FOUND IN TRANSLATION II: LOUIS DE PAOR'S "LANGUAGE QUESTION"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 16, Number 9 (September 2005), p. 26.

Last month I wrote for these pages some musings on Louis de Paor’s moving poem “Iarlais” / “Changeling” from his dual-language volume Gobán Cré Is Cloch / Sentences of Earth & Stone. One engaging poem summoning up in the back of my mind another by this fine Irish-language poet, I let my fingers do the walking to that volume’s neighbor on the bookshelf, Aimsir Bhreicneach / Freckled Weather, and found what I was I looking for: a wonderful lyric poem titled “Seanchas” / “Old Stories.” A further illustration of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s implication that language is intrinsically a way of knowing—that we interpret the world via the linguistic tools at our disposal—this poem acknowledges de Paor’s linguistic indebtedness to a family housekeeper he remembers fondly from his childhood in Cork.

The opening lines of “Seanchas” / “Old Stories” thus register the deep-seated relationship between and among reality, imagination and language—in this case, clearly a rich rural dialect:

00000D’fhág sí boladh fuinseoige
00000is móin ag dó ar theallach oscailte
00000le scéalta aniar as clúid teolaí a haigne.

De Paor himself translates:

00000She left the smell of mountain ash
00000and turf burning on an open fireplace
00000with stories raked up
00000from a warm chimney corner in her head.

Introducing the housekeeper by alluding to her natural storyteller’s ability to bring her rural past vividly to life in his family’s urban present, de Paor uses metaphor (rather than simile) to blur the distinction between the world seen literally and the world perceived through the lens of language. As he phrases it, the virtual and the actual are one and the same: just as her strength as a seanchaí—as a teller of seanchas (old stories)—can transport her listener to an unfamiliar realm, so the “warm chimney corner in her head” is as real in de Paor’s poem as the “open fireplace” of the rustic cabin that she grew up in.

Yet, while both initially and ultimately the poem may be “about” the way language affects perception, and also about how the use of language in poetry represents a heightened version of that phenomenon, “Seanchas” / “Old Stories” opens up other intriguing thematic territory:

00000oícheanta cuirfiú tar éis céili
00000chomh hairdeallach le giorria sínte sa chlaí,
00000tormán croí
00000ag sárú ar thrudaireacht na gcarranna
00000nó go slogfaí solas brúidiúil na saighdiúirí
00000sa dorchacht ropánta.

Her descriptive recollection resonates in English too:

00000coming from a dance after the curfew,
00000lying flat in the ditch, sharp-eared as a hare,
00000a clamour of heartbeats over the stuttering
00000patrolcars until the vicious lights of the soldiers
00000were ambushed by the dark.

Recounting a time she hid from marauding British soldiers during the Anglo-Irish war, this example of one of her “old stories” may tantalize the reader into imagining the housekeeper as the embodiment of a bowed but unbroken Irish nationalist spirit. Indeed, the scene she describes even seems reminiscent of William Butler Yeats’s quasi-apocalyptic poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”: “Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery / Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, / To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.”

But de Paor’s poem quickly complicates such a reflex interpretation, as another of the housekeeper’s old stories effectually de-romanticizes Irish militant nationalism:

00000reibiliúin gan mhúineadh ina dhiaidh sin
00000a thug caint gharbh is salachar na mbán
00000ar a sála isteach sa chistin sciomraithe,
00000a chiur an tigh faoi dhaorsmacht
00000le drochbhéasa is focail mhóra go maidin.

In English:

00000later on badmannered rebels
00000brought filthy words and mud
00000on heavy boots through the spotless kitchen
00000invading the house with rudeness
00000and big talk until morning.

Casting the often-idealized republican rebels as louts themselves, as no less boorish than the British soldiers they would displace, de Paor’s re-telling of her story in his poem simultaneously casts the housekeeper as the embodiment of a spirit of independence alright—but not in the conventional manner in which Ireland has been feminized by poets and politicians alike. She is no Cathleen Ni Houlihan, no old woman transformed (in Yeats’s version) into a young girl “with the walk of a queen.”

In fact, as the next lines reveal, in her defeat by the very values of the “modern” Ireland that the Irish rebels helped to put into place, the housekeeper emerges as a wistful symbol of a different claim for “self-government.” In this respect she is a spiritual sister of old Abby Driscoll in Frank O’Connor’s well-known short story “The Long Road to Ummera.” When her son Pat finally pronounces over her grave “Neighbors, this is Abby, Batty Heige’s daughter, that kept her promise to ye at the end of all,” the old woman comes to represent the triumph of traditional values—specifically, a sense of decency and respect for the past—over a post-revolutionary society increasingly defined by philistine pettiness masquerading as progress. Embodying Oscar Wilde’s incisive definition of a cynic as “someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Abby’s son himself represents a particular manifestation of the dominant forces that O’Connor’s and de Paor’s fellow Corkman Sean O’Faolain described in the 1930s: “To put the things in a few words—the figures of the new Ireland are the petty capitalist, native stock . . . ; the priest, native stock again; and the politician, almost always native stock. . . . Sanctity and salvation are on our banner. Security and stability are in our hearts. If we can have hard cash in our pockets we shall feel not merely holy but happy.”

De Paor’s housekeeper is not so fortunate as old Abby:

00000bhí sí neamhspleách rompu
00000agus ina ndiaidh
00000nó gur cheansaigh dochtúirí,
00000dlíodóirí, banaltraí is mná rialta
00000a hanam ceannairceach.

Her mettle stronger than that of either the British soldiers or the rebels, she yet eventually becomes the victim of a by-product of modernization—institutionalized treatment of the elderly:

00000she was independent before and after them
00000until doctors, lawyers, nurses and nuns
00000broke her heart.

For de Paor, then, his housekeeper’s linguistic example—itself an expression of her vital personal spirit—proves to be not just a useful gift for the future poet but a legacy for which he has been appointed, or anointed, custodian. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has written famously of the responsibility the contemporary Irish-language poet bears with regard to the native idiom. Translated by Paul Muldoon as “The Language Issue,” her “Ceist na Teangan” answers its own question about the future of Irish:

00000I place my hope on the water
00000in this little boat
00000of the language, the way a body might put
00000an infant

00000in a basket of intertwined
00000iris leaves,
00000its underside proofed
00000with bitumen and pitch,

00000then set the whole thing down amidst
00000the sedge
00000and bulrushes by the edge
00000of a river

00000only to have it borne hither and thither,
00000not knowing where it might end up;
00000in the lap, perhaps,
00000of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

Clearly, by virtue of the vibrant and vigorous form of the language that she passed on to Louis de Paor, his family’s housekeeper was just such a Pharaoh’s daughter.

But, recalling Padraic Colum’s poem “A Poor Scholar of the ’Forties,” in which the poet imagines fragments of the Latin and the Greek taught in nineteenth-century hedge schools showing up occasionally in twentieth-century conversation (“Years hence, in rustic speech, a phrase, / As in wild earth a Grecian vase!”), the surprising ending of “Old Stories” / “Seanchas” reveals that she played even that role with a characteristically singular twist. For tearing the veil of innocence from the seemingly innocuous English verb “mobilise,” she bequeaths to young de Paor in a private malediction against the fascist Blueshirts—yet another heavy-booted mob, active in Ireland in the post-revolutionary period—an altogether original battle cry that he would instinctively use under schoolboy duress. In effect, she invigorates, even renovates, the English language as well as the Irish:

00000Chuir sí fiúise is buachallán buí
00000ag gobadh aníos tré stroighin
00000is tarra im chaint
00000is chloisfí stair a cine gan chlaonscríobh
00000im ghlór fuilteach i gclós na scoile:

00000“I’ll mobilise you, you bloody Blueshirt.”

Little gets lost in de Paor’s translation:

00000She set fuchsia and ragwort
00000peeking through concrete and tarmacadam
00000in my talk and you could hear
00000the history of her people unrevised
00000in my blood-spattered voice in the schoolyard:

00000“I’ll mobilise you, you bloody Blueshirt.”

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: EYE TO EYE WITH LOUIS DE PAOR’S "IARLAIS"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 16, Number 8 (August 2005), p. 23.

Recently, reading “Photography,” Susan Sontag’s well-known essay first published in The New York Review of Books in 1973, I found myself not just transported by the power of a photograph but also translated, in effect, by the power of poetry. The catalyst for all of this was Sontag’s paragraph describing an image snapped during the Vietnam War by Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut: “A still photograph is a ‘privileged moment,’ turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. Photographs like the one taken in 1971 and put on the front page of most newspapers in the world—a naked child running down a South Vietnamese highway toward the camera, having just been hit by American napalm, her arms open, screaming with pain—were of great importance in mobilizing antiwar sentiment in this country from 1967 on.” Actually shot on June 8th of 1972, just outside the village of Trang Bang, Nick Ut’s universally reproduced photograph is a literal example of a picture being worth a thousand words (or more).

Simply as a photograph, it has that rare quality that master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson described in 1952 in the foreword to his landmark collection of photos titled The Decisive Moment: “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself.” A searingly candid record of the horrors of war—those horrors etched as permanently in the girl’s pain-contorted face as in her naked napalm-scorched body—Ut’s photo speaks proverbial volumes that need no translation for any viewer with a soul. Even the viewer’s knowledge that the nine-year-old girl in the photo, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, survived her wounds and grew up to become a United Nations goodwill ambassador working for world peace does not lessen the unutterable wrongfulness of what Ut captured in his photo. As Sontag observes, “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.” Not just transporting, this photograph proved to be transforming as well, as it became instantly imprinted in the mind’s eye, and thus in the conscience, of a world largely oblivious—and largely willfully so—to the true tax and toll that war exacts on the innocent.

Appreciating all of that resonance as I read Sontag’s essay and pictured in my own mind’s eye that truly indelible image, I also appreciated how an image like that—no, how that exact image—can continue to resonate not only over time but also across cultures and contexts, taking on additional import without losing an iota of its original impact. Specifically, that paragraph of Sontag’s essay stirred in me a memory of a remarkable poem I had read some years ago that directly invokes Nick Ut’s photograph. I thus took down from my bookshelf Gobán Cré Is Cloch / Sentences of Earth & Stone, a dual-language volume by Irish-language poet Louis de Paor. Thumbing my way beyond the book’s midpoint, I eventually came to “Iarlais” and its facing-page translation, “Changeling.”

“Poetry,” Robert Frost reportedly declared, “is what gets lost in translation.” Its formal structure of three free verse stanzas supporting its three-part rhetorical structure, “Iarlais” surely loses little in translation by its author. First the Irish:

00000Chuir sí a dhá láimh
00000in airde go humhal
00000gur bhaineas di
00000a geansaí róchúng
00000is d’imigh de chromrúid
00000ar chamchosa ag sciorradh
00000an an urlár sleamhain
00000don bhfolcadán.

Reworked in English by de Paor, that opening stanza appears to register an ordinary moment of a day-in-the-life of the stay-at-home father he was at the time of the poem’s conception:

00000She did as she was told
00000putting her arms above her head
00000as I pulled off the tightfitting jumper,
00000then ran crookedly
00000on bow legs slipping and
00000sliding across the wet floor
00000heading for the bath.

Straightforwardly descriptive, these opening lines prove to be subversively deceptive.

Indeed, exemplifying poetry’s capacity to make both the strange familiar and the familiar strange, the poem registers in its abrupt shift of language and image the poet’s own involuntary recollection of Nick Ut’s unerasable tableau:

00000I bhfaiteadh
00000na súl
00000ghaibh an iarlais uimpi
00000cló muirneach m’iníne
00000is rith isteach sa tsíoraíocht
00000uaim ar bhóthar gan ceann
00000i Vietnam Thuaidh
00000chomh lomnocht
00000le súil gan fora,
00000gan luid uirthi a cheilfeadh
00000a cabhail tanaí
00000ar mo shúil mhillteach
00000nuair a chaoch an ceamara
00000leathshúil dhall uirthi
00000mar seo.

In English:

00000In the blink
00000of an eye the changeling
00000took on my daughter’s body
00000running for all eternity
00000down a narrow unending road
00000somewhere in Vietnam
00000naked as an unlidded eye
00000without a stitch to protect
00000her wizened body
00000from my evil eye
00000when the camera winked
00000at her like this.

Superimposed on the image of his own daughter, the poet’s memory of that famous photo is itself infused with his openness to Irish folk belief in “changelings” and in the force of “the evil eye.” Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1995, preeminent Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill asserts that the very nature of the Irish language allows the native speaker equal access to the supposedly mutually exclusive realms of “reality and fantasy.” Claiming that “Even the dogs in the street in West Kerry know that the ‘otherworld’ exists, and that to be in and out of it constantly is the most natural thing in the world,” she explains: “The deep sense in the language that something exists beyond the ego-envelope is pleasant and reassuring, but it is also a great source of linguistic and imaginative playfulness, even on the most ordinary and banal of occasions.”

Of course, in “Iarlais” de Paor’s “playfulness” is altogether serious and sobering, as the folkloric elements convey a loving father’s perspective on the suffering of an innocent daughter. A rationalizing in the folk imagination of infant illness and mortality, the “changeling”—the sickly child exchanged by “the Fairies” for a healthy one—is quite literally a parent’s worst nightmare. In this case, the poet even projects his own culpability as “the evil eye” that has inflicted pain on the child now caught in the camera lens of his afflicted imagination.

But, consistent with Seamus Heaney’s description of the “verbal philandering” intrinsic to poetry written in Irish, de Paor’s working of troubling variations on the Irish word for “eye”—súil (súl, shúil, leathshúil)—in the second stanza affords the poem its restorative closure in the third stanza:

00000Nuari a nocthtann tú chugam
00000ag scréachaíl le tinneas
00000tá taise a cló buailte
00000ar do chraiceann fliuch
00000loiscthe ag an uisce fiuchta
00000ag allas scólta mo shúl.

00000When she comes back
00000screaming with pain
00000the mark of that tortured ghost
00000is branded on her dripping skin
00000scalded by the hot water
00000sweating from my unshuttered eye.

Perhaps truly, if unintentionally, complicit in sending his daughter into a bathtub of too-hot water, the poet may yet have his guilt assuaged, even absolved, by those heartfelt brimming tears—tears of empathetic fatherly love—burning his eyes at the end of the poem. Perhaps a similar capacity for love—not just for pity—contributed to what Sontag saw as the “moral outrage” provoked by Ut’s snapshot of a young girl’s agony. (“I almost love you,” Seamus Heaney wrote in a related vein in “Punishment,” a poem linking the photograph, published in P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People, of a female body buried for centuries in a Scandinavian bog with the thought of a young woman in Northern Ireland in the 1970s scapegoated for consorting with British soldiers.)

A compelling lyric poem by any measure, Louis de Paor’s “Iarlais” / “Changeling” may be that much more intriguing for having been written during the poet’s residency in Australia from 1987 to 1996. (A native of Cork, de Paor had a lectureship at the University of Sydney. He is currently Director of the Center for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway.) A “translation”—literally, a “carrying across”—in more ways than one, the poem’s engagement with Nick Ut’s transcendent photograph of Kim Phuc transports the reader far beyond the familiar realms of immediate time and place.