Mongolian Poetry 41: Your Orbit, My Orbit

This article continues our ongoing series exploring different ways of working with sound across creative, literary and cultural contexts. What follows is an interpretation into English of a doha by the Mongolian scholar-poet Zava Damdin (b. 1976).

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YOUR ORBIT, MY ORBIT

Even if you were to say nothing at all,

I hear a voice welling up from your chest.

Just as a yatga* trembles and its sound slowly fades,

the khan khuur* sings, as if drawing the spaces together.

If the melody drifts into the depths of the sky,

it still sounds like a wild goose* calling from within the lake of my breast.

You are neither coming nor going, but circling where we first met.

Your joy — like the sun rising in a child’s heart.

Your sorrow — like a lone swan spending the night in the moonlight.

All of it like a spring bubbling up, then sinking back into its own soil.

Silent, yet full of sound.

Colourless, yet casting colours and forms like a rainbow.

Your orbit is the melody of my orbit.

Egüzer* of Dragon Mountain
06.11.2025

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Translation is always an interpretation into another culture. Any errors in this regard are entirely my own, and for these I humbly apologise.

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ЧИНИЙ ОРЧИЛ МИНИЙ ОРЧИЛ

(Original Mongolian)

Чи юу ч хэлэх үгүй байв ч

Би бээр чиний цээжнээс ундрах дуу хоолойг сонсох юм

Юу гээ ч, яг л ятга хөгжим долигсож агснаа чавхдас нугууд нь алдраад

Алгуур орон зайн холбоос шиг хан хуур зөөлөн эгшиглэн холбогдмуй

Аялгуу эгшиг алсарсаар огторгуйн гүн дор одов уу хэмээвээс

Миний өвчүүн нууран дотроос ангир гунганах мэт дуулдмуй

Чи бээр одох бус, ирэх бус анх учирсан тэр л газраа орчиж буй аж

Баясах нь хүүхдийн сэтгэл дор нар ургах шиг

Гомдох нь сарны гэрэл дор хонох гагц хун шиг

Тэр бүхэн нэгэн булаг ориглоод өөрийн хөрсөндөө шингэх мэт

Чимээгүй атлаа дуутай,

Өнгөгүй атлаа өнгө, дүрс солонгоруулах аж

Тийн бөгөөс чиний орчил миний орчлын аялгуу аж

Луут Уулын егүзэр

06.11.2025

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NOTES

In translating this doha, I have tried to remain close not only to the original sense, but also to something of its tonal and formal movement: its calm unfolding, its inward musicality, and its preference for image carried lightly rather than over-explained.

What remains with me most is its world of sound: not sound as ornament, but sound as nearness, memory, and inward relation. Voices rise without being spoken; strings tremble and fade; one instrument yields to another; melody seems to vanish into the sky only to be heard again within the breast. In this poem, sound is what lingers when distance, silence, and uncertainty have done their work.

It makes one wonder whether the sounds that stay with us longest, in our own lives, are also of this kind: scarcely graspable, yet never altogether gone.

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GLOSSARY

Yatga refers to the Mongolian plucked zither. Here it stands in quiet contrast to the khan khuur (see below): the yatga’s sound trembles and fades, while the khan khuur sustains and carries the line onward. That contrast helps shape the verse’s movement from vanishing sound to continuing inward resonance.

Khan khuur refers to a Mongolian bowed string instrument; the name may be rendered literally as something like “khan khuur” or, more loosely, “royal bowed instrument,” and can suggest a larger or more sonorous member of the morin khuur family. In a poem such as this, its presence is not merely decorative: it brings with it the felt world of vibration, resonance, and continuity across distance. That makes it especially apt here, since the doha is concerned with a voice or melody that seems at once to recede and yet remain inwardly audible. In that sense, the khan khuur helps carry the poem’s movement from outer sound to inner resonance (Pegg 2024; Badamsuren et al. 2022).

The wild goose is a resonant image in the Mongolian poetic and steppe imagination. As a migratory bird of open skies, water, and distance, it can suggest longing, seasonal return, remoteness, and a voice heard across wide spaces. In this doha, the goose’s cry deepens the inwardness of the image: what seems to have gone far off into the sky is heard again within the “lake” of the breast. The image is therefore both nomadic and lyrical, joining landscape, migration, memory, and feeling in a single sound (Pegg 2024; Bürinbeki 2025).

Egüzer is a self-designation or poetic epithet. Its exact nuance is difficult to fix in English, but in this doha by Zava Damdin it seems to function as a stylised signature-title rather than an ordinary personal name.

An epithet is a descriptive word or phrase attached to a person, place, or thing, often functioning almost like a title.

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CP in Mongolia

Catherine Pleteshner, Independent Scholar and Musician

Mongolian Poetry 41: Your Orbit, My Orbit