“The meaning of the word sevdah in the Turkish language denotes amorous yearning and ecstasy of love, and has its origin in the Arabic expression “säwdâ”, which encompasses and specifies the term “black gall”. Namely, ancient Arabic and Greek doctors believed that the black gall, as one of the four basic substances in the human body, affects our emotional life and provokes a melancholic and irritable mood. There from derives the expression in the Greek language “melancholy” with a figurative meaning of the direct projection of its basic meaning: melan hôlos – black gall. Since it is love itself that causes the same mood, in the Turkish language these terms were brought into a close link with the semantic identity, accomplishing a conceptual result of a dual projection of the basic meaning. Linking these two meanings has opened the process of a poetic transfer of symbolic and emotional qualities from one term to another. This resulted in the birth of a new term related to specific lyrical and psychological features.
In our society, the feeling of love expressed by the word “sevdah”, retaining the basic tone of its emotional commitment has got a melancholic notion of the Slavic-Bogomilian transience of space and time. In essence, our sevdah is both, the passionate and painful longing for love, as well as the melancholic and sweet one, the feeling when you are incapable of enduring the pain caused by love, and the pain transforms into the ecstasy of the intoxication of love that compares to the slow process of dying. Pain, because love cannot be fulfilled at that time, sometimes because space and time act as a wall and obstacle to it, sometimes because there are obstacles of individual, social, familial, traditional or simply emotional and psychological nature. Sevdah expresses itself as torture by others and oneself, and the pleasure of whipping deriving from the identification with the yearning and masochistic experience of love despite the awareness of its futility.” (Muhsin Rizvić, Literary Historian)
“In my opinion, sevdah is an aura surrounding you, it is of invisible and non-material form, but every individual who defines aesthetics as part of his/her life, may feel sevdah in its slightest form and in the smallest space.
It is a gift of God for those lucky ones who view and live life optimistically, and find elements of beauty and pleasure in such view.
And once your soul is filled with the beauty of sevdah, you feel sevdalinka is refreshing and gladdening your heart: “Play and sing to gladden my heart”.
Sevdah is not just a word – it is rather an imaginative ambience of beauty, in whose immense expanse, souls feel, find grains of joy, thus forming a mosaic and making their lives beautiful.
Unfortunately, life is not just love, and sevdalinka as a peak expression of sevdah is not just a love song. Sevdah is a style, a Bosnian lifestyle, and sevdalinka is a historical note-keeper of the lives of Bosnians.” (Omer Pobrić, Musician)
About sevdalinka and its origin
“Sevdalinka is an urban Bosnian love song, with the word “Bosnian” defining the geographical origin of sevdalinka, the word “urban” depicting its urban nature, and the word “love” denoting its content related theme.” (Omer Pobrić, Musician).
“Sevdalinka is our first refinement.” (Zulfikar-Zuko Džumhur)
“… Sevdalinka is not just a love song; it is a song about sevdah. That is where its essence lies. It is the song of the Slavic and Oriental emotional fructification and a combination of the following: the Oriental – according to the intensity of its passion, the power and potential of its sensuality; the Slavic – according to the dreamy, inconsolable, painful sensitivity, and the width of its spirituality. The poetic nature of sevdalinka incorporates some of the essential core of ballads, its obscure tragedy of a painful feeling as a consequence of an occasion or event. The difference is that sevdalinka does not have any kind of plot in its development and dynamics; it rather has a concise and at the same time vast, subconscious anecdote as a motive or summary where the crucial uncoils from – a love sigh as the fateful lyrical and erotic outcome. Or maybe sevdalinka shows the mere experience of the outcome of an event, the crucial fragment of an event, the one that carries the full emotional and lyrical potential and results in a cry, a yearning moan and the pain of love. That is why sevdalinka is actually a woman’s lyrical monologue, who, from her emotional and subjective standpoint, follows the sub textual happening in its abstract course and afterwards, the monologue of her own feelings as an echo and comment of love and life.” (Muhsin Rizvić, Literary Historian)
“You remain speechless at its beauty. It turns the sadness and sorrow of sevdah into the sweetest smelling flowers.”
(Salih Trbonja-Sevdi, Mostar Poet)
“It was possible for sevdalinka, one of the most representative genres of our verbal literature and our folk art in general, to be born in times when the Eastern lifestyle was more comprehensively recognized in the part of the population of Bosnia that accepted Islam, when specific urban environments were formed with all necessary institutions, when the urban quarter – mahala – was fully developed with special spaces, depending on the economic power of the head of the household: court-yards with kapidžik with a fence around it, gardens with čardak , ašyk-pendžer … It was at the times when life was lived in an ambience that was characterized by well-known events described by sevdalinka. This may have taken place some fifty years after Bosnia came under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, that is, at the beginning of the XVI century. Since the lifestyle did not change from that time until the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, this period is believed to be the golden age of the thriving of sevdalinka. Sevdalinka still did not fade at that time, but the entirety of the circumstances which sevdalinka had been born from were interrupted; the breakthrough of the Western lifestyle saw these circumstances disappear, resulting in a loss of the conditions necessary for its continued and uninterrupted development.
During its life throughout centuries, sevdalinka was created in different social classes of the urban population, and it was composed and sung at girls’ and young men’s meetings, wheel dances, at come-togethers, weddings and other family gatherings, in court-yards, gardens, in towers, at belvederes, house rooms, at fairs, during travels, akshamluk , in hans, while walking through mahala, while riding a horse, in the open, at hunting, at city fortresses, in prisons, military marches, under the stars during nights spent in foreign countries…
… The strict separation of women, imposed by Islam ethics, reflected in the Muslim urban environment, and the culture of living that was partially transferred to the entire urban population: wealthy households had separated female and male rooms or even constructed separate buildings, selamluk and haremluk as well as female and male court-yards, with high walls or a wooden fence around it, in order to protect female faces from the glimpses from outside, but also to hide the maidens from their own cousins, grown men. A more moderate separation of girls that was practiced among the majority of the urban population, led to a special form of love encounters, ašikovanje , a gradual love acquainting with precisely established rules of love declaration, according to which, place, time and circumstances of the lovers’ meetings were rather precisely determined: it took place mostly on Friday afternoons, but also on other days and in different times of the day, at the gate or ašik pendžer , mušepci … On days determined for flirting, boys used to walk in the streets in groups, and girls used to stand in ašik pendžer or to peer out through a half-open courtyard door. One of the typical ways of understanding each other in this love dialogue was sevdalinka, which represented a unique form of communication between the female voice singing behind mušebak, the court-yard wall, and the male voice singing on the other side of it.
…Metrically, sevdalinka displays a great diversity and it appears in six metric varieties, which have been transferred into our age: the thirteen-syllable verse– “Uzeh đugum i maštrafu, pođoh na vodu”, the eleven-syllable verse – “Ja kakva je Đulbegova kaduna”, the symmetric lyrical decasyllable – “Djevojka viče s visoka brda”, and the rare asymmetric octosyllabic verse – “Ja svu noć ležah, ne zaspah”, while the symmetric octosyllabic verse “Put putuje Latif-aga” and asymmetric “epic” decasyllable – “Pošetala Hana Pehlivana” are the most frequent verses in our folk songs and sevdalinka.” (Munib Maglajlić, Literary Historian)
”The most gentle and beautiful that has ever been created by lyrical and musical art.” (Gerhard Gesemann, Slavicist)
… Sevdalinka evokes the most tender and noble feelings and spiritual moods: joy, rahatluk , the most sublime moments of self-fulfillment, moments that are so close to us, but often seem unreachable.
Sevdalinka is like the unreachable Johann Sebastian Bach – the magic union of a human being and the universe. Ennoblement and illumination. An inexhaustible lyrical potential that evokes melancholy and the self-reexamination of the purpose of our lives.
…It requires a spiritual maturity; sevdalinka demands an extreme spiritual effort from interpreters, solo-performers and musicians. Let us remind you of sevdalija that we all gladly listened to, well-known for its luxurious solo performance of the first-class interpreter Himzo Polovina: Ima l' jada k'o kad akšam pada, kad mahale fenjere zapale, kad saz bije u pozne jacije, kad tanahni dršću šadrvani...» (Rašid Durić, Literary Historian)
Musical features and interpretation of sevdalinka
“It is difficult to classify sevdalinka in a formal context since it is not a defined type of song likes, for example, wedding-wheel songs, party songs, lullaby and others are. Every love song can be considered a sevdalinka: it all depends on how it is performed, but, besides that, sevdalinka has its musical features according to which it is undoubtedly exclusively sevdalinka and nothing else. Firstly, the excessive second is that miraculous interval that provides the song with a specific intensity of sevdah, picturing distant horizons and unknown regions, the restlessness of unaccomplished dreams, the pain of yearning and many more things that are not so easily expressed. I would briefly call it the “power of the excessive second”.
Musical features of sevdalinka are as follows:
a) Excessive second
b) Mixolidic, major and harmonic minor scale with 2nd grade ending
c) Alteration
d) Coloring
e) Wide voice range and sentences with a long breath
I emphasize this excessive second, because it strikes the listener’s ear with extraordinary power, it poses itself to the listener’s attention and cuts into his consciousness; it marks the melodic course of sevdalinka and ads Oriental colors to it; it is the unifying factor of all the songs with a similar musical content in the area of the Levant cultural circle.
…Sevdalinka may exist as a melody and as an audio phenomenon, but it shows all its glow only when the adequate singer performs it.
Not everybody can sing sevdalinka, because it is not enough to be merely a good singer with a nice voice; the one who sings sevdalinka has to be an artist in the first place, and there are not many artists among singers, neither are there among the audience.
Truly, to listen to a genuine song performed by a genuine singer is an extraordinary experience; it is an unusual psychological condition, filled with the exceptional intensity of pure emotion and sensibility.” (Vlado Milošević, Ethno-musicologist and Composer)
“… It is not enough just to sing a song correctly. There is much more to it. You have to penetrate the inner tissue of a song. A song has its layers just as combat does. Even the worst song has its womb, just as we do, you and me. You have to know how to reach the womb. You have to have a wish to reach it. When you deal with this “geology” or “anatomy”, once you and the song become one, and once you release this song towards others, then the others will realize that it is not a song for the sake of a song, but more than that. Therefore, you have to “render” a song.” (Himzo Polovina, interpreter and heir of sevdalinka)
“We all know interpreters who will “correctly” sing sevdalinka, but they sing it without inner vibration. It is to be sung with refinement, nobly, graciously, without affectation.” (Tamara Karača-Beljak, Ethnomusicologist)
Thanks to our translators:
Tayfun Kesgin (Sarajevo, Bosna i Hercegovina)
Nina Karić (Sarajevo, Bosna i Hercegovina)
Sylvia Parnell (London, UK)
Besmir Fidahić (New York, USA)
Bron "Sevdah i sevdalinka", autors: Semir Vranić i Omer Pobrić. Institut sevdaha, Visoko, 2005. BiH
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