
- The sun rises there
- Where does it go down in the evening?
Selected Dainas in German translation
- August Bielenstein : The wooden buildings and wooden tools of the Latvians. A contribution to the ethnography, cultural history and archeology of the peoples of Russia in the western region (2 volumes). St. Petersburg 1907-1918; Reprint: v. Hirschheydt, Hannover-Döhren 1969 (with many Dainas in Latvian and German).
- Annemarie Bostroem, Welta Ehlert : Have five chests full of songs. Latvian Dainas . Rütten and Loening, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-352-00058-1 .
- Manfred Bissinger: Songs of Latvia. 178 Latvian Dainas . Edition Bavaria, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-00-016820-6 .
- Cure Dieviņi tu paliksi. Where god will you stay then. Latvian folk poetry. Selected by Amanda Aizpuriete . Retouched by Manfred Peter Hein based on the translation by Horst Bernhardt. Queich-Verlag, Germersheim 2011, ISBN 978-3-939207-01-6 .
literature
- Benita Spielhaus: The mythological figures in the Latvian Dainas and their reflection in Latvian literature . Diss., Humboldt University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Berlin 1970.
- Friedrich Scholz : The literatures of the Baltic States. Their origin and development (= treatises of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vol. 80). Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1990, ISBN 3-531-05097-4 .
- Alfrēds Gāters: Latvian Syntax. The Dainas . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-631-42472-8 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Latviešu etimoloģijas vārdnīca divos sējumos . Avots, Riga 1992, vol. 1, p. 196 f.
- ^ Art. Dainas . In: Latvia 100 snapshot stories , p. 9.