And khaita.com Updates
As some of you may know, we have recently published new translations for Khaita songs from the Metreng 1 collection on khaita.com; in addition, the translations for the Metreng 2 songs will be published shortly.
Metreng 1 and 2 are each made up of 60 modern Tibetan songs and dances, and are part of the Mekhor 180 songs collection completed by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu in 2017. The titles and structure of the collection refer to the principles of Tibetan astrology that Rinpoche used in his research on Tibetan culture and history. Rinpoche selected the songs according to their meaning, and now this meaning is available to us thanks to the tireless work of a group of translators and editors.
Our infinite gratitude goes to our translators from Tibetan, with a very special thank you to Lobsang and Kelsang Zatul, as well as to Fabian Sanders, Margherita Pansa, Monica Gentile, Olga Gomilevskaia and Susan Schwarz; to Adriano Clemente for revising the songs; to Joanna Fagg for editing the English; to Luna Lattarulo for coordinating the translation project and for online editing together with Lena Dumcheva; and to Adriana Dal Borgo for contributing to the project in so many ways.
These 120 translations (with the exception of a few songs that are still being reviewed) are being published for the very first time, conveniently combined with corresponding songs and dances, easily accessible from your mobile phone or computer and totally free of charge.
The publication of these translations is a part the khaita.com project that we inaugurated on the 8th December 2019 – a web application that will unite all Khaita songs, dances, lyrics, translations and commentaries. Having started with a simple structure, we have been gradually improving it by adding more functionality and uploading more content.
At the moment, we have published all songs and dances for three Khaita collections: Message from Tibet 108 songs, Mekhor 108 songs, and the most recent Barsam collection with 70 songs; as well as Kham, Golok, Amdo and Markham circle dances. The majority of the lyrics and translations have been published as well. We now only need to complete the lyrics for Metreng 3 and Message from Tibet.
Once all the lyrics are published, we plan to start adding Rinpoche’s commentaries, both in video and text formats. While over 100 commentaries for the Message from Tibet songs have been previously published in a book, a great many other commentaries are still unpublished. Rinpoche’s Khaita commentaries are a real treasure of Tibetan culture so we really look forward to start working on that.
In addition to publishing lyrics and translations, we have made various improvements on the technical side as well: you can now search songs by the song title or the name of the singer, share the link to a song and add your favorite songs to your personal playlist. Soon we will publish detailed information about these updates. We will continue improving the app in these coming months.
Right now khaita.com is in trial mode as we are still working on it, so we are not advertising it much outside the Dzogchen Community. However, once the technical and the content aspects have been sufficiently improved, we would like to present khaita.com to the wider public.
All this has only been possible thanks to the invaluable help of Alexander Zheleznov, St. Petersburg, and his team of app developers whom you might know from their recent work Norbu Stress Control app mynorbu.com. I’m most grateful to Alexander who gave his advice and helped to shape the project in its early stages, as well as involving his team: Alexey Shadrov for programming, Mila Zakhirina for user experience, Tanitiana Magdieva for design and Tatiana Arzhakova our main programmer who built up khaita.com.
Finally, our sincere thanks goes to all the donors who support the project financially. Although most of the work is run on a karma yoga basis, we do have considerable expenses related to technical implementation that we can only cover through donations.
Donations can be sent to khaita.com/donate
Lena Dumcheva
khaita.com project coordinator
