Poetry
Where Was I Born?
Би хаана төрөө вэ?
Begziin Yavuukhulan · 1959
Synopsis
The poem answers the question of its title, where was I born, through a series of stanzas opening on the same refrain: I was born to be the master of the blue sky, its moon and its stars, then of the snowy mountain where the yaks live, of the steppe, of the river where the hooves of the ancestors' horses wash the earth, of the fragrant grass and of the white flower of the mountains. The gaze descends from the sky to the earth, from the earth to the yurt, and from the yurt to the man.
Context
According to a study by a young researcher, Ya. Baatar, reported by the Mongolian press in 2022, the poem has three hundred and sixty-five words, like the days of the year, in twelve stanzas of five lines, that is sixty lines, like the sexagenary cycle; the word that expresses mastery recurs twenty-four times, like the solar periods of the calendar. The critic L. Khürelbaatar reads in it a meditation on the native land, where the landscape stands in for an answer to the question posed.
Who it is for
A poem of sixty lines, in Mongolian, with no published French translation; it circulates in English under the title Where Was I Born?
Prizes and reception
Among the best-known poems of its author, whose work is taught in the country's secondary schools.
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