1. Prime melody

The urn-shaped sand dunes gloomed brown under the desert sun
Over a small stream refreshing with its swirling water their feet
On the small stream’s bed, under water, we, kids, saw a few Yembuu-shaped* stones
Lying in the fine, soft sand as if grown there by good luck to be with the stream

Perhaps, because stones were a rare thing in the pristine great sands
On that day we got keen to play with those stones from the small stream
And took them home to make horses and animals of them and play with
Against the days end the leather loop of my father’s whip roared like thunder over us

Prolog

At first, this tale
Was known to only one.
Nowadays, this tale
Must be known by many.

i
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was an unimaginably empty, terrifyingly immense abyss. In that abyss, there was nothing but emptiness, there was nothing. There was no earth, there was no water, no air, no golden sun, nothing.

They moved, then, nomadically, from the winter encampment in the kidney-red and stony desert, where the piebald goat pauses to stand, to the flat summit of the mountain, where saussurea flowers grow in pairs, and, as Yavuuhuman journeyed from this, the land of his father, who hunted on the ridges of the mountain, to Ulaanbaatar, he was moving among the elders’ tales and the long songs, and amidst the wonder of stories. In 1952, he finished school in Sanhüü and went to live in the capital. His father Begz, together with his two younger brothers, gathered a few cattle together and travelled to Ulaanbaatar, the many bells on their carts jangling. In 1949, as a student at the Financial Polytechnic, Yavuuhulan had assembled his first poems and these had been published as two books, What We Desire (1950) and Under the Blue Sky (1952). He went to Moscow to study at the famous A M Gorky University, which specialised in literature. The years 1954-1959, while Yavuuhulan was a student at this university, one of the principal schools of the arts in the world, resulted in a flowering of his poetic output. In 1959 his book Lyrics was published in Russia, and a second book, The Sound of a Silver Bridle, in Mongolian, and these announced the arrival on the poetry scene of a special, lyrical, voice. And while this poet, who had tasted the essence of Mongolia’s ancient epics, its long songs, stories and poetic tradition, was studying the finest literary traditions of the east, this was for him a great nomadic journey through poetry.

Mongolians are a people with a particular concept of poetry, and a rich and broad poetic heritage, stretching from couplets of two words to epics of 20,000 lines. Regrettably, Mongolian poetry has been translated very little into foreign languages. In particular, translations into English are as rare as a star in daytime. Although I could offer an explanation for this, I will refrain in my introduction from such things, and introduce this new book, in which a sample is presented from the rich heritage of Mongolian poetry.