Asha Elijah ~ A föld gyerméke (Child of the earth)

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Asha Elijah sings 'A föld gyerméke' (Child of the earth) from his 2nd album of songs in Hungarian "Egy Csepp Méz a Mennyből" (A Little Drop of Honey from the Sky).

This gorgeous poem by Márk Thándor has been turned into a song by Máté Török of Misztrál, and it's my favourite amongst so many wonderful Misztrál songs!

Misztrál are a Hungarian, humanist, folk-rock band with a wide appeal. They often take poems by Hungary's finest poets and bring them new life through song.

Watching Misztrál is mesmerising, because they combine traditional instruments... mandolins & lutes, for example... with electro-folk, and their harmonies are goosebump-inducing. The guys are now mostly in their late 40's, but they've been going for over 20 years.

Much-loved in Hungary and beyond, they are a national treasure. Every month they perform in a Budapest art-house for the faithful, but of course they also gig extensively, and at Christmas and in July they host a festival in Nagymaros, a sleepy village on the Duna (Danube) ringed by the forested Pilis and Börzsöny mountains.

This is their home zone, some 40 kms north of Budapest! I've got to know the guys a little bit and have recorded versions of 2 others of their songs, 'Párisban j'art az Ösz' [Autumn came to Paris], and 'Teveled az Isten' [God is with you]. There are many others I'd like to record, too.

So I came to Nagymaros to film for this song, and had a fabulous couple of days down by the river and in the cobbled, leafy alleys in very hot weather.

The poem is about the miracle of rain-drops, however:

The child of the earth

Mirrors fall from the sky
Blessed little drops.
When they fall, they become a stream of water.

Their mother is the cloud, their father is the wind,
There are more and more small ones.

They fight, they chase,
They undress falling to the ground.

They strip, make love,
They wallow involuntarily.

They tumble, mingle,
They get lost in the crowd.

They sink and drink,
They grow plants.

And in the end they live as mothers,
To the child of the earth.

Hungarian poetry often has a very profound God reverence, not just in a mainstream religious sense, but in an esoteric, shamanic sense. The Táltos tradition in Hungary differs from other shamanic traditions, in that the true Táltos communes directly with spirit, without the need of drums, ritual or fancy dress... the communion for healing & wisdom is done incognito.

In this way, the pre-Christian Táltos tradition readily assimilated the Christ event as an evolution in a path already established, owing much to Egyptian and Zoroastrian mysticism.

Misztrál in turn take the essence of this inner, mystical poetry of life, and reveal it afresh in the 21st century. I, then, am also inspired to honour, re-create and share this state of being to my own audience, with my own interpretations.

The Hungarian language is a thing of great complexity and beauty. I sing it better than I speak it, still, because there are so many bewildering changes of tone, accent & expression... often in just one word... that an English guy's, face muscles end up in a tangled twist without extreme vigilance!

Take the word 'Együttérzők' for example ('empathy')! It has accents or different umlauts on 3 of the 4 vowels, and a double 't' which must be clearly pronounced... so, phonetically, it comes out as 'Edge-yoot- tear-zerk'! Something like that!

And in any one paragraph there will be several of those! I find it an impossible language to learn in a 'school' sense. I have to learn in an intuitive 'child' sense, just by absorbing, hearing & repeating.

Mind you, English can be just as baffling... would & wood, for example, or hare and hair, or through and threw!

Hungarian actually makes me think differently! It changes my brain and my conditioning, and reveals a whole different perception of reality. For example, there is no simple gender differentiation; no 'he' or 'she' because we are all one in God. It's deemed vain and irrelevant, linguistically, to distinguish pronouns like that.

But all these things have made me fall in love with Hungary; with the land, the folk, the spirit, soul, nature, history, language, art and culture.