Poetry
Songs of Love and War
لنډۍ
Anonymous · 1988
Synopsis
Landays, couplets of nine and thirteen syllables sung by Pashtun women, collected during the Soviet occupation and arranged with a commentary. They tell of the day's labours, the water to be carried, the children, the cooking and the animals, forced marriage to a boy or an old man, the death promised to the woman who loves another, the son who beats his mother to show he is a man; and also anger, shame, desire, love and war, with a violence and a humour that no one signs.
Context
The landay, whose name means the short one, or the little venomous snake, is an oral, anonymous form: two verses without obligatory rhyme, ending in ma or na, which women pass on and adapt to current events, and which are sung at weddings. Sayd Bahodine Majrouh collected them in exile in Peshawar and published them in French with the poet André Velter in 1988, the year of his assassination; Gallimard reissued the book in 1994, and it appeared in English in 2003. The first collections of Afghan folk songs date from the 1880s, with James Darmesteter.
Who it is for
Very short couplets, with a commentary, to be read in series. Their crudeness surprises anyone expecting conventional poetry.
Prizes and reception
Taken up by Gallimard six years after its first publication and translated into English; another collection, made in 2012, appeared in New York in 2014.
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