The poem ‘Molǎqe’ (literally ‘To the wine’) is a sonnet, a rare genre for Romani literature. It is written in the standardised Romani script used and promoted by the Romani expert Marcel Courtiade. Possibly the poet was influenced by Russian translations of poems by Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mathematician and poet, and by Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet LXXIV’, translated into Russian by Samuil Marshak (1887–1964), where – differing from the original – the topic of wine is introduced.

(Ilona Makhotina)

Source of the text sample

Courtiade, Marcel. 1986. Romani fonetika thaj lekhipa. Izdaje NIO ‘Pobjeda’ OOUR Izdavačka djelatnost. Titograd.