Yoruba Oral PoemThe poetry includes prayers and praise of rulers, magical formulas, poems about death, and ballads, all of which Beier collected from mostly unidentified poets and translated with the help of Nigerian colleagues and friends. With the death of Ulli Beier on April 3, 2011, the Yorúbá originals cannot be retrieved. My concern in this piece is to translate Ulli Beier's English version of these lost poems2 back into Yorúbá, the original language of delivery of the poems.