Dūno River lyrics and meaning

Dūno, dūno upė

Dūno upė lylio, gilus ažerėlis
Dūno upė lylio, tamy ažarėly
Dūno upė lylio, plauko untinėlis
Dūno upė lylio, ir mano brolalis
Dūno upė lylio, gilus ažerėlis
Dūno upė lylio, tamy ažerėly
Dūno upė lylio, plauko daug žuvelių
Dūno upė lylio, ateis ribokėlis*
Dūno upė lylio, išgaudys žuvelas
Dūno upė lylio, daug yra žuvelių

*arba žuvėjėlis

Dūno River: sutartinė interpretation

This sutartinė with the refrain "lylio" can be understood as a song built around water and the image of a brother. The repeated scene names the Dūno River, a deep little lake, a dark little lake, and in it a duckling and my little brother swimming. The pairing can be read as the brother's identification with a water bird or a fish in a wide body of water.

The song then says that many little fish are swimming in the river, that a fisherman will come, and that he will catch the fish. These images can be understood as a premonition of threat or loss: in folk poetics, a fisherman catching fish can sometimes be linked with fate, separation, or danger to whatever lives in the water.

A second reading treats the deep, dark lake in the Lithuanian worldview not only as a natural image but as a sign of the otherworld, a threshold of death. Water separates the realms of the living and the dead. In that reading, the brother swimming in dark water among little fish that the fisherman will "catch out" becomes an image of a loved one in danger or at a boundary; the fisherman becomes unseen fate or death, the one who "collects" lives. The gentle "lylio" refrain, related to soothing or rocking, then begins to sound close to lament: a song that lulls the brother away.

Dūno River: symbols and phrases

Dūno River, deep little lake
A repeated image of deep, dark water. It marks a broad and mysterious natural world, possibly an otherworldly threshold.
Duckling and little brother
A duckling swimming in water and the brother named beside it; together they identify the brother with a water being.
Little fish
Fish swimming abundantly in the water. They mark water-life and also possible prey.
Fisherman / ribokėlis
The fisherman who comes and catches the fish; he suggests fate or approaching danger in the water-world.

Dūno River: sutartinė history

"Dūno upė" belongs to keturinė sutartinės with water imagery and the refrain "lylio." Sutartinės flourished from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century in northeastern Aukštaitija, and keturinės are sung alternately by two pairs, divided into two voices each. In 2010, sutartinės were inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The exact place and collector of this variant could not be confirmed in the publicly available Slaviūnas index, so provincial data are not given here. The motif of deep, dark water and a brother swimming in it is, however, well attested in Lithuanian songs.

sources

  • Z. Slaviūnas. Sutartinės, vols. 1-3 (1958-1959)
  • D. Račiūnaitė-Vyčinienė. Sutartinės: Lithuanian Polyphonic Songs (2002)

Dūno River: sources