Latvia’s ancient poetry is getting its first major translation

OVER THE years, Swedes, Germans and Russians have all had a go at conquering Latvia and imposing their flavours of Christianity on it. Today Lutherans worship mainly in the country’s west, and Russian Orthodox in the east. But Latvia’s deepest rituals are still inspired by its home-grown brand of paganism. They include wild summer-solstice parties and a national song-and-dance festival every five years.The hymns of this prehistoric faith are folk poems, typically four lines long, called dainas. Thanks to Krisjanis Barons, a folklorist who encouraged Latvians to note down such quatrains in the 19th and early 20th centuries, over a million of them are on file at the national library in Riga, the capital. Some have musical notation, but since dainas follow predictable schemes the tunes tend to be repeated, as in Celtic jigs and reels.