Esperanto song

La Tagiĝo

The Daybreak

Lyrics

Strofo 1

, ',

, !

',

:

o, o ',

'!

Strofo 2

o '

' ;

'

' ' .

, a ',

'.

Strofo 6

mondparto, -',

,

',

' :

o, o ',

'!

New words in this song

Comprehension drill

4 questions on what you just read. Get one wrong and the story will show you where it says otherwise.

Words by Antoni Grabowski (1857-1921), the father of Esperanto poetry, from El Parnaso de Popoloj (1913). The melody is credited only to an unidentifiable "Baranski" (or W. Czerwiński, d. 1893, per the songbook wiki), printed with score in Bennemann's Internacia Kantaro in the early 1920s and commercially recorded in 1926 - anonymous work long out of term on every reading. We print stanzas 1, 2 and 6 of the 1913 text, the ones the linked rendition sings. Source text. Translation ours.

If La Espero is the movement's hymn, this is its marching song. Antoni Grabowski - the chemist who made the first Esperanto translations of Pushkin and Mickiewicz - published it in 1913, and through the 1920s it was sung at congresses right after the anthem. When the first Esperanto music records came out in 1926, La Tagiĝo was one of the three titles.

The image doing the work is o - daybreak - and it is also the word-building lesson: tago (day) plus -iĝ- (becoming) plus -o. Day-becoming. You built forty affixes in this course; here is one carrying a whole song. Listen for too - the shadows of night do not merely run, they run away, for- doing exactly what the affix track taught.

One textual footnote: our 1913 source has - the starry banner - where later songbooks often print la verda standardo, the green one. Both circulate; we print what Grabowski published.

Every clipped word here - fratar', mar', mond' - is Rule 16 elision doing the metre's bidding; poetic Esperanto explains the rules the apostrophe has to obey.