Orin: The Song Genres
Yoruba song across work, ritual, nursing, children's play and social comment, with texts, and the problem of translating a song so that it can still be sung.
Orin is the general Yoruba word for song, and unlike the chanted genres it is not the property of specialists. Everyone sings. Song accompanies work, nursing, play, worship, mourning, marriage and the settling of scores, and it is the register of Yoruba verbal art with the widest participation and the smallest barrier to entry.
The distinction from the chanted genres is real and the tradition marks it. Ìjálá, ẹ̀sà, rárà and the rest are chanted, in identifiable vocal modes described in yoruba-oral-genre-system, and they are sung by people who have learned to do it. Orin is sung, in melody, often responsorially, and its performance requires no license. Where the chanted genres are mostly not danceable and mostly unaccompanied by drums, songs are frequently both .
Songs inside stories
The most common childhood encounter with orin is inside àlọ́ àpagbè, the tale with singing, treated in file 08. The name itself means call-and-response story, and the mechanism is that the storyteller leads while the audience takes the chorus .
Structurally the song does specific work inside the narrative. It marks the moments the tale wants remembered, and because the audience sings it rather than hearing it, those moments are the ones that survive. A Yoruba adult who cannot retell a tale will usually still be able to sing its song, which is a fair description of what the form is engineered to do.
Lullaby: orin ìrẹ́mọ́lékún
Orin ìrẹ́mọ́lékún is the lullaby, literally the song for quieting a child's crying, used by nursing mothers to put babies to sleep .
Original (as printed, undiacriticised)
Ọmọ-ọn mi o akurubetekube. Ọmọ-ọn mi o akuru bete kube. Bi oo ku o maa raso fun o. Bi oo ku maa raya okan. Aya okan la fi n somo loge. Ọmọ-ọn mi akurubetekube.
- Ọmọ-ọn mi o my child, oh
- Akurubetekube an ideophonic praise epithet for a small plump child
- Bí o ò kú if you do not die o maa ra aṣọ fun ọ I will buy cloth for you
- Bí o ò kú, maa ra aya okan if you do not die, I will buy coral beads
- La fi ń ṣọmọ lóge is what one uses to adorn a child
- Final line repeats the opening
My little young baby. My little vibrant baby. If you live, I will buy you clothes. If you do not die, I will buy you coral beads. Coral beads are what we adorn a child with. My little young baby.
Translator: Oladele Caleb Orimoogunje
Yoruba text and English translation as printed by Orimoogunje, who gives it as a dialectal variant of the version in Ogundeji 1991 p. 98 . The source prints the Yoruba without tone marks or subdots and it is reproduced in that form; the literal gloss is the compiler's.
The conditional is the whole point and it is easy to miss: bí o ò kú, if you do not die. A lullaby that offers a child clothes and coral beads on condition that the child survives is speaking directly to the infant mortality that produced the àbíkú complex treated in yoruba-ibeji and in the naming file. Orimoogunje's account of why it is phrased this way is that the Yoruba hold that babies understand what is said even before they can speak, and that a child's inner self has control over its own health and willingness to live, so that the mother's good wishes are heard and endorsed by the child's inner self . The song is a negotiation with the baby's orí, not a soothing noise. yoruba-ori treats the concept. The published English softens akurubetekube into "little young" and "little vibrant"; it is an ideophone whose sound does most of its work, and no English word carries it.
Songs of childbirth
Expectant and nursing mothers sing together at health centres, and Orimoogunje records the natal songs performed there .
Original (as printed, undiacriticised)
Oluwa ma je n fobe bimo, Oluwa ma je n fobe bimo. Keje ma po, Je komi o to. Oluwa ma je n fobe bimo.
- Olúwa Lord má jẹ́ n fọbẹ bímọ do-not let me with-a-knife bear-a-child
- Kí ẹ̀jẹ̀ má pọ̀ let blood not be-much
- Jẹ́ kí omi ó tó let water be-sufficient
Lord, do not let me give birth by the knife, Lord, do not let me give birth by the knife. May I not bleed too much, may my waters be sufficient. Lord, do not let me give birth by the knife.
Translator: Oladele Caleb Orimoogunje
Yoruba text and English translation as printed by Orimoogunje ; literal gloss the compiler's.
Fọbẹ bímọ, to bear a child with a knife, is caesarean section, and the published translation names it directly. The song is contemporary rather than ancient: it is sung in modern clinics, addressed to Olúwa, and it is about surgical delivery. It shows the genre doing what it has always done, taking the immediate fear and putting it in a form a group can sing together. Orimoogunje's reading is that the belief that the delivery date lies with Olódùmarè equips the singer with courage and removes the unknown .
Ìbejì songs
Twins are honoured in Yoruba culture at a rate connected to the highest twinning rate in the world, and they have their own body of song and praise poetry. yoruba-ibeji in 06-orisa treats twins as a religious and social institution, and yoruba-arts treats the ère ìbejì figures.
The scholarly resource for the songs is Val Ọlayẹmi's Orin Ìbejì (Songs in Praise of Twins), a transcription and translation in Yoruba and English held at the Smithsonian and Stanford , and Amanda Villepastour's chapter "Orin Ìbejì (Song for the Twins): Sounding the Sacred Twins of the Yorùbá" . This compiler could not obtain either, so no ìbejì song text is presented here, and a reader wanting them should go to Ọlayẹmi.
What can be said without a text. Songs and oríkì for twins are performed by ìyá ìbejì, mothers of twins, characteristically while carrying the children or the ère figures, and in some accounts while going from house to house, which places the practice in the same family as rárà: a woman performing praise and receiving gifts. The genre is a praise form rather than a lullaby, and its material is oríkì, so yoruba-oriki describes its structure. The best known epithet is Èjìrẹ́, and the names Táíwò and Kẹ́hìndé, treated in yoruba-ibeji, are themselves compressed praise.
Children's play songs
Play songs are a substantial body of material and the least studied. Bolanle Sogunro's study of translating them makes a point that matters for this whole section: compared with folktales, Yoruba play and game songs have attracted little attention and few resources, and the translations that exist commonly lack the Yoruba flavour and the socio-cultural nuance, and are frequently unsingable, which is a functional failure and not just an aesthetic one .
The leopard and the goat
Ẹkùn mẹ́ran mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀! Ó dorí kogbó mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀! Ó dorí kodàn mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀! Ẹkùn mẹ́ran mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀! Ó ṣe é mú o mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀! Ó ṣàì mú o mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀! Ojú ẹkùn ń pọ́n, Ìrù ẹkùn ńle. Ó gbé e, kò ì gbé e, Logolo, bẹ̀rẹ̀ gbé e.
- Ẹkùn mẹ́ran leopard catches-an-animal mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀ (the goat's bleat)
- Ó dorí kogbó it turns-its-head to-the-forest
- Ó dorí kodàn it turns-its-head to-the-open-country
- Ó ṣe é mú o it is-able to-catch-it
- Ó ṣàì mú o it fails-to catch-it
- Ojú ẹkùn ń pọ́n the-leopard's eyes are-reddening
- Ìrù ẹkùn ńle the-leopard's tail is-stiff
- Ó gbé e it has-carried-it-off kò ì gbé e it has-not-yet carried-it-off
- Logolo the tall/lanky one bẹ̀rẹ̀ gbé e bend-down and take-it
Idiomatic English (Di Èyí Mú version)
The leopard catches a goat, mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀, it turns to the bush, mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀, the leopard catches a goat, mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀, it's able to catch it, mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀, it's able to catch it, mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀, the leopard looks fierce, its tail tightens up, it has caught it, it hasn't caught it, Logologo the tall one, bend down and catch it.
Translator: Di Èyí Mú compiler, cited in Bolanle Sogunro
Yoruba text and the two competing English translations as printed by Sogunro, from the Mama Lisa's World site and from Di Èyí Mú, an unpublished compilation of translated Yoruba games and songs for children .
Sogunro compares the two English versions and the comparison is instructive :
The Mama Lisa version renders the goat's cry as bàáà. Sogunro's objection is that Yoruba goats do not sound like that: bàá is the English nursery convention, from "baa baa black sheep", while a Yoruba goat bleats mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀, so the translation quietly replaces a Yoruba sound with an English one and distorts the cultural expression . The Di Èyí Mú version keeps mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀ and preserves the flavour.
On the other hand, Mama Lisa's "the leopard's eyes are red" is judged better than Di Èyí Mú's "the leopard looks fierce", because it is closer to actual Nigerian English usage and because it is a graphic image where "fierce" is an abstraction . Neither translation wins outright, which is the honest result.
This is the corpus translation rule stated from the practitioner's side. yoruba-translation-and-bias argues that translation choices carry ideology; Sogunro shows the same thing at the level of an onomatopoeia in a children's game, where replacing mẹ̀ẹ́ẹ̀ with baa is a small act of cultural substitution that nobody intended.
There is a further constraint peculiar to song. A translation must be singable, which requires a musico-verbal fit: syllable count, rhythm, intonation and stress matching the melody . A translation that gets the meaning right and the syllable count wrong cannot be performed, and for a genre that exists only in performance that is a total failure. Sogunro uses Franzon's five translation choices and finds that most of the available Yoruba play-song translations fall into the category of translating the lyrics without regard to the music, and are consequently unperformable .
Who is in the garden
Ta ló wà nínú ọgbà náà? Ọmọ kékeré kan ni. Ṣé è ń wá wò ó? Má wàá wò ó. Tèlé mi ká lọ.
- Ta ló wà who is-it that-is nínú ọgbà náà inside the-compound
- Ọmọ kékeré kan ni a small child it-is
- Ṣé è ń wá wò ó may-you come to-look-at her
- Má wàá wò ó do-not come and-look-at her
- Tèlé mi ká lọ follow me let-us go
Idiomatic English (the popular singable version)
Who is in the garden? A little fine girl. Can I come and see her? No, no, no. Follow me.
Translator: Popular playground version, cited in Bolanle Sogunro
Yoruba and both English versions as printed by Sogunro .
Sogunro's analysis of "a little fine girl" is worth recording because it defends an inaccuracy. The phrase is not a literal rendering of ọmọ kékeré kan ni, which specifies neither beauty nor gender. But "fine girl" is Nigerian English, it is singable, and it captures a whole cultural theme: the courtship convention in which a suitor's relatives visit a girl's parents saying they have seen a beautiful flower in the family's ọgbà, since nobody asks so politely for permission to see a young man in his father's house . The Yoruba leaves the gender to be inferred from the situation; the English supplies it. That is a defensible translation choice and it is a real addition, and both facts should be visible to a reader.
The other detail Sogunro notes is the triple "no, no, no", which is not in the Yoruba Má wàá wò ó but reproduces how children actually speak and gives the line its beat .
A caution about origins
Sogunro flags one case where the direction of translation is probably the reverse of what is assumed. The familiar Orí mi, èjìká, oókún, ẹsẹ̀ (my head, shoulders, knees, feet) is very likely an English original with the Yoruba as the translation, on the evidence of its exact syllable matching and its Christian closing line . Not everything sung in Yoruba by Yoruba children is a Yoruba traditional song, and mission schools and churches are a large source of the repertoire.
Work songs
Work song is the least documented category here and this corpus will not fill the gap with invention. What can be said accurately: singing accompanies collective labour, farming, pounding, grinding, paddling and building, and its function is to coordinate rhythm and to make duration bearable, which is common to work song everywhere. Specific Yoruba work-song texts with reliable transcriptions were not located by this compiler in open sources, and none are presented rather than offering unattributed lines. The field recordings listed in sources-audio-visual are the route to the actual material.
Songs of ritual and òrìṣà worship
Each òrìṣà has its songs, and they overlap heavily with oríkì. 06-orisa treats the individual divinities and yoruba-music-instruments-and-drum-language treats the ensembles that accompany them, including the ìgbìn drums of Ọbàtálá and the bàtá of Ṣàngó. The Bascom Folkways recordings of 1951, documented in sources-audio-visual, are field recordings of this material in context.
The satirical and social-control songs of Egúngún and the Ẹfẹ̀ night of Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ are treated in file 12, since they form a distinct system.
Songs of comment and satire
Beyond the masquerade context, ordinary social satire in song is a live Yoruba practice. Market women, age-grade societies and neighbours compose songs about people who have behaved badly, and the sanction is that the song circulates. Etíyerí, the satirical chant, is a named genre in the classification of chant forms , and the same impulse in sung form is everywhere.
The practice is continuous with contemporary popular music, where the composed insult, the subtweet in song, and the praise-for-payment all descend from these forms. File 14 follows that line.