Ob-Ugric, V (and a half)
Our posts on the Ob-Ugric classes are a work in progress, based on notes taken during the lessons and tidied up into legible, readable form. Any errors are attributable solely to their anonymous authors!
Munkácsi
Here’s a misunderstanding from a couple of posts ago. I mentioned that Munkácsi’s collections of Mansi song and verse (Bernát Munkácsi, Vogul Népköltési Gyűjtemény, 4 vols., Budapest, MTA, 1892-1963) had inspired a number of twentieth-century poets, and referred to a poem about a particular kind of deep sleep, the sort so deep that the sleeper would not wake up, even if the his or her head/torso were cut off. It was not a poem per se, but the rich imagery of sleep and dreams in Ob-Ugrian cultures.
This motif of the deep sleep might, for instance, refer to the shaman’s loss of consciousness after performing his/her rites.
Here’s an example of the Mansi neck-/head-/trunk-cut, firm/rooted sleep image:
| slot 1 | slot 2 | slot 3 | slot 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| puŋkä | jäktim | tāriŋ | ūləm |
| its head | cuts/chops | rooted | sleep |
Slot 4 is always occupied by the same word for ’sleep’, ūləm, which will be familiar to Hungarian speakers as álom, dream. The preceding slots may be filled as follows:
- puŋk-ä (head-3rd person possessive), sip-ä (neck-3rd person possessive), or porx-ä (shoulder/trunk-3rd person possessive);
- Slot 2 might contain jäktim (cuts/chops) or ńawlənə (pursues/chases);
- Slot 3 might contain tār-iŋ (root-ed), vaɣ-in (strong, lit: strength-ed), porx-iŋ (shoulder-ed/ trunk-ed), sari (true/genuine), ńaŋrä (powerful/firm/hard), xosä (long, C.f. HU hosszú), or usi (powerful/strong)
Such forms were explicated by Munkácsi (as nyaklevágott álom, neck-cut-off dream), and read by, amongst others, the poets László Nagy (1925-78, below left) and Ferenc Juhász (b. 1928).
László Nagy
Nagy transforms the nyaklevágott álom in his poem ‘Medvezsoltár’ (Bear-psalm) into a fejlevágható, szív-kiszakítható álom, in which the dream becomes rather ‘head-cut-off-able’, and the new attribute is ‘heart-tear-out-able’ (szív-kiszakítható). Note that the -ható is not there in the original. Translated into English as ‘Bear Psalm’ in Tony Connor and Kenneth McRobbie (trans.), Love of the Scorching Wind: Selected Poems 1953-1971, Budapest, Corvina, 1973, pp. 61-3, this line is translated as ‘the dream can be beheaded, my sleeping heart torn out’.
See László Nagy, ‘Medvezsoltár’ in Versek és versfordítások, Vol. I, Budapest, Magvető, 1975, pp. 444-6, or downloadable from the Digitális Irodalmi Akadémia.
Further reading: Robert Austerlitz, Ob-Ugric Metrics: the metrical structure of Ostyak and Vogul folk poetry, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1958; Peter Sherwood, ‘Ob-Ugrian Sleep’, in L. Jakab, L. Keresztes, A. Kiss and S. Maticsák (eds), Congressus Septimus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum. Sessiones Sectionum. Dissertationes Linguistica, Debrecen, Debrecen University Press, 1990, pp. 308-13.