Surely many of you remember from your childhood your mother singing a lullaby to help you sleep, or to help your little brothers sleep (this is easier to remember). Surely you (and you) also sing a song to your children so they sleep, a quiet one, as if it were a babysitter.
I say as if it were, because the best-known nannies are more scary than anything else ("the wolf will come and eat you") and many prefer to hum some newer melody and with less threats. But, if we ask ourselves how the oldest babysitters were, we would surely have the doubt. That's why today I'm going to show you how is the lullaby to sleep the oldest baby in the world.
It really isn't the oldest
Well, I'm surely lying. It is really difficult that it is the oldest, because the oldest is probably a humming that someone must have invented in a moment of despair. But nevertheless, It is the oldest documented babysitter.
It is collected in the Satires of a Roman poet of the first century called Aulio Persio Flaco and is titled aut dormi aut lacte (or you sleep, or breasts), a phrase that is repeated in the babysitter's choruses and that is probably an outburst of sincerity of that mother who, having her baby in her arms, tells her to decide, if you want to breastfeed, and if not, then sleep. It is night, the stars shine up there and it is time to sleep, not to be awake.
As at that time he didn't take that with recording the songs in cassettes Not even the music is written in that book, the melody of the nana is a mystery. We can read the lyrics below.
The oldest nanny known in original version
First I leave it in original version, that is, in Latin:
Lalla, lalla, aut dormi aut lacte
Nisi Lactes, I slept, I slept.Blande somne, somne veni,
claude Marco nostro ocellos,
artus occupa tenellos;
Sunt Ocelli Somni Pleni:
somne veniLalla, lalla, aut dormi aut lacte
Nisi Lactes, I slept, I slept.Alta in caelo splendet luna,
errant noctis umbrae inanes,
per silentia latrant canes,
micant stellae mille et una,
splendet moon.Lalla, lalla, aut dormi aut lacte
Nisi Lactes, I slept, I slept.Longe rubent dulcia poma,
cadunt lilia, surgunt rosae,
stellae in caelo sunt radiosae ...
stertit… ridet… super coma
sentit poma.Lalla, lalla, aut dormi aut lacte
Nisi Lactes, I slept, I slept.
The oldest known nanny translated into Spanish
Now you can read it translated into Spanish:
La-la, la-la, or sleep or breasts;
If you don't breastfeed, sleep, sleep.Soft dream, come, dream,
hesitate, Marco, our eyes,
seizes the tender body,
They are eyes full of sleep:
Come sleep.La-la, la-la, or sleep or breasts;
If you don't breastfeed, sleep, sleep.High in the sky the moon shines
vague shadows wander in the night;
In the silence, the dogs bark,
the thousand and one stars shine
the moon shines.La-la, la-la, or sleep or breasts;
If you don't breastfeed, sleep, sleep.Far, fruit sweets ripen,
lilacs wilt, roses bloom;
the stars in the sky are radiant ...
Snore ... laugh ... over your hair
Feel the fruit trees.La-la, la-la, or sleep or breasts;
If you don't breastfeed, sleep, sleep.
As you can see, it is aimed at a boy named Marco. As a curiosity, notice that over there the first century the mothers seem to sleep the children to the chest. Now there are mothers who come to the pediatrician saying that "I think he uses me as a pacifier, because he sleeps to the chest", as if over the years he had forgotten that the most normal thing in the world is that they sleep by sucking, and there are even Professional theorists who write books entitled Pediatrics with common sense in which they say that mothers should dissociate breastfeeding with sleep, because they are two different things. Anyway.
