Skip to main content

The Honeybee flies home

As we lead up to February 24th, Estonia's national day, I find myself thinking of last years song festival, and one of the more beautiful songs in the incredible choral tradition of Estonia is a setting of a poem by Juhan Liiv, as follows:

Ta lendab lillest lillesse,
ja lendab mesipuu poole;
ja tõuseb kõuepilv ülesse -
ta lendab mesipuu poole.

Ja langevad teele tuhanded;
veel koju jõuavad tuhanded
ja viivad vaeva ja hoole
ja lendavad mesipuu poole!

Nii hing, oh hing, sa raskel a'al -
kuis õhkad sa isamaa poole;
kas kodu sa, kas võõral maal -
kuis ihkad sa isamaa poole!

I have tried to translate it:

She flies from flower to flower
and returning flies to the honeycomb
and as thunder clouds increase above
She returning flies to the honeycomb.

Though thousands fall on the road
still thousands may return home.
and forget their pain and worries
and they fly returning to the honeycomb.

So soul, oh soul, in hard times
as you sigh for your homeland
then you are home- even in a foreign land
as you yearn for your homeland

The performance last year was electric, and very beautiful, as you can hear and see here

30,000 people singing is a truly stirring sight


Comments

Newmania said…
Yes the people of Croydon which is about the same size have a similarly emotional song with which they describe the deep feelings of loyalty that beauteous land of Southern Fried chicken , sports wear and Binge drinking . I have tried to translate but I cannot do justice to the original dialect which is perhaps fortunately unintelligible to the modern Croydonian .



The wild pony he galloped in the wind
So wild and free/wilful mastering and mastered in his joy/spiritual contentment
Then he fell into a smelly ditch
His legs were broken
For a while he struggled
Finally the stinking and stagnant waters came to seem just as good
As the gallops he dreamt/imagined still
As the death was long one
He convinced finally himself it was great place
Even relishing his own faeces
Happy pony
We salute you
Oh Croydon
You are my ditch


I tell you C the sound of 30,000 people belting that out would bring a tear to your eye . Does me
Cicero said…
After the invasion of Estonia (on the same day as Dunkirk fell) Stalin ordered all the leaders of Estonia to be shot or exiled, mostly to Siberia. In the end nearly a third of the 1939 population were shot or exiled or fled.

The population loss so horrified even the Communists that no official census was published for thirty years. When it was the population was the same number- 1.3 million- however instead of 90% Estonians, there were only 60%.

For fifty years even wearing the blue black white colours would get you ten years in the Gulag.

Almost everyone your see in the film- 30,000 in the choir and 100,000 in the crowd had someone in their immediate family who went to the camps- some indeed were sent themselves.

Singing for freedom means a bit more when you know what it means to lose it.

So frankly I think your little joke is really rather crass.
Newmania said…
Tough crowd in tonight..yeeesh
Cicero said…
I may seem a bit po-faced, but it's just not funny to make a joke about what the victims of Stalin underwent.
It may not be a great translation, but you probably wouldn't make jokes about the holocaust. The only difference between National Socialism and Soviet Socialism was that Stalin killed more people, more brutally for a lot longer.
Russia, unlike Germany, does not even acknowledge the crimes committed by its predecessor state, still less does it seek to make amends for them.
And that really is NOT funny.

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch