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Friday, November 27, 2009

Green, Orange, Red





















His song is goodybe, even
as he chirps hello
from his deadwood hollow,

the orange-bellied parrot
chirping his gay old sorrow.

He has swallowed his halo:
it glows, a traffic light
suggesting an imminent stop.

In the event of a crash
remember to clean up

these twigs and seeds, and pin
to my breast an orange letter
reading O for zero.

(from the current issue of Misjudge Your Limits)

Investigation Shames Catholic Church Into New Openness, Transparency on Child Sex Abuse: ‘We Openly and Transparently Like Having Sex with Children'

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Grr!
















The Monk of Montaudon: touchy twelfth-century French bloke, ‘always going off on one’, as a student once described Sylvia Plath to me. Hereunder a version from my vaults, my vaults, of his enueg (Beckettian genre!) ‘Fort m’enoia, si auzes dire...

What gets my goat, if you don’t mind,
is the sort whose promises are all wind,
the armchair ‘up-and-at-’em’ kind,
or riding a horse with one foot lamed.
As big a drag, so help me God,
is an upstart buckler-carrying cod
who’s never had to face a sword,
chaplains and monks who wear a beard,
and hook-beaked yes-men bought for a word.

‘Poor but honest’ gets up my nose
in a wench, no whit less than does
a man who fawns too much on his spouse,
even if she’s from Toulouse,
without forgetting the lordly knight
who keeps his airs and graces quiet
till he’s abroad and out of sight
of folk back home who hire the sot
to grind the pepper or watch the pot.

Another thing that gets my back up
is coward Blimps all storm in a teacup,
hawks that never pick your swag up,
and pots as bare of meat as a hiccup,
and, while I’m at it, by Saint Martin,
I hate wine watered by some cretin,
and the sort of misbegotten
blind or spastic cripple that button-
holes his prey on roads two ‘shorten’.

Being made wait at table’s a bore
or getting your joint too tough or raw,
having to sit through liar priests’ jaw,
or being stuck with a stubborn old whore,
and by Saint Delman, given the choice
I’d pass, on fool civilities,
having to travel when there’s ice,
or trying to ride with greaves for trews,
or sauciness from churls playing dice.

And then there are taverns out on their own
for serving salads in a snowstorm,
or trying to make it with a crone
who fires off tap-room farts till dawn –
fun, eh? Or having to call the varlet
out at night to drain the piss-pot,
or seeing a beauty tie the knot
with an ape who stops her doing what
she’s there for (to give me my bit).

You needn’t think I’ve two good words
for fiddle-scrapers in good courts,
for will-grubbing farmers’ brats,
or partners who don’t back your cards.
All of which, by Saint Marcel,
applies to coats lined double as well,
to heirs-in-waiting to a castle,
the stuffed-shirt’s party (called a ‘social’),
or the tourney’s sweaty jostle.

But, God, tableclothes are a pest
that miss your place but cover the rest,
and scab-handed lads to cut the roast,
or a poor fit in a chain-mail vest.
Not much better’s being kept at the door
if what you’re kept in is a downpour,
or having to listen while your friends score
points off each other, and ignore
they’re both wrong in this hot-air war.

Another thing that I can’t bear
is past-it hags in tarty gear,
or any old strumpet who puts on an air,
or wants me to ogle her legs if I dare,
though, by Saint Avon, what could touch
the fat dame with too tight a snatch,
the lord who bleeds his serfs too much,
or trying to sleep but keeping watch?
Forget the wenches – there’s your bitch.

And that’s not all that gives me the pip:
riding through rain without a cape,
pigs that catch my nag asleep
and guzzle a troughful of his slop,
or what it feels like on his back
once the harness comes unstuck,
or dinner invites from the bloke
whose larder you find chock-a-block
(while he remembers he can’t cook).

Shambolic Liverpool Win UEFA Cup

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Self-Portrait in the Concave Mirror of the Life, Trial and Martyrdom of Ernest Lalor Malley





















‘I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.’

Order, order!
Opening the case
for the prosecution,
the Zoological Society
of London announced the return
of Mr Ern Malley’s paper
on his discovery of an oviparous
monotreme, ornithorhynchus
paradoxus
, on the grounds
of non-existence: ‘If there are
mammary glands, where is the butter?
The “platypus” is the merest
imposture and you, sir,
are a damnable fraud.’

Representing himself
Ern Malley, Irish rebel
and author of a memoir, On
Another Man’s Wind
, hailed
by avant-garde periodical
Fractious Echidnas as ‘pungent’
wished to denounce
in the strongest possible terms
the Scouse poet-mechanic
and disturber of the peace
Ernie O’Malley.

‘The use of the copula
I considered an indecency’,
testified Officer Vogelsang,
only the twitchings of whose
ever-vigilant groin stand
between Australia
and moral collapse.
‘In the strictly conscientious
prosecution of my
duties’, he added, ‘I have
sometimes found it
necessary to do away
with language altogether.’

Ethel Malley, housewife
and sister of the accused,
stated weeping that
the life and works of authors
James McAuley and Harold Stewart
had all been an immature
prank for which her brother
now wished to apologise.
The whole affair had been
a terrible strain on their father,
and she too had been against
this writing game from the start!

The defendant, Ern Malley,
in his closing remarks
ruled Dermot Trellis,
novelist-within-a-novel
in Flann O’Brien’s recently
published At Swim-Two-Birds
an inadmissible witness
before finding himself guilty.
‘I am denounced as a hoax,’
he protested as he did so,
‘but patently exist. I call
on myself to drop this trumped-
up case now before
I waste any more of my time.’


I By the Tide of Humber























































































I think of Peter Didsbury’s ‘Three Lakes by Humber’, and yes, I know there is only one swan in that photograph, not two:

Clean, and left to please itself.
two swans circling
on an Iron Age mirror

And in fact, who should I meet on Newland Avenue, fresh from spotting the Far Ings bittern at last, flying overhead (as pointed out to me by the man sitting beside me, to whom many thanks), but Peter Didsbury. Confusing syntax that, is it not, but no, Peter Didsbury was not flying overhead, amusing though that would have been.

I have spent the last few years of my life watching the sky sink into the mud, it seems. There are worse ways to spend one’s time.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Hint Hint




















‘Among the unusual professions of the people [greatest-living-Brayman Dara Ó Briain] meets [in his book Tickling the English, reviewed by someone or other in the current TLS] is that of airtraffic controller controller, which does not, it turns out, involve preventing air traffic controllers from bumping into one another.’

(Harbour Bar, Bray, Christmas?)

‘There is the world’s most middle-class crime story, when an audience member describes a burglar breaking into a house during a dinner party and “We all just presumed he was another guest”; all the valuables are recovered when the escaping thief drops them on the courgette patch.’

(Good to get away th’ auld family for a bit. Porter House maybe?)

Tickling the English is a thoughtful and wise critique. It is also extremely funny.’

(Christmas holidays then. The Porter House it is. Any afternoon there’s a Liverpool game on. Mine’s an Erdinger, thanks.)

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The Country, The Burn, The Hard













Leeches petrol.

















Leach’s petrel.

For more by me on one of the above subjects, courtesy of the kindly folk at Verse Palace, see here.

Large Vat of Drivel





















The university sector, as it exists in the minds of the people who run this country, is a fairly dysfunctional-absurdist place, in policy theory and, increasingly, thanks to the efforts of those nice people, in practical fact, and I can’t explain why any better than Stefan Collini does in his commentary piece in this week’s TLS, ‘Impact on Humanities’.

Workers in the humanities produce ‘outcomes’ of various kinds which are then graded for the purposes of conversion into funding on a five-yearly basis in the Research Assessment Exercise, as was, lately renamed the Research Excellence Framework. Among recent government bright ideas is the suggestion that research be given a 25 per cent weighting for ‘impact’ achieved, in terms of its ‘demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society.’ Examples of these benefits could not be more crudely utilitarian, including ‘creating new businesses’, ‘commercialising new products or processes’ and other ideas copied from the minutes of the nearest photocopier salesmen’s convention. This sounds like a familiar standoff between highminded layabouts and hardnosed philistines, but more important than that is the total incoherence of these ‘indicators’, even in hardnosed philistine terms. Collini gives the example of a diligently researched edition of a Victorian poet, ‘exemplif[ying] the general values of careful scholarship and remind[ing] its readers of the qualities of responsiveness, judgement, and literary tact called upon by the best criticism’, but whose ‘impact’ (in the terms outlined above) is zero. Unless of course that Victorian poet was in the habit of burying poetry manuscripts with his dead mistresses and digging them back up again afterwards, and the bodice-ripping ITV period drama on this subject mentions the study in the credits afterwards. That, apparently, is ‘impact’.

Collini writes;

Even if the policy represents a deliberately attempt by government to change the character of British universities (and the humanities are, I suspect, simply being flattened by a runaway tank designed for other purposes), its confusions and inadequacies should still be called to public attention. There are, after all, some straightforward conceptual mistakes involved. For example, the exercise conflates the notions of ‘impact’ and of ‘benefit’. It proposes no way of judging whether an impact is desirable [DW butts in: is it ‘impact’ if the Times covers a front-page story on my latest article in The Journal of Thomas Lovell Beddoes Studies as the single most arse-achingly tedious piece of English prose ever written?]; it assumes that if the research in question can be shown to have affected a number of poeple who are categorized as ‘outside’, then it constitutes a social benefit of that research [DW again: if I throw copies my article out the window and hit a passing schoolchild on the head, is that ‘impact’?] It also confines the notion of a ‘benefit’ to something that is deliberately aimed at and successfully achieved. Good work which has some wider influence without its authors having taken steps to bring this about is neither more nor less valuable than good work which has that influence as a result of such deliberate efforts, or indeed than good work which does not have that influence at all.

{Ends}

The proposals, Collini concludes, are ‘drivel’, reducing humanities academics to ‘door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”.’

Speaking as every taxpayer’s idea of the layabout academic, and someone who has never read the Times Higher Education Supplement in my life, I am, I presume, a walking embodiment of all the reasons why these barbarians are now at the gate, or inside it writing government reports. But drivel is drivel and having a large vat of it emptied over your head does not become any more pleasant an experience for your being told it was written by the people who pay your wages.

Oh, and can I put this blog on my RAE returns? Assuming I can, some customer-driven ‘impact’ in the comments, please.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich















Ah, the sweet aftertaste of crumbly Arran cheese, as I was reminded the other day while washing some down with a pint of Arran blonde beer in a bar outside Brodick. And ah, the distinctive kidney shape of the island itself (ára = kidney), I was also reminded, looking at the large map of the place on the wall, before replacing my pint on an Arran-shaped table. That’s four Arrans in one mouthful of beer.

For whatever reason, there is less perceived need in Hull to look at the place on the wall, and eat, drink and dine off it too.

Arran, however, is quite suburban, as Scottish isles go, given that it’s a mere two hours from Glasgow city-centre. Perhaps the more remote you get the larger the chunks the island name takes out of the rest of the language, until by the time you get to Sula Sgeir all other words have been purged and the inhabitants (gannets and fulmars, in that case) spend all day reworking that scene from Being John Malkovich where he goes inside his own head and into a world of conversations that go ‘Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich’, ad infinitum. ‘Sula Sgeir? Sula Sgeir Sula Sgeir Sula Sgeir.’

For reading, MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch. It chimes all too perfectly with my remarks the other day about the appeal of ‘meta-Gaelic’ to people who cannot speak that language. As Jonathan Allison was saying of that book at the get-together in Aberdeen where I was doing my own sounding off too, this poet of things being drunkenly various finds himself strangely susceptible to all manner of Gaelic purism, which burden they, the locals, not he must then shoulder. The Perceval and Crowder figures in that book remind me strongly of the idiotic Englishmen in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes who spend the whole film worrying about the test-score at Lord’s, unable to turn off the drone of their upper-class twittish chatter no matter what their surroundings (much like the group of wax-jacketed, purple-trousered upper-class twits in the bar in Brodick, intent on some fraternisation with the stags on Goatfell, I’m sure). MacNeice gets some wan mileage out of this Mutt and Jeff combination, but then launches into his own version of chatter in a discussion of Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism, an utterly pointless book, then and now, and not, one would have thought, the kind of thing anyone needed to dwell on in the wilds of Lewis or Harris. My point being that, for all the appeals of the far Celtic shore, the ambient musak of Anglophone chatter retained a certain irresistible appeal, if only as a buffer against the elemental ferocity all around, a point MacNeice never quite faces in that fascinating piece of hack-work. In just the same way that MacDiarmid’s ‘On a Raised Beach’ gets back, philosophically, to the stones, by forsaking the earthier language (but artificial in its own way, yes I know, I know) of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep to crash his way through all those Latinate jaw-breakers, half of whose meanings I suspect he didn’t even know himself. Do stones speak Latin? Or Gaelic? Or possibly Sumerian? Whichever, I’m sure they sound nothing like ‘On a Raised Beach’. It’s an exercise in ‘meta-stone’, in other words.

Sighted: stags loping lazily across the road, a golden eagle on a telegraph pole, a buzzard, lots of oystercatchers and lapwings, and most pleasingly of all, Britain’s most persecuted bird, the grouse-fancying hen harrier, préachán na gcearc.

Anyone with a spare hour on their hands can listen to John Kerrigan speak, fascinatingly, on I Crossed the Minch here.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

What I Believe


















Ses ailes de géant l’êmpechent de marcher, but as for the contents of the albatross’s stomach...

I was inspired to look up Chris Jordan’s work by a similar picture in the Guardian the other day. He has been documenting the effects on albatrosses of the plastic they pick up out at sea and feed to their young, believing it to be food.

An obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss the other day described his philosophy of life as one of ‘serene pessimism’, but how to express this serenely? Life is shit. For most people and creatures, at most times, life is shit. As Beckett’s ill-fated attempt at a stage character in Mary Manning Howe’s play Youth’s the Season put it: ‘My conception of the universe is a huge head with pus-exuding scabs – entirely revolting.’ This is my philosophy of life too.

(Life is shit.)

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

'Service Me Sexually From Three to Seven Times a Day'


















John Cheever to Allan Garganus: ‘All I expect is that you learn to cook, service me sexually from three to seven times a day, never interrupt me, contradict me or reflect in any way on the beauty of my prose, my intellect or my person. You must also play soccer, hockey and football.’

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

On the Trembling Margin





















Hereunder the text of a talk I gave at Aberdeen at the weekend, titled ‘On the “trembling margin”: Irish-Language Trace Elements in Contemporary Irish Poetry in English’. Yes, it is woefully incomplete. I don’t discuss Heaney or Montague, the first of whom has every bit as deep a scholarly knowledge of Irish as Thomas Kinsella, but without the Gaelic Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders complex, and the latter of whom is every bit as much of an old-style culural nationalist as Kinsella, but whose engagement with Irish partakes more noticeably of a private drama (the stuttering speech of his ‘grafted tongue’). I also don’t engage with Vivian Mercier or Declan Kiberd, as alternatives to the merely catastrophist view of the fate of Irish taken, again, by Kinsella. And since I was speaking in Scotland you’d imagine I might have had something to say about Rody Gorman, who triangulates his work between English, Irish and (Scottish) Gaelic, but no. I did, however (thanks Kit), receive some suggestions for who that Irish poet might be who lives and writes in apparent total indifference to the Irish language (your suggestions please...). Seo agaibh anois:

In a short film of 2003, Yu Ming is Ainm Dom, a Chinese man decides to move to Ireland, and having established in an atlas that the official language of that country is Gaelic, sets about learning it. On arrival in Dublin he enters a pub and asks for a job, only to be met with incomprehension. Finally, one man sitting in the corner intervenes and explains as Gaeilge how Yu Ming has been sadly misinformed. English is the language of Ireland, not Irish. At this point, his use of the famous mirror sequence from Taxi Driver while practising the language in China (‘An bhfuil tusa ag labhairt liomsa?’, ‘You talkin’ to me?’) seems all the more appropriate, since also in the words of that celebrated soundbite ‘I’m the only one here’. It gets worse: the bemused barman exclaims to another drinker that he wasn’t aware Paddy spoke Chinese. But all is not lost: the closing sequence of the film features some tourists arriving at a pub in the Gaeltacht and encountering Yu Ming behind the bar, who greets them with a hearty ‘Fáilte go Conamara!’, ‘Welcome to Connemara’.

A post-Celtic Tiger Irish-resident version of Christopher Reid’s Katerina Brac can easily be imagined, a Latvian, Angolan or Chinese poet commenting with affectionate irony on the Irish and their foibles. But as Yu Ming’s example reminds us, there is already a resident linguistic alien among the Irish, and that is the Irish language itself. A taxonomy of Irish writers and their relationship to the Irish language today might go something like this. At one end of the scale are poets who not only write in Irish, but refuse to have their work translated into English. I’m thinking here of Biddy Jenkinson, whose gran rifiuto was, oddly enough, made in precisely that language: ‘I would prefer not to be translated into English in Ireland. It is a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland. If I were a corncrake I would feel no obligation to have my skin cured, my [torso] injected with formalin so that I could fill a museum shelf in a world that saw no heed for my kind’.

Next along would be the great majority of writers in Irish who, I presume, would have no objection to being translated into English or any other language, but whose books are read and received by an Irish-language readership with little acknowledgement of their existence outside this small community. Liam Ó Muirthile, for instance, is a fine contemporary Irish poet, but where is the engagement with his work among critics of Irish poetry who write predominantly on poetry in English? It is practically non-existent. A different case again is that of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Ní Dhomhnaill has done more than any writer in recent memory to raise the profile of the Irish language, but the manner in which she has done lays bare not a few of the morbid aspects of the relationship between Irish and English. Ní Dhomhnaill’s translators include some of the most distinguished contemporary Irish poets some of whom can, and some of whom cannot, speak Irish. Moreover, it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that one of the latter, working from Ní Dhomhnaill’s cribs, might produce a more readable version than one of the former, as indeed has happened. Where Irish is concerned, the postcolonial linguistic condition admits of not just hybridisation but immaculate conceptions.

Another category again, possibly a one-man category in recent times, is that of the writer whose sense of grief and guilt over writing in English leads him to abandon it for Irish. I am thinking here of Michael Hartnett, who dramatised his great about-turn in A Farewell to English in 1975. A central problem throughout that book, however, is its re-energizing of the link between the Irish language and a brand of national and even racial consciousness that almost guarantees the tragic impasse of the project, and which finds more profitable expression in the series of translations from Ó Bruadair, Ó Rathaille and Haicéad that occupied the last years of his life.

My next category would be that of the committed but Anglophone cultural nationalist, actively translating from Irish and fully aware of the postcolonial ironies of his every step in English. Here I might name Thomas Kinsella, whose translation of the Táin and whose New Oxford Book of Irish Verse and (with Seán Ó Tuama) Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed are landmarks, dolmens even, in modern Irish poetry, but products of an unabashed belief in the mutilation of the Irish psyche by the colonial experience. In his Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, Justin Quinn takes a very brisk view of Kinsella’s position: his theory of a ‘dual tradition’ is ‘plainly wrong’. To Kinsella’s example of Jonathan Swift and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille’s ignorance of each other’s existence, Quinn replies: ‘the distance between the two languages and their worlds is greater than Kinsella will admit: you can only have a “dual tradition” if there are enough readers who are bilingual.’ For Kinsella, even when ignoring each other, the two traditions remain locked together in time-honoured antagonism, whereas for Quinn, lacking Kinsella’s nationalist template, it is simply delusional to describe contemporary Irish writing in these terms. This leads him to combine a hard line on what, if anything, is still distinctive about Irish poetry (his answer being: the Irish language) with a total absence of the emotional reasons that might underpin the argument if it were being advanced by Kinsella. How apparently close but in fact utterly removed we are from Kinsella’s position when, in a debate with Barra Ó Séaghdha, Quinn declares: ‘I wished to inquire whether a work can be Irish yet not be in that language. I ultimately don’t think that it meaningfully can be, and that it forms a kind of sub-section of Anglophone poetry, which is not identical to English or British poetry.’

How far we are, too, from the practice of most contemporary Irish poets should also become apparent in what follows: here my taxonomy begins to fragment, as writers unwilling to follow the logic of Quinn’s demanding position put the Irish language to more private or meta-poetic uses instead. A good example of this would be Eavan Boland. To the best of my knowledge, Boland is not an Irish speaker: the Irish language in her work seems to me to fall into the category of fetishised identity exhibit, to be touted in the abstract rather than examined, spoken or read in the living particular. I have written about this before, so will restrict myself to one example, the bardic poet whose dispossession she sketches in ‘My Country in Darkness’:

The Gaelic world stretches out under a hawthorn tree
and burns in the rain. This is its home,
its last frail shelter. All of it –
Limerick, the Wild Geese and what went before –
falters into cadence before he sleeps.

He shuts his eyes. Darkness falls on it.

Whatever else Boland’s aims, adding to the store of our knowledge of the Gaelic world is hardly among them. The reality of Gaelic culture is snuffed out and replaced by Celtic Twilight cliché. Why is our bard voiceless and unnamed? Boland could tell us a lot more about him if she wanted. When other people do this to us it is cultural imperialism. When we Irish do it to ourselves it is laziness.

A different example of this combination of distance from the Irish language and re-engagement with it across that very distance occurs in the work of Medbh McGuckian. When The Southern Review devoted a special issue to Irish poetry in 1995, it featured a remarkable conversation or comhrá between McGuckian and Ní Dhomhnaill. When the conversation turns to the Irish language, McGuckian describes her linguistic self-image as an Irish-haunted speaker of English in frankly remarkable terms. She frets in the shadow of the colonial language, so that:

even the words ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Wordsworth’ – at some level I’m rejecting them, at some level I’m saying get out of my country, or get out of my...

[Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill]: ... soul.

MMcG: Get out of me. [...] I do feel that there’s a psychic hunger [...] and I’m lying like a corpse under it all.

She aspires to write ‘an English that would be so purified of English that it would be Irish’, but it is a revealing commentary on the Irish purity aspired to by McGuckian, surely, that both the medium of pursuit and the eventual goal are the English language. The further postcolonial experience appears to take us from the Irish language, the greater the temptation to reinvest in it as a cultural fantasy, a mirage of otherness from the Anglo-culture we flatter ourselves we reject, but that in fact governs every aspect of our daily lives. Are Irish poets in denial about this fact and using the Irish language, or a meta-version of it, as a shield against this unpleasant reality?

One immediate come-back to that might be to wonder what is wrong with cultural fantasies, when they take the rich and compelling form McGuckian’s poems frequently do and, also frequently, with some Gaelic element very strongly in the mix. In ‘Elegy for an Irish Speaker’ McGuckian invokes the ‘Roaming root of multiple meanings’ before announcing ‘I cannot live without /your trans-sense language /the living furrow of your spoken words /that plough up time.’ Shane Murphy has done invaluable work identifying the wholesale borrowings and rewritings going on under the surface in McGuckian’s work, but even the non-specialist reader might recognize the quotation here from Mandelstam’s ‘The Word and Culture’ (‘poetry is the plough that turns up time’), not to mention the reference to the Futurist movement of ‘zaum’ or trans-sense. Once again though, it is revealing that, for all McGuckian’s talk of returning to a decontaminated Irish essence, her work takes the route of centrifugal dispersal across other languages and traditions. Perhaps Irish sleeps somewhere at the heart of all this in the same way that, as she writes in ‘The Dream Language of Fergus’, ‘Latin sleeps, they say, in Russian speech.’ But no matter where it resides, it does so as an enabling myth, a projection, a glorious fantasy, as well as a mere language to write in or speak.

Derek Mahon too has translated Ní Dhomhnaill from English cribs, but it is notable in the wake of the politically greener noises Mahon makes in The Yellow Book, with its jibes about Northern Ireland, how its sequel, Harbour Lights, strikes overtly bardic postures, unpicking the etymologies of Irish place-names and translating a seventeenth-century poem of Tadhg Ó Ruairc’s. Mahon displays his characteristic Francophilia when the girl addressed in the poem is praised for her ‘gold chevelure’, while it is also doubtful the original card games played included bezique (invented in the nineteenth century). Reading the poem again in his collected translations, Adaptations, it is striking how tonally consonant it is with Mahon’s versions of poems from French, German, Italian and other languages: not for Mahon the willed (or at any rate I’m guessing it was willed) awkwardness of Kinsella’s translations, underlining the implicit resistance of the Irish poem to Anglicisation. This may be a late variant on the old redskins and palefaces divide, but even as Mahon becomes (apparently) more racy of the Munster soil, he insists all the more on how racy of the Baudelairean intertext his Irish versions are. Mahon is no neo-Corkeryan, but the most pragmatic of born-again bards.

A fellow Ní Dhomhnaill translator of Mahon’s, Michael Longley, is worth reeling in on our súgán rope at this point. Of his fine poem ‘On Hearing Irish Spoken’, Justin Quinn has commented: ‘Yet Longley, it is clear, is not going to go so far as to learn [Irish]’, which brings our argument to a sensitive crux: should he? Poetry is not community service, so Longley no more ‘should’ learn Irish than he should learn Icelandic, Latvian or any other minority language that took his fancy. But do we hereby establish that this attitude to the Irish language (the commonest among Irish poets writing in English today, I would suggest), means that while we dip into language as a theme or source of Celtic otherness, in practical terms owe the language nothing, nothing at all? I am very reluctant to think this is the case.

And finally there is the poet who does not speak Irish, whose imaginative world does not include the Irish language, and in no way registers its absence. Can anyone suggest such a contemporary Irish poet? We have long established that the game of ‘Irish, Irisher, Irishest’ is demeaning to discussions of Irish poetry, and using one’s interest in Irish as a badge of privileged identity should impress no one. But taking that as read, we find ourselves at my previously announced crux all over again. On what grounds could one reprove, if one wished to do so, this hypothetical writer whose world simply excludes the Irish language? Do we wish to reprove this writer?

In pursuing this Linnaean survey, I am aware of following an arc away from the Irish language as medium to the Irish language as message, as in Boland’s auto-exoticising appropriations of it. But even in Irish this strategy is all too tempting. When Quinn notes that for Gearóid MacLochlainn, as for Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘the Irish language itself is also the main theme’, are we at risk of aping the ludicrous feis of Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht, whose fanatical Gaelgeoir insists that speaking Irish is not enough, we must only use it to speak about the Irish language, the better to be ‘fíor-Ghaeil fíor-Ghaelacha a bhíonn ag caint fíor-Ghaeilge Gaelaí i dtaobh na Gaeilge fíor-Ghaelaí’ (somehow I think that translates itself). But Mylesian absurdity aside, it must be possible to write both intelligently in and on the language without succumbing to morbid self-referentiality. I will now conclude with two examples from recent poets that, I believe, make use of Irish-language themes in just such a way.

My first is the sequence ‘Edge Songs’ from Peter Sirr’s 2004 collection Nonetheless. A note describes the poems as ‘a series of workings, adaptations, versions, “skeleton” translations of poems in Old Irish, Middle Irish and Latin, as they might be remembered or misremembered by an imagined Irish poet’, though original poems of Sirr’s are added to the mix too. Sources given include the Aisling Mhic Chonglinne, The Life of Brigid the Virgin and the poems of Sedulius Scottus. We meet a ‘solitary blackbird’ in the first section and think, of course, of the ninth-century blackbird of Belfast Lough:

the quick impulse of it, slantwise
scribbled on the edge of the moment
this hasty space, trembling margin
this at last a place to live in

The poems are full of transformations, performed with the fiat of Amergin’s ur-text of Gaeldom, familiar to generations of readers of Graves’s The White Goddess:

she hangs her cloak on a sunbeam
turns water to beer
she causes a foetus to disappear
makes salt from rock
her mantle is not stained by raw meat
a river rises up against cattle thieves
wolves are her swineherds

There is a cottage, or even bothy industry today in Celtic spirituality and nature mysticism, which operates almost entirely on the meta-level of self-conscious Celticness (I’m thinking here of the works of John O’Donoghue and John Moriarty), but here is the real thing, whatever that may be, precisely in its abstention from self-applied identity markers. Consider section x, a response to the eleventh-century lyric ‘Ná luig, ná luig’:

What else should we swear on, if not the earth
how should we walk, if not so lightly
we hardly touched it

[...]

where else can the world go
but away from us, like an ebbing tide
and what should we do

but follow

‘Edge Songs’ are among the finest achievements of recent Irish poetry and a paradigm of what a linguistically curious writer, with no apparent cultural-nationalist baggage whatever, can do with this rich and challenging material.

My second and final example is the poem ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’ from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Girl Who Married the Reindeer. This must count among the most intensely coded, some might say overdetermined, reckonings with the Irish language through the medium of English in recent Irish poetry. Its scholar has been ‘raking the dictionaries’, ‘hunting for keys’, working on a puzzle whose solution is ‘the price of his release’, though his release from what remains opaque. Where most poets troping the Irish language in English are concerned to emphasize its distance from the language in which they are writing, Ní Chuilleanáin instead drives the two almost together, but subject to a tantalizing yet insuperable divide, in which I for one hear echoes of MacNeice’s ‘Dublin’, with its similarly painful degrees of closeness:

Two words as opposite as his and hers
Which yet must be as close
As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard
Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note
On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle


Caitríona O’Reilly has praised the poem as a ‘visionary examination of what it means to reach out, to step beyond personal limitation and prejudice in all areas of life’, and in its final stanza it achieves a condition of, simultaneously, doubleness, in-betweenness, and neitherness, if that is a word:

The rags of language are streaming like weathervanes,
Like weeds in water they turn with the tide, as he turns
Back and forth the looking-glass pages, the words
Pouring and slippery like the silk thighs of the tomcat
Pouring through the slit in the fence, lightly,
Until he reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.

The solving language is recognized, paradoxically, through its poverty – it has ‘no word for his’, just as the Irish language has no word for ‘No’ (or ‘Yes’). The final image is of togetherness across, or do I mean in division. The unreachable girl turns the ‘locked lock green’ with her breath: the door is faoi ghlas, locked, and glas also means ‘green’ (it also means ‘death-knell’ in French, I might add). However, on the Gaelic colour chart it’s important to note that glas can also be glossed as ‘grey’: they are the same word, just as Irish has the same word for ‘hand’ and ‘arm’ and ‘leg’ and ‘foot’, and other very obviously different things, one would have thought. I am reminded of George Steiner’s discussions in After Babel of the different cultural resonances of the same word in different languages: Brot is not bread is not pain, or arán. Ní Chuilleanáin exults in this small act of ‘insisting so on difference’, as Larkin called it in ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, an act of tricky ambiguity that may appear to complicate the plain sense of things, while in fact reminding us there never was an innocent plain sense of things in the first place, just as that concluding locked bilingual door is more liberating than any amount of monoglot open sesames. Despite my earlier worry about the ‘overdetermined’ nature of this poem, it is surely among the outstanding Irish poems of our times.

At this point it only remains to say that it is a cause of real regret to me that I am not talking here, today, in as well as about the Irish language. It is, let us not forget, vastly more important to speak and write the Irish language than to speak and write about it in English. The Yu Mings of this world, from Connemara to China, have had enough time now to practise their Travis Bickle lines in the mirror, but the next time an Irish-language poet finds him or herself asking ‘An bhfuil tusa ag labhairt liomsa?’, there has to be a better riposte than – I switch back to English to underline the gloominess of the answer – ‘I’m the only one here’.

Baldpates - Pearl Eyes - Tumbles Well



To sew its nest in place, the reed warbler sometimes collects threads from spiders’ webs.

‘Imagine a whale’s tongue, grey-brown and wet for ever, fifteen miles long and fifteen miles wide – that is the mud of the Wash.’

Starlings on Shetland use sheep as towels.

While living in England, Rimbaud compiles a list of pigeon names, as follows:

homing – working – fantails
pearl-eyed tumbler –
shortfaced – performing tumblers
trumpeters – squeakers
blue, red turbits – Jacobins
baldpates – pearl eyes – tumbles well
high flying performing tumblers
splashed – rough legged
grouse limbed
black buglers
saddle back
over thirty tail feathers

A woodcock arrives ‘with the kerfuffle of a Dickensian clerk, hunched and wheezing and crabbed. He looked more as though he was carrying a heavy ledger up Threadneedle Street. It was hard to think that he was in the thick of a sex dance.’

The bittern was formerly known in England as the myre dromble.

‘Peter took the wooden fish-priest strung on his waist and hit each mullet very hard three of four times on the head. It was bone-crunching, a loud and finite noise amidst the never-ending soughing and blow of wind and water. As he hit them, Peter talked to the fish in a soft voice. “I know, I know”, he said.’

A heron trying to land, according to J.A. Baker, is ‘like a man descending through the trap-door of a loft and feeling for a ladder with his feet.’

All this and more in Tim Dee’s The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life (Jonathan Cape), a luminous read and surely instant classic. The youtube clip is of his favourite bird, the redstart, subject of John Buxton’s classic 1950 study, called simply The Redstart, to which this book has now sent me scurrying.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Il Fuoco Che Gli Affina






















An appreciation of Richard Price’s Rays and Thomas A. Clark’s The Hundred Thousand Places. And before you ask me why I describe Price as the author of a dozen books, please just don’t: I never said that!