«Поучение о бренности мира» как жанр староамхарской поэзии

Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета. Серия 3: Филология. 2018. № 57. С. 24–36.

Bulakh M.

The contribution considers four Old Amharic poetic texts which can be attributed to the genre of “admonition on the transience of the world”. In the course of investigation the general features characteristic of all these texts are discussed, as well as specific features shared by some of them.

The common features are the style of rhymed prose, the genre of admonition directly addressed to the believer, and the distinction between the speaker and the listener.

The parameters which give clue to the relationship between separate texts of admonitions include the rhyme, the use of refrains to introduce the new parts of text, the degree of involvement of the speaker, the employment of the topic of “contempt of wealth” as the major theme of the poem, the set of topics addressed in the poem, the presence of prosaic additions.

Finally, a preliminary evaluation of the extant hypotheses on the origin of the texts of “admonitions on the transience of the world” and on the relationship between them is given. Two of the extant witnesses share considerable portions of text and must go back to a common archetype. The third text is somewhat more remote, but still it shares a lengthy fragment with one of the first two witnesses. At the same time, the fourth witness is undoubtedly an independent piece of Amharic poetry, which is only linked to the three other texts by the common theme and by some general stylistic and structural characteristics. The presence of unrelated to each other admonitions suggests that the “admonition on the transience of the world” existed as a special genre of early Amharic poetry. Its formation was probably to some extent influenced by the European medieval literature on contempt of world, which must have become known in Ethiopia in the course of Catholic missionary activities in XVI-XVII cent.

Keywords: средневековая Эфиопия, амхарский язык