Poetry
Guba
Not translated into English
Anonymous · 1923
Synopsis
In 1923, Cali Dhuux Aadan launches a gabay urging the Ogaden to take revenge on the Isaaq, masters of their lands and their wells since the Dervish wars. Qamaan Bulxan answers him with a call for peace. For more than twenty years, some twenty poems answer one another, carried by a dozen rival poets, among them Ismaaciil Mire and Salaan Carrabey: each defends the honour of his clan, its herds, its pastures and its wells.
Context
Composed and handed down from memory, the poems of the chain have never been gathered in a complete edition. Musa Galaal and B. W. Andrzejewski published three of them, by Cali Dhuux, Qamaan Bulxan and Salaan Carrabey, with their English translation; the anthology War and Peace, translated by Martin Orwin in 2009, includes others. Two poems of the chain appear in the recordings made by Blake Robinson in 1959, now held at the Library of Congress.
Who it is for
For discovering the Somali poetic contest, in which the clans answer one another in verse; a few poems exist in English.
Prizes and reception
It is regarded as the most famous of the Somali poetic chains, long handed down from memory before being collected.
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