Translation and Interpretation of the Eya Songbook Long Song
This article presents a character-by-character philological translation and interpretation of a Dongba-script wedding songbook called Long Song, photographed in 2009 from a senior Dongba priest in Eya (Yanyuan County) and later translated with the help of Dongba priest Yingzha in 2017. The lyrics, drawn from a local scripture about the ancestor Chongren Li'en's discovery of butter (used in the wedding blessing rite), narrate the successive mythic "marriages" of Heaven and Earth, mountain and valley, down through generations of named deities and heavenly maidens, culminating in the genealogy of Naxi clan surnames (Ehe, Mei, He, Shu, Yang) and the god Muridu, the "Creator of All Things." For each of the 19 stanzas the authors give the Dongba pictograph glosses (with etymology and phonetic-loan analysis), an IPA transcription, and a Chinese translation, followed by a complete running Chinese translation of the whole song. The article also discusses how Dongba script functions as a mnemonic aid recording only the gist of pre-memorized oral verse rather than a full phonetic transcript.
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