Dancing and swinging of who, when and why? Deciphering two murky lines of Buryat shamanic poetry

Buryat shamanic poetry is a difficult genre to understand and to translate. Its lyrics can be challenging to understand even for native speakers, for it is believed that shamans’ spirits speak and prefer to be spoken to in a language characterized by riddles and roundabout phrases. Attendees of shamanic rituals barely understand this highly elevated language. Therefore, an assistant, i.e. a person familiar with the spirits’ language acts as an interpreter during the ritual. No wonder that when Buryat shamanic poetry is translated to another language for scholarly purposes, the result contains a considerable amount of guesswork, and lines that do not seem to fit well in the entire corpus. In the present paper based on the explanations given by a shaman’s assistant, I am going to shed more light on two lines that frequently recur in shamanic incantations and are crucial to our understanding of Buryat shamanic practice

Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Interpreter · Linguistics · Literature · Lyrics · Poetry · Shamanism · Wonder · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Computer Science · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Philosophy