Poetry
Allayl dumay
Raage Ugaas · 1976
Synopsis
Allayl dumay (Night has fallen): the young woman whom Raage Ugaas was to marry is married to another man. The poet makes of it a lament in which he speaks of his grief and his regret, meditates on the wrong done to him and on wounded honour, and weighs the call to vengeance. The poem is a gabay, the most prestigious genre of Somali poetry, and all its lines alliterate on an initial vowel.
Context
Composed and handed down orally, the poem was set down in writing only in the twentieth century; an elegy by Yuusuf-Dheere, from the beginning of that century, already takes up words from it. It entered in 1976 a school textbook published in Mogadishu, Suugaan: Fasalka Koowaad, which gives nineteen of its lines and omits the one that named clans; the version collected by Axmednuur in 2015 has twenty-two. Martin Orwin devoted a study of its language and sounds to it in 2022; it was translated into Italian in 1988, into French in 1989 and into English in 1993.
Who it is for
For reading a classic of Somali love poetry, translated into French in the collection Tix and into English.
Prizes and reception
Martin Orwin describes it as a poem well known and loved by Somalis, and sees in it one of the finest examples of lyric poetry.
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