Eritrean Literature - First Publications

First Publications

The first literary text in Tigrinya was published in Europe itself: in 1895 Feseha Giyorgis An ethiopian(Tigrai) published a pamphlet in Rome giving an account of his journey to Italy five years earlier. Giyorgis was a scholar who taught Tigrinya in Naples, as well as studying the Italian and Latin languages. He was very conscious of his trailblazing role as "the father of Tigrinya literature": in his foreword to the work, he wrote that, "our main drive has been... to furnish those who yearn to learn Tigrinya with material for exercise". The content of the pamphlet indicates that his primary audience, however, was the educated elite of his home country, as it focuses on the author's impressions of the exotic country to which he had travelled. Negash praises the artistic quality of the work, arguing that it is, "endowed with special linguistic mastery and artistic, literary craftsmanship".

The early years of the 20th century saw several further works appear: the first of these was a collection of forty fables and folktales by Ghebre-Medhin Dighnei. This was published in a journal in Rome in 1902. It contains nine fables with animal characters, typically depicting the stronger animals as unjust and untrustworthy, while the weaker animals are virtuous but powerless. The other thirty-one stories are folktales, including (number 34) The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Other publications of this period included three collections of oral poetry by Carlo Conti Rossini, Johannes Kolmodin and Jacques Faïtlovitch. Conti Rossini published his Tigrinya Popular Songs between 1903 and 1906: this ran to 166 works, with notes and commentary in Italian. It is divided into three parts. Part one contains 73 love poems, mostly by men, while part two consists of lovers' complaints. Part three, called 'Songs of Various Arguments' includes more substantial works, notably: masse poems, written for special occasions and combining entertainment, education and praise for tribal leaders; melke, written for funerals and praising the deceased; and dog'a, poems of general mourning. Two of the masse are accounts of the late-19th-century conflict between two chiefs, Ras Weldamichael of Hazzega and Deggiat Hailu of Tsazzega, an event which has continued to be the subject of folk narratives down to the present day. It is also a substantial presence in Kolmodin's collection, Traditions of Tsazzega and Hazzega, which forms a narrative of the history of Eritrea over the few centuries preceding the Italian colonization. Finally, Faïtlovitch's Habasha Poetry is a collection of 125 dog'a poems, assembled from the preceding work of Winqwist and Twolde-Medkhin of the Swedish mission.

One original work from this period was How the World Was Set Ablaze because of Two Serpents, a 270-line poem published anonymously in Rome in 1916. The work is a commentary on the First World War, which the author sees as a war between the true Christian countries of the Entente Powers and the 'champions of Islam', Austro-Hungary and Germany. In his preface, he explains that he wrote it because, "I want you to know in time about this terrible darkness which has deeply affected my conscience".