Thursday, August 28, 2008

Lyrics to the story of the three brothers and pot of porridge

I am very excited to receive an email from a reader, Enitan. She (I'm assuming she) sent me an email with lyrics to the story of the three brothers and the pot of porridge and she says the name of the youngest brother, yeah, the culprit, is Tegbe. The song goes like this:

`To ba se pe emi ni mo je koko arugbo (If I ate the koko yam)
Ko'kun o gbe mi, (Let the ocean take me)
K'Osa ko gba mi, (Let the sea take me)
Ke ma ri Tegbe ko ku o.
Tegbe.`(chorus)

In the version on the website, I interpreted okun as sea. Enitan interpretes it as ocean. I didn't have osa. Enitan interpretes that as "sea: as in Lagos". Could it also mean Lagoon since Lagos is surrounded by those?

I speak Yoruba but I'm no literary expert in the language. It isn't easy translating from one language to another. My feeble attempts on this site has given me a healthy dose of respect for Wole Soyinka's translation of D.O. Fagunwa's Ogboju ode ninu igbo irumale into A Forest of a Thousand Daemons.

Enitan, thanks for stopping by and dropping a note.