Rough cut from upcoming album:
Reference recording:
This song comes from a poem about a woman whose husband is killed by her father.
Ia Mtazeda
Ia mtazeda
ia mtazeda, tovlianzeda,
ia davtese, vardi mosula,
ia k’oc’amde, vardi muXlamde,
irmisa Zogi shemocveula.
net’amc eZovnat, ar gaekelat.
siZe-simamri mtas ch’amosulan.
sheXvdat iremi korbudiani, —
st’q’orcna sasiZom: mohk ’la iremi. st’q’orcna simamrma: mohk’la sasiZo.
— shvilo barbare, me ra gaXaro,
sakmro mogik ’al, tavs nu moik’lav .
— shen mama chemo, darbaiselo,
Violet on the mountain
Violet on the mountain, on the snowy mountain,
I planted a violet, up came a rose,
Violets to my ankles, roses to my neck,
A herd of deer came over this way.
May they graze freely, but trample them not. The groom went out with his father-in-law, They met on the mountain a large-antlered buck. The son-in-law shot — he killed the buck. The father-in-law shot — he killed the groom.
— “Barbara, my child, what can I tell you?
I killed your husband, don’t kill yourself.”
— “May you, my father, my father so noble
About the poem (from an academic paper by Kevin Tuite):
Ia mtazeda (“Violet on the mountain”). Source: LP 146-147. Recited by M. Murjik’neli in the Javakhetian village Baraleti in 1930. Variants in Ko 58, LP 341-349. Musical settings: GFS (two versions in 3/8 meter: one monophonic, the other — “a women’s round dance song” — for solo with three-voice choir); MFS #44 (monophonic, in 8/8 [2+3+3] meter). In the exogamous and virilocal societies of the South Caucasus, a young woman traditionally left her village in order to marry. At the same time, outsiders were regarded with a measure of suspicion, and consent to marriage was only obtained from the woman’s parents after lengthy negotiations and the exchanges of gifts. One way out of this predicament was marriage by abduction, and in fact this was once a common occurrence in the Caucasus. In most cases, the “abduction” was agreed to in advance by both families. Still, the form, if not the spirit, of the practice had to be observed, and a squad of the groom’s friends (maq’rebi) were dispatched to the bride’s village to escort her to the church. Along the way, the maq’rebi shouted and fired their rifles into the air, a vestige of their original function. In the event of an actual hostile abduction, the male relatives of the captured bride were expected to take up arms and fight to get her back. The killing of the newly-married young man by his father-in-law in the poem harks back to this practice. But the bride, who no longer wants to be treated as her father’s chattel, protests her predicament. The opening of the poem, I believe, tells the same story in symbolic language. Evidence from other texts shows that the violet has female connotations, and the rose is its masculine counterpart (see the notes to poem #17 above). The parents sow a violet (the bride, their offspring), but a rose (the groom) appears. The male deer represents the bride’s father; she implores him not to trample her beloved, the rose. The opening and middle sections of the poem are bridged in a way that shows so well the special genius of folk literature. In killing a buck, the bridegroom is symbolically killing the father-in-law. To the anonymous creators of this poem, he is as much a party as the father-in-law is to the hostility that once accompanied the transfer of a woman from one clan to another. Charachidzé has pointed out another factor that would exacerbate the relation between bridegroom and father-in-law [PC 203]. Seen against the background of Georgian mythology, the hunter — in particular, the hunter who pursues his vocation to excess — stands in opposition to the principles of the settled agrarian life of the village, to wife, home, and hearth. In his words “l’idéologie géorgienne conçoit le chasseur excessif comme un anti-gendre [emphasis mine— KT] … La libre activité du prédateur absolu … implique la destruction du foyer et du mariage, la vanité de tous les travaux quotidiens, la négation du groupe social tel qu’il est, dans sa structure et ses enterprises” [PC 203, 206]. Finally, in her discussion of “Violet on the mountain” and its variants, Virsaladze offers the interpretation that — in the original form of the myth at least — the father-in-law did not intentionally shoot the bridegroom. The guilty party is the goddess-protector of wild beasts, who caused the father-in-law’s arrow to go astray and kill the young man, in revenge for the buck the latter had just slain. In some variants the bereft bride washes the hunter’s body with deer’s milk (egeb gavretskho irmis rdzitao), which is believed to be a means of counteracting Dali’s power [GOM 174-180].