Ring Structure literature – 3

The Tale of Sinuhe

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Looking through a collection of older texts I came upon the Oxford World’s Classics series edition of an ancient Egyptian collection of tales, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640BC. (published 1997).

Certain recognisable characteristics of the Tale of Sinuhe caught my attention. On further examination it is, yes, a ring-structured text.

First recorded in written form in circa 1875BC, it was much copied in the proceeding three hundred years. It is, the book jacket claims a ‘supreme masterpiece… a perfect fusion of monumental, dramatic, and lyrical styles…’.

The Tale of Sinuhe itself is a relatively short piece, of little over three hundred lines (though there are differences on the page: between lines marked 265 and 270 for instance there are eleven lines on the page etc).

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The Tale consists of five sections, clearly marked, and roughly equal in length.

Part One opens with what seems to be a funerary inscription, an autobiographical account of the dead man’s life. It tells us that Sinuhe was a ‘Follower’, that is, Retainer, of the Egyptian Royal household.

We then encounter a narrative by Sinuhe that is dated: Year thirty, Month three, Day seven; it tells how he was part of the King’s son’s party returning from ’the Libyan Lands’. A messenger from the Royal Court arrives, and S overhears the news that the King is dead. The son immediately returns to Court leaving the party behind, uninformed. But Sinuhe has heard, and flies into a panic; he flees.

It is nightfall, he hides, flees South, then East, then North. At one point a man recognises him, but he avoids him, hides again. He makes his way to the eastern border of Egypt, travelling by night. Suffering badly from thirst he is rescued by a Syrian who recognises him. He takes care of him, takes him in. They travel up to Byblos, Qedem. He spent six months travelling with the Syrian group, when he was carried off by Amunenshi, another Syrian of higher rank. But he was a Syrian, a non-Egyptian, in fact a barbarian, or so he is also titled, an Asiatic.

Part Two consists of a question and answer section. Amuneshi asks him ‘Why did you come here?’ Sinuhe replies, tells a wary version of his tale. He reassures Amuneshi that he is no fugitive, he has not been disgraced, is not a wanted man: ‘I do not know what brought me to this country – it is like a plan of God.’ he says.

Amuneshi’s next question is ‘So how is that land? (Egypt). Sinuhe enters into a huge sell of all the righteous wonders and virtues of Egypt, its culture, and its claims to supremacy.

Amuneshi’s reply to this is, ‘Well, Egypt is certainly happy…But look, you are here now… I shall do you good.’

We are then regaled with all the riches of fruits, oils, cattle, grains of the lands of Iaa. He is honoured, his abilities recognised; he is given Amuneshi’s eldest daughter.

In Part Three we find he has lived there many years, his children have grown into tribal heroes; the ruler of the adjoining land of Retjenu relies on him as chief warrior to subdue recalcitrant tribesman. He is very successful, his life is good and he is richly rewarded. Then the greatest warrior of the land challenges him to a fight for supremacy. He wins the battle, and kills the challenger with the man’s own axe. He is allowed as with all such acts, to seize the man’s cattle, goods, enslave his people etc.

He reminisces: we have moved on many years, and he feels age upon him, and also a desire to return to Egypt, and wonders if the new King would allow him home.

Part Four consists of letters of correspondence between the King of Egypt and Sinuhe, and Sinuhe and the King. The King remembers him, has no blame for his flight, tells of Egypt, how he is remembered, and would welcome him home. Sinuhe in turn effuses and offers the King the land of Retjenu, which he has claimed through conquest.

In Part Five we see Sinuhe return to Egypt in splendour, be received with honour, and given an honoured residence, food from the Court, and in time, a tomb according to his rank prepared for him amidst the Royal pyramids.

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The parallels between the Parts are clearly drawn, and the turn in Part Three well constructed. Throughout his exile one constant thread is the conflict between the Delta Man: Egyptian, and the barbarian: Asiatic. When Sinuhe killed the challenger, using strategy, skill, he records he ‘gave my war cry…’ while ‘every Asiatic was bellowing’. There are many disparaging comments on the behaviour and ways of the ‘Asiatics’ – who were after all his wife’s people, and who saved him from death and dishonour. The ruler of Retjenu says to Sinuhe before the fight ‘No barbarian can ever ally with a Delta man.’ And so, in Sinuhe’s reply to the King of Egypt he has no hesitation in saying, ‘Retjenu… it is yours…’ in other words Sinuhe has conquered it for the King. The area of Iaa and Retjenu seem to coincide with modern Lebanon, Syria; in effect Sinuhe has added to Egypt’s dominion lands.

The paralleled contrasts between Part One, his journey out like an outcast, hiding, travelling by night, and Part Five his journey home in splendour are well drawn; as also are the use of the question and answer of Part Two, with the use of Royal correspondence in Part Four. Both cover similar grounds: Why are you here? What is it like there (itself a rather dubious question: in times of conquest and expansion, such a question could only mean, Is it worth my having/Have I anything to fear?).

There are many similarities of phrasing between the Parts that also tie them together. The paralleling is not what we would expect, however: there is not much straight Part to Part paralleling of event, action, theme, as contrasts, and that often between adjacent Parts. In his flight from Egypt (Part One) he records how he ‘crouched down in fear of being seen…’, of how he travelled only at night. Line 152 in the central Part (Three) he begins a series of almost homilies about how a fugitive, a man who leaves his land, a man who runs off, behaves, and how he himself by contrast was an honourable man. Sinuhe’s running off was not an act of dishonour, subterfuge; he was not an outlaw, he was ‘out of (his) mind’. He cannot account for his behaviour, either to Amuneshi, or the King.

Parts are connected with repeated phrasings, references: in Part One he mentions how he set out for Byblos and Qedem; in Part Four the place names are referenced again. Parts Three and Five are linked with references to linen: the clean linen of Iaa, and then the linen of his clothes that are returned there upon his return to Egypt. In Part One there are two references to being recognised as he fled, this contrasts with the recognition of him (‘Is it really he…?’) by the Royal household (Part Five).

It can be seen from this that there is a complex system of linking images and phrases, rather than a system of straight equivalences. We now begin to see why the Tale was so esteemed.

It will be noticed that the central section, Part Three, consists of a small ring in itself. It opens some years later, with Sinyje in his prime, his sons grown, and himself the chosen warrior and subduer for the ruler of Retjenu. The section closes after the challenge, also some years later again, but with Sinuhe past his prime, declining in years, health and potency. It is a structural paralleling, and as such a well used device.

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One of the strongest contrasts drawn is between the events of the night and of the day: it is by night he travels as he flees the country, whilst he disembarks in Egypt on his glorious return at dawn. By night he scurries away, avoids people. By day he is recognised by the Syrian, and saved from dying of thirst; in the daylight he takes on, and conquers, the challenger.

There is also a very striking contrast between the description of the riches of the land of Iaa, and those of Egypt. Iaa: ‘Figs were in it, and grapes;/ its wine was more copious than its water;/ great its honey, plentiful its moringa-oil/ with all kinds of fruits on its trees./ Barley was there, and emmer, and numberless were its cattle of all kinds…’. It is in effect an earthly paradise; he is treated honourably there, good food and drink are served him, he is able to prove his prowess, his abilities are recognised. Egypt is first described by alluding to the supreme worthiness of the new King, of his might, how he can subdue all others. Later this King is called ‘great in sweetness’, and how all the people of the land love and exult in his presence. It is as though Egypt was the residence of the Gods on earth. The earthly paradise pales against the actual paradise of the King.

These last are important points, because they allow us to understand the panic, the flight of Sinuhe. For the people of Egypt at that period it was commanded that they value the King as supreme, source of reason; as the offspring of the Gods, to whom he will return in due time. And so when the King died suddenly (the Notes suggest it was an assassination, and that this would be a given reference for the readers) then reason was suddenly extinguished. Sinuhe’s flight was a panic, a consequence of loss of reason. It is as though his wits had been disordered. It is almost a King Lear moment on the blasted heath.

He describes how in his flight he crossed a river ‘… a rudderless barge/ blown by the West wind…’. It was, as we have seen, mostly an act of the night, of chaos, where order and clarity are obscured. ‘Truth, balance, order, morality, law and justice’, as one source has it, were the attributes of the goddess Maat. It is at the border of the kingdom he crosses a lake dedicated to Maat. In effect then, by crossing the border he leaves the ordered world behind. His return is at dawn, where reason, and order are restored. Although he and his sons were tribal leaders and warriors amongst the ‘Asiatics’, his return to the Royal Court is to be placed once more amongst the children of the King where he began. Being of ‘common’ stock, this apparently was the highest position he could command in the supreme hierarchy of the King and his Court.

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There is a comment by Sinuhe early on (Part One), in his flight, his ‘madness’, where he says as he was suffering from thirst: ‘I was scorched, my throat parched./ I said, “This is the taste of death”./ But I lifted up my heart, and gathered my limbs together.’ This has all the tones of a quote from the later Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead is considered to be an authoritative version of many scattered and variant versions of rites, spells, procedures and accounts, that date from many periods of early Egyptian history.

R B Parkinson, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, in his Notes to the Tale points out several references within the Tale to connections with the Egyptian deity Hathor. If we take Sinuhe, the name itself, it means ‘Son of the Sycamore’, a tree associated with Hathor, the goddess of fertility and, more importantly, rebirth. The sycamore tree occurs several times in the text. Sinuhe’s flight was not so haphazard either: all the place names in the text of his flight were places connected with Hathor. So why was Hathor so important to the Tale? Is it because she was the goddess of fertility, rebirth and also patroness of foreign countries?

One source describes the after death paradise, from the later Book of the Dead, as ‘the ‘Field of Reeds’, a paradisaical likeness of the real world. The Field of Reeds is depicted as a lush, plentiful version of the Egypt of the living. There are fields, crops, oxen, people and waterways.’ This description fits rather closely to the land of Iaa as described in the Tale. Iaa, in the Notes, is glossed as ‘whose name may mean ‘Rushy place’’.

The newly dead undergo a ritual Weighing of the Heart. The deceased was led by the god Anubis into the presence of Osiris. There, the dead person swore that he had not committed any sin. There are distinct parallels in all this to the passage of Sinuhe from his leaving Egypt, his encounter with the Syrian, and his being taken off by Amunenshi, the questioning, and Sinuhe swearing that he was not a criminal, wanted man etc. In the Book of the Dead commentaries, this swearing is termed the Negative Confession, in that the phraseology is concerned with the person denying wrongdoing. Similarly in the Tale Sinuhe swears, that ‘I had not been talked of, and my face had not been spat upon;/ I had heard no reproaches; my name had not been heard in the herald’s mouth…’. It is only then the soul can enter paradise. And is then in the Tale that Sinuhe enters the land of Iaa. The heart is weighed against an ostrich feather, an accepted epithet of the goddess Maat, reflecting, it is assumed, the freedom of choice one has in one’s behaviour; and also reflecting again Sinuhe’s connection with the goddess in the means and ways of his flight. Maat is often identified with granting the individual the freedom of the will. It is this freedom of will that is constantly referred to when Sinuhe’s flight is discussed by all parties: the new King in his letter writes, ‘… your roving through countries/ going from Qedem to Retjenu,/ country giving you to country,/ was at the counsel of your own heart.’ (ll184-7, Part Four).

The central challenge also is reflected in the Book of the Dead. In the Tale the challenger is not named, but in the Book he is the god Apep: the god Osiris (Amenenshi?) constantly battles Apep.

As stated earlier Sinuhe’s return is at dawn; the alternative title to the Book of the Dead, is The Book of Coming Forth by Day. That is, into the light of the sun deity Ra, and the family of gods and goddesses. Sinuhe’s return at dawn begs the question whether he does actually return to Egypt, or does he enter the domain of the Gods. The recognition scene is important in this aspect; in the Book of the Dead the dead person meets again his/her parents. In the Tale he recognised by the Royal court and family.  I stated earlier that the inhabitants/Asiatics ‘bellowed’ in the all-important central part, when Sinuhe defeated the challenger. Is this a reference to them being followers of Hathor, often depicted as a cow, or as horns? The cattle imagery in this central part is quite extensive. Would this would indicate that the Asiatics, the inhabitants of those other realms are not ordinary people but… priests/priestesses of Hathor in their after-death roles?

When Sinuhe meets the King at last, he falls as if dead: ‘I was stretched out prostrate,/ unconscious of myself in front of him,/ while this God was addressing me amicably./ I was like a man seized in the dusk,/ my soul had perished, my limbs failed,/ my heart was not in my body./ I did not know life from death.’ (ll222-5, Part Five).The King/God raises him up: ‘The years were made to pass from my limbs’ (l291, Part Five), and he lives amongst them for a period. His tomb is prepared amongst their pyramids.

There are a number of pertinent passages here that support a reading of an after-death journey. Is this a further pointer to the Tale having another parallel meaning: political fable, moral tale, wonder tale, also an after-death tale?

Ring Structures in Literature – 2

The Author’s Prologue, Collected Poems, Dylan Thomas

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One surprising modern example of a ring-structured piece is Dylan Thomas’ Author’s Prologue to the Collected Poems. First published in 1952, shortly before the author’s death, The Collected Poems is prefaced by the Author’s Prologue, perhaps his last piece to be written.

That Thomas explored different and varied forms is no surprise to readers of his work. The most visually arresting form must be Vision and Prayer, from Deaths and Entrances, 1941. This is a two part long poem, the first section written in diamond form on the page:

                                     Who

                                    Are you

                                Who is born       etc

Where each line builds up a word per line into the structure, only to return within the same stanza to the single word at the bottom of the stanza. Each stanza is seventeen lines in length, that is the two halves of eight lines each plus a central, connecting line. This pattern is repeated for six stanzas, and then the shape halved horizontally to create an egg timer shape where the single words at top and bottom become one word in the middle, joining both halves together:

                           The ghost

                               From

                          The ground         etc

for another six stanzas. The shapes explore the relationship, consequences, hopes and fears at the birth of a child, from empathetic acknowledgement, witnessing, to self doubting, to attempting celebration. Thomas’ form-awareness is considerable; the Collected Poems explores the villanelle, sonnet, ballad, centrally structured poem (Into her Lying Down Head etc) to name but a few. Figure poems like this were very common in Renaissance times; we are more familiar perhaps with George Herbert’s Easter Wings.

Could Edwin Morgan’s ‘computer’/concrete poems be classified here also? How strict is it necessary to be to lay down the rules for recognising figure writing?

There are many forms of figure writing; another is an Old Testament biblical book, Leviticus. Professor Mary Douglas, in Thinking in Circles, persuasively argues that it is written in the form of the tabernacle as described to Moses in Exodus. In this example the book does not display a pictorial artefact on the page but is constructed so that the text is formed in three blocks, whose contents reflect the purpose of each of the three parts of the tabernacle: the large entrance hall, smaller hall of the priests, and the small holy of holies which only the high priest can enter.

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In Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems, The Author’s Prologue consists of fifty-two lines in two halves; each half parallels the other in their rhyme scheme. The rhymes runs abcd etc, and the latter half  …dcba ie in reverse order.

The Prologue begins

         This day winding down now

         At God speeded summer’s end

and ends

        At God speeded summer’s end

       And the flood flowers now.

Where the rhymes meet at the end of the first, beginning of the second we have the crux of the piece.

The Prologue attempts an overview of the writing of the poems collected together, saved, that is, in the one volume. The first half of fifty one lines, set amongst an estuary location conflux of waters, and particularly of birds, finds the writer in ‘poor peace’ at sundown. The poem works through this feeling of disquiet, to reveal that the collection of poems is in concept an ark. It is on this ark he hopes to ride out the overwhelming fear of the time, behind one’s life; his discovery is that in this ark he holds

                …. the wound asleep

          Sheep white hollow farms

 

          To Wales in my arms.

The second half of The Prologue is a celebration of this newly discovered sense of belonging, to a culture, to the world, to life, and of what constitutes it.

It is very noticeable in these latter poems, and in this poem in particular that the main images he uses tend to be light, musical images; in the Prologue it is the birds of the estuary he fills his poem with, rather than the heavier images , ‘brassy orator’, the ‘man-iron sidle’, ‘the bell of rocks’ etc of his earlier work.

It is as if he was attempting celebration and flight to heaven, whether through the musical/ tonal qualities of his work, or those in conjunction with an emergent inner compulsion for celebration. This, I think is the raison for preponderance of birds, and an almost onomatopoeic rendering of their flightiness in the broken rhythms, and song in the lighter tones, the higher registers.

Celebration becomes a major aspect of these later poems. We see this first forming explicitly in the Deaths and Entrances volume, as though to off-set the horrors witnessed in the War.

For, as he says in his Note: “These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.”

Ring Structures in Literature – 1

The social anthropologist the late Mary Douglas, promoted a new investigation of these old structures. Her book Thinking in Circles, (Yale University Press, 2007) has examined the phenomenon in some detail.

So what are Ring Structures? They are a way of structuring a text so that it forms a complete whole; there are many models, and they all seem to have definite similarities of structure. They are also found over a wide cultural area. Parallelism in literature, oral and written, occurs throughout the middle and far east. They are one of the earliest ways of structuring tales, poems, stories, even at one point a history.

A Ring Structure is based around a paralleling of events, themes etc, within the text; the main event appears in the middle of the story, poem etc, or to the modern reader, half way through. The events, thematic points, leading up to this main event are reiterated in reverse order in the latter part. The ending ties-in very closely with the beginning of the piece. The beginning and ending are also echoed clearly in the central event. This central event is the crux of the piece; it is a crux in that it is also a turning point in the piece, a crossing over in the story.

In some classic examples ring structured works also contain rings within the main ring.

Each paralleled point etc is usually clearly indicated in the text. This can take the form of reiterated phrases, verbal clusters. The result is what seems to be a series of separate episodes, and a petering-out of storyline. Ring literature can appear inconclusive, and full of repetitions, to the linear reader. Douglas writes it is this confusion in the scholarly approach: a widely praised work that to them reads jumbled, confused, repetitive, that made her pay close attention. The question is not Why is this work so valued? but What is it about this work makes it valued?

The general structure would seem to indicate that the text concentrates on the examination of cause and effect equally, as equal space is given both to the build up and the implications of actions.

For examples of these we mostly have to look to ancient texts. Mary Douglas’ book gives a very detailed account of The Book of Numbers, in the Old Testament of the Bible as having been conceived as a ring structured text. Another example is that of the Zoroastrian myths. As I said, ancient texts.

More modern examples can be found in the Chinese classics of the stories of the eleventh century The Water Margin.

Many modern scholars find it hard to recognise the structure; the majority of modern literature is based on far more linear models, and ring structures are not that easily recognised in this environment. Ring structures do not seem to have survived in any quantity beyond the last millennium BC. Metrical structures and later rhyming structures seem to have taken over; whether these forms displaced the older forms or not is not clear. Douglas seemed to think that the loss of ring practice was due to displacement by other emergent cultures. Many questions are thrown up by this, especially if, as we see, they are so wide spread throughout most cultures: where do these new cultures which do not use ring structures come from? It is probably the case that new ideas within cultures, amalgamations of extant and conquering cultures, took over, imposed different orders, new methods.

In Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

Gwendolyn Brook’s first book A Street in Bronzeville was published in 1945.

As soon as you mention dates weird time shifts happen. 1945:  end of WW11, Hiroshima and all the technology connected with the Manhattan Project. For Black America it moves differently: 1941 the Supreme Court ruled that black people could now travel first class on the railroad.

Gwendolyn Brooks published within the New Criticism orthodoxy of the time. She did not publish as a black person, coming in from that other time scale. Acceptance was immediate. She was writing out of a middle class, suburban background. This, along with an intellectual background in Eliot, Pound, and Wallace Stevens, was what was recognised. Even so, her first contacts were with writers like Langston Hughes.

Her Bronzeville was a southern suburb of Chicago. It became more black with time, and her writing became more entangled in black issues.

Her second book Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Her first book ranged through many verse forms, and brought in real life things like Coca-Cola, but also:

the mother

Abortion will not let you forget,

You remember the children you got that you did not get…

 and ending

Believe me, I loved them all,

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved you, loved you

All.

  -orchestrating to a precise degree, from third person to first: identifying, immediate…

She is always direct, engaged, writing from deep within her subject; the distancing is of the medium, the expression in language of what is perhaps pre-verbal, or non-verbal; expressing a response to a way of life that is imposed upon one, through the filter of that life’s allotted components’ of expression: the registers of engage- and disengage – ment.

kitchenette building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,

Grayed in, and grey. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong

Like “rent”, “feeding a wife”, “satisfying a woman”.

But could a dream send up through onion fumes

Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes

And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall…

 One of the outstanding sequences of this collection is Gay Chaps in a Bar (‘Gay’ in the pre-Stonewall sense). This sequence of twelve sonnets won the Midwestern Writer’s Group prize in 1943.

Its theme the articulacy of the GI’s response to the War front and home front. It earns its New Crit credentials by juggling soldier’s letters home, home expectations, the horror and alienation of war experience, and the “tight-lipped obligation of masculine self-censorship” (Susan Schweik).

“Straining dialogue…structured around a clear ironic contrast between after and before, front and home” (ibid). The sequence tackles the “strategies of omission” in the image of potential war-injury as physical, and communicable loss: the response and counter response of male to female, war front to home front.

The racial tension is always present:

the white troops had their orders but the…

…………….Negroes looked like men. Besides, it taxed

Time and temper to remember these

Congenital iniquities that cause

Disfavor of the darkness……….

 Congenital iniquities. A. Yemisi Jimot writes of Brook’s “middle-class notion of transcendent, unified, and fixed social narrative”, but also of a deepening “black group-consciousness”. Fame and university teaching put her in touch with young black writers, like LeRoy James/Amiri Baraka. She published with African American publishers or her own imprints thereon.

She puts forward the ideal male as black, masculine, young: … looked like men…; implicit here is all the diminution of the black man in a white man’s world; here she discards the polarities by re-valuing, re-evaluating. New Criticism focused on the multiple implications of diction and symbol.

After the Pulitzer Prize winning Annie Allen, she lost favour with her follow-up, The Bean Eaters. It was seen as too polemical. 1960 was a different world, with black issues and Civil Rights on top agenda.

Gender was always implicit: she was writing out of a black woman’s experience. Her audience was perceived as heterogeneous.

She would have been empathetic with Stuart Hall’s ‘hybridity’ stance on race awareness, as well as the identifiable and separate-discursive tradition stance of Alice Walker, and by extension, Sonia Sanchez. Her long career allowed her to explore many of these positions. Hall’s ‘hybridity’ (“nowhere to be found in its pure, pristine state” but “already… fused, syncretized, with other alloyed elements”) is there in the earlier books, whilst the later ones illustrate the enforced separateness, enforced ethnicity.

To allow the writer last word with that shocking ‘it’:

from Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat

hires out to Mrs Mills

  

They had never had one in the house before,

                 The strangeness of it all, like unleashing

A lion, really. Poised

To pounce. A puma. A panther. A black

Bear.

There it stood at the door

Under a red hat that was rash, but refreshing……….

(Mrs Mills’ child )

“………..kissed by the black maid! Square on the mouth!

World yelled, world writhed, world turned up light and rolled

………………

(but the child)

Kissed back the colored maid

………………..

Love had been hard and rapid to respond.

Twelfth Night, or Not Twelfth Night?

So, it is January 5^th – is this, then 12^th Night?

Do I take my decorations down? Would I have a BAD year if I didn’t?

(Everything points to that anyway: job going down the pan, further decrease of the job’s market. – I don’t need to go on).

So I asked someone in management ; I was just discussing that too, she said. Apparently Jan 5 is the time for Protestants, and 6^th for Catholics.

All depends upon when the 3 Wise Men arrived at the Nativity.

Of course that was closely followed by the Massacre of the Innocents. Something the Wise Men said to Herod. Not so Wise then, eh?

Those Brueghel paintings really made their impact on me in this connection.

So, their arrival also gives the date for the Russian Orthodox Xmas: as they were bearing gifts (Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh), so the giving of presents was a part of the festival.

I was the one who brought the Myrrh at school. I made a point of finding out just what that was in later years. I was making my own little collection: I had the F, then the M… the bling? Doesn’t sort of stay long enough to be counted!

Russian Orthodox Church – does that mean the Slavic Church in general? And thereby the Balkan Churches (the first European churches to have Mass and Bible translations in their spoken demotic languages). There is something about the history of Bulgaria that promises a lot of interesting insights here.

Something for the coming ‘empty time’.

And before the Church? This was period of the Latin Saturnalia: orgiastic, and uproarious.

The Church of the late medieval period celebrated Carnival(e): Rabelaisian – and the time of the Lord of Misrule.

The world turned upside down.

Fun, basically: fun before the lean days of Lent.

 

Another Brueghel painting: The War(?) Between Carnival and Lent.

 

We remember this period in the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. Dare we suggest that our carol must therefore a cleaned up version?

 

So, do I take them down tonight – or tomorrow night?

Nah, I’ll do it in the morning.

Some Themes in the Irish Language Poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

The first, most obvious thing that readers pick up on when reading the poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill is that it is not her poetry they are reading, but that of her translators.

The second must be that to write solely in Irish is a deliberate act of political and cultural significance.

How deliberate is it? Is there a choice in the use of the language? Although she can speak six languages, how many can she write poetry in? The only poetry of hers in English we do have is that of her own translations of seven of her poems, included in Rogha Danta.

“I am not a bilingual poet,” she has said. “I would be the first to admit,” she continues, commenting on a poem she translated, “that it is a very unsatisfactory translation.”

And so we have the problem of translation. Of her three books available, the first two are selections from three previously untranslated books. This is a blessing in its way, it does away with any kind of chronology for the poems, they all inhabit the same contemporaneous dimension.

It is salutary to note how broad her subjects are, how copious the work (there are only seven poem overlaps between the two books). On the whole she has been very well represented by her translators, the Rogha Danta translator Michael Hartnett keeping closer to the original than the various ‘personalities’ of The Pharaoh’s Daughter. A comparison between the first stanza of An Crann of Rogha Danta and As for the Quince done by Paul Muldoon in the latter book will have to suffice:

An Crann

Do thainig bean an leasa                

le Black and Decker,

do ghearr si anuas mo chrann.

D’fhanas im oinseach ag feachaint iurthi

faid a bhearraigh si na brainsi

ceann ar cheann.

The tree

The fairy woman came                              

with a Black and Decker.                          

She cut down my tree.                                

I watched her like a fool                            

cut the branches one by one.                    

                                                                   

As for the Quince

There came this bright young thing

with a Black and Decker

and cut down my quince tree

I stood with my mouth hanging open

while one by one

she trimmed off the branches.

 

There is no overt reference to a quince tree in the Irish: apple, apple tree: ull, crann ull; quince, quince tree: cainche, crann cainche. The Greek and Latin referencing here is rather weighing down the piece. Those implications come later. This strikes as an unwillingness to trust the author’s structure of the poem, and a rather show-off attitude in throwing in one’s own personality: ‘This is how I would have done it.’ The racy language is caught, but at what expense?

The later book, The Water Horse is served better than the previous one; in particular the translations by Medbh McGuckian stand out as especially impressive, capturing both the racy tone and richness of the language, and economy of expression.

Of course to write solely in a minority ‘dying’ language has its modern day precedents: Sorley MacLean wrote only Scots Gaelic, as with Derick Thomson and more contemporary writers; in Wales Menna Elfyn is making a similar plea for the language. This latter writer is particularly apposite to the case of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill in that both are politically active writers, willing to take part in political action. Menna Elfyn has been imprisoned twice on Welsh Language issues; Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill took part in the Bloody Sunday march in Derry (a typescript of her evidence is available on the .net).

Sorley MacLean, in his early works, espoused support for Bolshevik causes; he did not take any active part. The impetus for his most famous book Dain do Eimhir comes from his self-recrimination for his supposed neglect of the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

This political awareness is also evident in Ni Dhomhnail’s latest book The Water Horse, Eithne the Hun:

‘…but the lamb must still be waiting/to be led to the altar/by the mess they’ve just made/of those three in Gibraltar.’ (relating to an alleged pre-emptive strike by British Security forces on three IRA suspects entering Gibralter territory from Spain).

The language-issue seems particularly tied-in in her thinking about her family. It was her father’s side that kept the language alive. Her mother, however, perhaps thinking of her daughter’s future in a predominantly English world, played down the Irish. This becomes especially important when Nuala had taken the decision to write solely in Irish: she quotes her mother as saying her writing Irish was “mad”. She was not alone in this. At this period, the late 1960s, the very idea of basing one’s creative life on a ‘dead language’ had very little credibility in commercial terms.

Nuala does not write autobiographical or confessional poetry; all her characters are carefully stylised in the manner of the folk tales she draws on. So when we come across a poem as hard-hitting as Mother we must make an effort to remember not to read it as personal:

Mother

You gave me a dress

 and then took it back from me.

You gave me a horse

which you sold in my absence.

You gave me a harp

and then asked me back for it.

And you gave me life.

 

At the miser’s dinner-party

every bite is counted.

 

What would you say

if I tore the dress

if I drowned the horse

if I broke the harp

if I choked the strings

the strings of life?

Even if

I walked off a cliff?

I know your answer.

 

With your medieval mind

you’d announce me dead

and on the medical reports

you’d write the words

 “ingrate”, “schizophrenic”.

It is just as easy to read this as an attack on the Irish Catholic Church, with its communion dress and blended medieval iconography of holy mother, and thereby idealised mother; and threat of excommunication always present for strayers off the narrow way. Interestingly, the term “schizophrenic” banded about in this manner immediately dates the poem to the 1970s. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s language awareness, and sensitivity to vocabulary usage, is always up to date; and also rarely if ever does she resort to archaic terms or syntax, and never without good reason.

Whereas references to her father’s side frequently crop-up in comments, articles and poems her mother never does. This cannot but be felt. The question is, how far can one read this as an estrangement from her mother? I think Laura O’Connor has the most salient comment here: ‘… both Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and (Mebdh) McGuckian rely on “the enabling myth of the disabling mother”, citing “hostile, rather than nurturant mothering” as their impetus to art.’  It is a device for both moving on, and for subverting implied obligations to limited and limiting ideals.

In Words for the Branwen Theme she writes Civil Rights was my mother. Here we deal with an important distinction between biological parent and the parent, or agent, of awareness: political, cultural and feminist. These are shifting distinctions, I admit, but relevant to this particular case under discussion. The hostile mother here is the mother who preferred the English language, and therewith the English cultural heritage. Englishness has permeated every aspect of Irish culture: English is the language of school, commerce, business and every transaction outside the home. The inroads by the Gaelic League of the nineteenth century helped preserve the language on the ground level, the Settlement of 1921 the territory left to the language.

“The issue of the native language and its suppression has intrinsically a vast political dimension….At surface level it offers parallels with the position of Ireland’s women.”

For Nuala to take up the cause of the Irish language, she is in a way exchanging one set of cultural shackles for another. With the language goes all the iconography of nationhood, the personification of Mother Ireland, and, through the Catholic Church its conflation with the image of the suffering mother. The cult of the Virgin also has endorsed not only chastity and motherhood as womanly ideals, but also humility, obedience and passive suffering. Even more so, “The spiritualized ideal as Erin is… intensified by and linked to the puritanical and asexual ideal of woman by the Catholic Church….”

Put like this the imagery would seem to go so deep into the psyche of Ireland it would seem almost impossible to change or alter anything. Throughout the 1970s and early 80s “the assault on the traditional encoding of women…by Irish women poets…did a great deal to destabilise the conventions…” This was the period of the Innti group of Gaelic broadsheets with whom Nuala was involved at Cork University, also the nation-wide women’s’ workshop movement with which Eavon Boland was connected.

It could be argued that one of the most malleable weapons for destabilising standards and long settled traditions, is humour, whether as the waspish sting of satire or the alternative realignment of tradition into absurd or exaggerated antics. This was both Nuala’s great weapon and saving grace: “…a poet at her finest in the comic mode…”, and a saving grace in that her great gusts of laughter lift her out of the swamping of cultural iconography: “She… handled (sic) Gaelic tradition in a more subversive fashion than did (sic) the English-language poets. Her An Crann…. is infinitely more satisfying than…. programmatic assaults on the Sean-Bhean Bhocht of national tradition…”

For Nuala it would seem humour is a way of subverting the chaste, Madonna image, the suffering mother image, and also a way of laying claim to one’s own sexual identity. This last is a major tenet of second-wave feminist thinking, particularly in the writings of Julia Kristeva. For Nuala it makes its appearance in poems tackling nationalist images, as The Great Mother.

Irish women writers are already speaking and thinking in terms of generations: Maura Dooley can reference Peig Sayers in full knowledge that her work is accessible and available. Of the generation of Gaelic women writers preceding Nuala, Ni Dhomhnaill Maire Mhac an tSaoi was held to be the “most technically gifted…of her time.” She used the lyric-parody, another humour-based form, for subverting Catholic traditions. Her lyrics were found too complex for easy translation. She “gave her blessing” to Nuala, and whereas her own poetry has found few translators, Nuala has now a wide and international readership, partly through an accessible and vernacular vocabulary but also through her great humour.

By using humour to subvert tradition, and by using the Irish language she is also preserving a tradition. Like all old traditions the Gaelic is full of its own stereotypes and male dominance. The Ulster Cycle reeks with testosterone; this she takes issue with in her Cu Chulainn series from Rogha Danta:

  Cu Chulainn 1

Small dark rigid man

……………………

…………………………………….

…………………………………….

Don’t threaten us with your youth again

small poor dark man

 and goes on to be portrayed as a mithering brat who treats his mother to his rudeness.

The Connaught Cycles however are much more amenable, Queen Mebd figures hugely and her position as royal equal to Aillil forms the backbone of ‘The Tain’. The poem Mebd Speaks is very telling here:

Mebd Speaks

War I declare from now

on all the men of Ireland

on all the corner-boys…..

………………………….

on the twenty-pint heroes……

…………………………

just looking for a chance

to dominate my limbs –

…………………………

 

I will make incursions

…………………

my amazons beside me

 (not just to steal a bull

……………………..

but for an honour-price

…………………….

my dignity). 

 

: that is, the “integrity of the body”

Eibhlin Evans writes: “Poetry is not required to be oppositionalist and the writing of the women does include other motivations…” For Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill these “other motivations” she finds already embedded in Gaelic culture and language. The Gaelic Heritage she describes as “… a relationship between people and their objects of desire…” According to Helene Cixous “the discovery of desire necessarily precedes the discovery of a writing practice grounded in female pleasure and power.” The grounded female embodiment of pleasure and power is the dominant figure in all of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s writing.

“The Gaeltacht language I grew up with,” she writes, “fell out of history before the Enlightenment, and before many other things, including Victorian prudishness; and the language just isn’t prudish. The language is very open and non-judgemental about the body and its orifices.” Here again is the issue of the ‘integrity of the body’.

In the opening poem of ‘Rogha Danta’, We are Damned, My Sisters she writes of:

………………………….

 we who swam at night

 on beaches, with the stars

laughing with us

……………………..

without shifts or dresses

………………………

who accepted the priests’ challenge

…………………………………

We who didn’t darn stockings

we who didn’t comb or tease

…………………………….

We find the female stereotypes, the Church control, all cast away as with the shifts and dresses, the ‘sisters’ laugh with the stars; this is a poem of challenge, but also triumph whilst at the same emphasising the on-going nature of the struggle for self identity and fulfilment: to be damned is to be on the outside of the community, and the sisterhood image an alternative community in the making, whether in material terms, or imaginative terms, both are equally valid at different times.

The Irish language, she says, “…can pick up and sing out every hint of emotional modulation that can occur between people.” This is the plus side of tradition. It is as though, for Nuala, the language both written and spoken become an unbroken link between people at all points in history, it is as though to use the language is to transcend tenses, to embody all or any historical moment, to inhabit a contemporaneous dimension.

Unfortunately, the Irish language has also picked up the cast of the image of the colonised. This has proved a major stumbling block for many wishing to use the language as their own with some kind of native purity.   “…the crucial function of language as power demands that post-colonial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre…” I paraphrase the piece here: there is no way the Irish language will ever seize autonomy again, and so the only way to utilise the language as power is to centre one’s own not-inconsiderable gifts in it.

This is precisely Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s position: the passage continues, “The most effective way of reappropriation is not a return to native linguistic purity… but the conscious combative use of the vernacular and/or deliberate, resisting use of the hegemonic master discourse to contest the imperial traditions on their own terms.”

This is what, in fact, I would argue, one of many of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s achievements.