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This song will never come to an end
Oct. 3rd, 2005 10:56 pm(or, a crash course in modern Mongolian poetry)
Before I go on, thank you all for telling me about your sibling-relationships. I'll be posting more about Mongolia soon, but for now...
I found this wonderful thing at Buyant-Ukhaa airport in Ulan Bator, just before getting on the plane, in a souvenir shop otherwise full of tat. It’s fascinating.
It was published in 1985, when communism was still in force, and there’s a lot of terrible poems about the greatness of Lenin and the glory of the October Revolution in it. The foreword also declares that the modern poetry movement in Mongolia began with two Communist revolutionary songs written in the 1920s. I take this claim with a large sack of salt. But many of the non-political ones are quite beautiful. (There seems to be an inverse correspondence between whether they’re about Communism and whether they’re any cop.) The translation is a bit clunky, it’s full of typos and I can’t see through the haze of my infatuation with Mongolia if the poetry is actually any good or not, but I’m charmed by it anyway.
Look inside...
(I didn't manage to write down the authors' names before posting the book back to Ireland in a large box of souvenirs. I'll add them later. And ignore the last picture, its purpose will become clear in the fullness of time.)
Before I go on, thank you all for telling me about your sibling-relationships. I'll be posting more about Mongolia soon, but for now...
I found this wonderful thing at Buyant-Ukhaa airport in Ulan Bator, just before getting on the plane, in a souvenir shop otherwise full of tat. It’s fascinating.
It was published in 1985, when communism was still in force, and there’s a lot of terrible poems about the greatness of Lenin and the glory of the October Revolution in it. The foreword also declares that the modern poetry movement in Mongolia began with two Communist revolutionary songs written in the 1920s. I take this claim with a large sack of salt. But many of the non-political ones are quite beautiful. (There seems to be an inverse correspondence between whether they’re about Communism and whether they’re any cop.) The translation is a bit clunky, it’s full of typos and I can’t see through the haze of my infatuation with Mongolia if the poetry is actually any good or not, but I’m charmed by it anyway.
Look inside...
(I didn't manage to write down the authors' names before posting the book back to Ireland in a large box of souvenirs. I'll add them later. And ignore the last picture, its purpose will become clear in the fullness of time.)
