Poetry
Latvju dainas
Not translated into English
Krišjānis Barons · 1894
Synopsis
Folk songs of two to four lines, unified by the quatrain, arranged according to the cycles of human life: birth, youth, marriage, married life and death. Apart come the songs of social condition, in which passes the hard life of the farmhands and maidservants whom song eased, then those of mythology and festivals, with their pre-Christian symbolism, the divinities of nature and the cult of the sun that culminates at Midsummer.
Context
The three-by-eleven-centimetre slips are kept in a cabinet made in Moscow to the editor's plan, seventy drawers and three others for letters and drafts. The six volumes appeared from 1894 to 1915 at Jelgava and then at Saint Petersburg, the first at the expense of the merchant Henrijs Visendorfs, the later ones with the help of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and bring together 217,996 songs by Barons's count. The cabinet, in the archives of Latvian folklore since 1940 and in the National Library since 2014, was entered in 2001 in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
Who it is for
An immense corpus of quatrains, read in series, following the ages of life, rather than from beginning to end.
Prizes and reception
The great collection of the songs of the Latvian people, regarded today as a symbol of the country's identity.
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