Autumn, falling leaves, and time to listen to new music:
The new album of Amira Medunjanin features the tradition of Bosnian romantic songs in modern arrangements. Her angelic voice creeps immediately under your skin, leaving you with a pleasant shiver of melancholy and sweet emotions.
"Sevdah" is not only the most prominent song tradition in Bosnia, but also a certain attidude towards life, read an excellent description of Muhsin Rizvić,
Literary Historian:
“The meaning of the word sevdah in the Turkish language denotes
amorous yearning and ecstasy of love, and has its origin in the Arabic
expression “säwdâ”, which encompasses and specifies the term “black
gall”. Namely, ancient Arabic and Greek doctors believed that the black
gall, as one of the four basic substances in the human body, affects
our emotional life and provokes a melancholic and irritable mood.
There from derives the expression in the Greek language “melancholy”
with a figurative meaning of the direct projection of its basic
meaning: melan hôlos – black gall. Since it is love itself that causes
the same mood, in the Turkish language these terms were brought into a
close link with the semantic identity, accomplishing a conceptual
result of a dual projection of the basic meaning. Linking these two
meanings has opened the process of a poetic transfer of symbolic and
emotional qualities from one term to another. This resulted in the
birth of a new term related to specific lyrical and psychological
features.
In our society, the feeling of
love expressed by the word “sevdah”, retaining the basic tone of its
emotional commitment has got a melancholic notion of the
Slavic-Bogomilian transience of space and time. In essence, our sevdah
is both, the passionate and painful longing for love, as well as the
melancholic and sweet one, the feeling when you are incapable of
enduring the pain caused by love, and the pain transforms into the
ecstasy of the intoxication of love that compares to the slow process of
dying. Pain, because love cannot be fulfilled at that time, sometimes
because space and time act as a wall and obstacle to it, sometimes
because there are obstacles of individual, social, familial, traditional
or simply emotional and psychological nature. Sevdah expresses itself
as torture by others and oneself, and the pleasure of whipping deriving
from the identification with the yearning and masochistic experience
of love despite the awareness of its futility.” (credits here)
