Selected Poetry / Избранное (англ.)

], tens of thousands of Kazan Tatars with tears in their eyes joined in singing В«Mother TongueВ», a folk song and an unofficial national anthem, the simple and beautiful lines of which, composed in 1907 by the greatest Tatar poet Gabdullah Tukai, are dear to every Tatar since childhood:

My mother tongue! Fair tongue of mine!

My father’s and my mother’s speech;

Through you so much I bear and learn;

So many people can I reach.

Beside my cradle in your lilt

My mother sang a lullaby;

My grandmother would tell me tales,

As evening’s dusk came creeping by.

My mother tongue! Your kind support

Has helped my life to run its course;

And since my childhood you have borne

My hopes, my joys and my remorse.

My mother tongue! In you I prayed,

Beseeching God to save my soul.

Forgiveness for my parents too

I sought through you. You made me whole[2 - Translation by David Matthews and Ravil Bukharaev. A new translation of the same poem see on page 127.

Of course, to truly appreciate the unified message of this massive choir, one has to know something of the painful history of the Kazan (Volga) Tatar people. Also, certain national feelings are impossible to communicate and explain to others, and there is no need to do so. There are depths of national feelings, which a stranger simply cannot register or understand.

Yet, paradoxically, it is equally true that, the deeper we penetrate into the most intimate recesses of the national soul, the more universal it becomes.

Only truly great poets are capable of releasing this secret energy of universal brotherhood from the motherly bonds of their national culture, while remaining the most distinct representative voices of their nation for all its past, present and future.

Gabdullah Tukai, the national classical poet of the Kazan Tatar people, was exactly such a poet.

He was born on April 26, 1886 in the small hamlet of Kushlavych in the Kazan province of the Russian Empire. Very early in his life, he became an orphan, unwelcome everywhere, belonging to no one. Little did the people around him know that this poor unloved child was to become the most cherished and enduring figure in the thousand-year-old Kazan Tatar history.