The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

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THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN / 24 3 1

50 Worships language and forgives Everyone by who m it lives; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet.

Tim e that with this strange excuse

55 Pardoned Kipling6 and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel,7 Pardons hi m for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark,8 60 An d the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every huma n face, An d the seas of pity lie

65 Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, Wit h your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;

70 With the farming of a verse Mak e a vineyard of the curse, Sing of huma n unsuccess In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart

75 Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

Feb. 1939 1939, 1940

The Unknown Citizen

To JS/07/M/378 This Marble Monument is Erected by the State

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be On e against who m there was no official complaint, An d all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,

5 For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

6. The British writer Rudyard Kipling (1865� conservative politics. Yeats was at times anti1936) championed imperialism. democratic and appeared to favor dictatorship. 7. French author (1868�1955) with extremely 8. World War II began in September 1939.

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2432 / W. H. AUDEN

Except for the Wa r till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,

10 For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) An d our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. Th e Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

15 An d that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, An d his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured. Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan

20 And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A gramophone, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; Whe n there was peace, he was for peace; whe n there was war, he

went. 25 He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist1 says was the right number for a parent of his

generation, An d our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Wa s he free? Wa s he happy? Th e question is absurd: Ha d anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Mar. 1939 1939, 1940

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street2 Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire

5 Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright An d darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives;

10 Th e unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther3 until now

15 That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz,4

1. An expert in eugenics, a pseudoscience for the 2. In New York City, where Auden was living. genetic "improvement" of humans. 3. Martin Luther (1483-1546), founder of the 1. The date of Germany's invasion of Poland and Protestant Reformation. the outbreak of World War II. 4. Austrian city where Hitler spent his childhood.

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SEPTEMBER 1,1939 / 2433

What huge imago5 made A psychopathic god: I and the public know

20 Wha t all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides6 knew All that a speech can say

25 About Democracy, An d what dictators do, Th e elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book,

30 Th e enlightenment driven away, Th e habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

35 Wher e blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Eac h language pours its vain Competitive excuse:

40 But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Ou t of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face An d the international wrong.

45 Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, Th e music must always play, All the conventions conspire

50 To make this fort assume Th e furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night

55 Wh o have never been happy or good.

Th e windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote

60 About Diaghilev7 Is true of the normal heart;

5. Psychoanalytic term for the unconscious rep-because he failed to prevent the Spartans from resentation of a parental figure. seizing a colony. 6. Greek general (d. ca. 401 B.C.E.) and historian 7. The Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav of the Peloponnesian War, exiled from Athens Nijinsky (1890-1950) wrote that his former lover

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243 4 / W . H . AUDE N For the error bred in the bone Of each woma n and each ma n Craves what it cannot have, 6 5 Not universal love But to be loved alone. Fro m the conservative dark Into the ethical life Th e dense commuters come, 7 0 Repeating their morning vow, "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," An d helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: 7 5 Wh o can release them now, Wh o can reach the deaf, Wh o can speak for the dumb?8 All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, so Th e romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street An d the lie of Authority Whos e buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State 85 An d no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.9 Defenceless under the night 9 0 Ou r world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: 9 5 Ma y I, composed like them Of ErOS� and of dust, Greek god o f desire Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. Sept. 193 9 1939, 1940

the ballet impresario Sergey Diaghilev (1872� 9. Auden later revised this line, which struck him 1929) "does not want universal love, but to be as "dishonest." In one version of the poem the line loved alone." reads "We must love one another and die." Another 8. Proverbs 31.8. version leaves out the entire stanza.

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IN PRAISE OF LIMESTONE / 243 5

In Praise of Limestone1

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes With their surface fragrance of thyme and beneath 5 A secret system of caves and conduits; hear these springs That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region 10 Of short distances and definite places: What could be more like Mother or a fitter background For her son, for the nude young male who lounges Against a rock displaying his dildo,� never doubting penis That for all his faults he is loved, whose works are but 15 Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard, Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish To receive more attention than his brothers, whether 20 By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down Their steep stone gennels2 in twos and threes, sometimes Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged On the shady side of a square at midday in 25 Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think There are any important secrets, unable To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral And not to be pacified by a clever line Or a good lay: for, accustomed to a stone that responds, 30 They have never had to veil their faces in awe Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed; Adjusted to the local needs of valleys Where everything can be touched or reached by walking, Their eyes have never looked into infinite space 35 Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky, Their legs have never encountered the fungi And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common. So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works 40 Remains comprehensible: to become a pimp Or deal in fake jewelry or ruin a fine tenor voice For effects that bring down the house could happen to all But the best and the worst of us . . . That is why, I suppose, The best and worst never stayed here long but sought

1. Inspired by the limestone landscape outside is to my 'Mutterland', the Pennines [hills in the Florence, Italy, where Auden and his longtime north of England]. Am in fact starting on a poem, companion Chester Kallman (1921�1975) were 'In Praise of Limestone', the theme of which is that staying; the poem also recalls the poet's native rock creates the only truly human landscape." Yorkshire. In a letter to Elizabeth Mayer, Auden 2. Narrow passages between houses (Yorkshire wrote: "I hadn't realised till I came how like Italy dialect) or, as here, rocks.

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2436 / W. H. AUDEN

45 Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external, The light less public and the meaning of life Something more than a ma d camp. "Come!" cried the granite wastes, "How evasive is your humor, how accidental Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." (Saints-to-be Slipped away sighing.) "Come!" purred the clays and gravels "On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both Need to be altered." (Intendant Caesars rose and 55 Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper: "I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad."

60 They were right, my dear, all those voices were right An d still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks, Nor its peace the historical calm of a site Wher e something was settled once and for all: A backward An d dilapidated province, connected 65 To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite: It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself It does not neglect, but calls into question All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. Th e poet, 70 Admired for his earnest habit of calling Th e sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy By these solid statues which so obviously doubt His antimythological myth; and these gamins,0 urchins Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade 7 5 With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what An d how muc h you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught, Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water so Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these Are our Commo n Prayer,3 whose greatest comfort is music Whic h can be made anywhere, is invisible, An d does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if 85 Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead, These modifications of matter into Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains, Mad e solely for pleasure, make a further point: Th e blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, 90 Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmu r Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

May 1948 1948,1951

3. The Book of Common Prayer is the liturgical book of the Anglican Church.

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THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES / 243 7

The Shield of Achilles1

She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities, An d ships upon untamed seas, 5 But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness An d a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown, 10 No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,

Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude,

A million eyes, a million boots in line, 15 Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face Proved by statistics that some cause was just In tones as dry and level as the place: No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

20 Column by column in a cloud of dust They marched away enduring a belief Whos e logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder For ritual pieties, 25 White flower-garlanded heifers, Libation and sacrifice,2 But there on the shining metal Wher e the altar should have been, She saw by his flickering forge-light 30 Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) An d sentries sweated, for the day was hot: A crowd of ordinary decent folk

35 Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground.

1. In Homer's Iliad Achilles, the chief Greek hero and a city at war; scenes from country life, animal in the war with Troy, lends his armor to his great life, and the joyful life of young men and women. friend Patroclus and loses it when Patroclus is The ocean, as the outer border, flows around all killed by Hector. While Achilles is mourning the these scenes. death of his friend, his mother, the goddess Thetis, 2. Cf. John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" goes to Mt. Olympus to beg Hephaestos, the god (1820): "Who are these coming to the sacrifice? / of fire, to forge new armor for Achilles. The splen-To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st did shield of Achilles that Hephaestos then makes thou that heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her is described in book 18 (lines 478-608). On it he silken flanks with garlands dressed?" "Libation": depicts the earth, the heavens, the sea, and the sacrifice of wine or other liquid. planets; a city in peace (with a wedding and a trial)

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2438 / W. H. AUDEN

Th e mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same, 40 Lay in the hands of others; they were small An d could not hope for help and no help came: Wha t their foes liked to do was done, their shame Wa s all the worst could wish; they lost their pride An d died as me n before their bodies died. 45 She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Me n and wome n in a dance Moving their sweet limbs Quick, quick, to music, 50 But there on the shining shield His hands had set no dancing-floor But a weed-choked field. A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy; a bird 55 Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept Or one could weep because another wept. 60 Th e thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away; Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought 65 To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Wh o would not live long. 1952 1952, 1955

[Poetry as Memorable Speech]1

Of the man y definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: 'memorable speech.' That is to say, it must move our emotions, or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is memorable, and the stimulus is the audible spoken word and cadence, to which in all its power of suggestion and incantation we must surrender, as we do when talking to an intimate friend. We must, in fact, make exactly the opposite kind of mental effort to that we make in grasping other verbal uses, for in the case of the latter the aura of suggestion round every word through which, like the atom radiating lines of force through the whole of space and time, it becomes ultimately a sign for the sum of all possible meanings, must be rigorously suppressed and its meaning confined to a single dictionary one. For this reason the exposition of a

1. Excerpted from Auden and John Garrett's introduction to their anthology of verse, The Poet's Tongue.

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[POETRY AS MEMORABLE SPEECH] / 243 9

scientific theory is easier to read than to hear. No poetry, on the other hand, which when mastered is not better heard than read is good poetry.

All speech has rhythm, which is the result of the combination of the alternating periods of effort and rest necessary to all living things, and the laying of emphasis on what we consider important; and in all poetry there is a tension between the rhythm due to the poet's personal values, and those due to the experiences of generations crystallised into habits of language such as the English tendency to alternate weak and accented syllables, and conventional verse forms like the hexameter, the heroic pentameter, or the French Alexandrine. Similes, metaphors of image or idea, and auditory metaphors such as rhyme, assonance, and alliteration help further to clarify and strengthen the pattern and internal relations of the experience described.

Poetry, in fact, bears the same kind of relation to Prose, using prose simply in the sense of all those uses of words that are not poetry, that algebra bears to arithmetic. Th e poet writes of personal or fictitious experiences, but these are not important in themselves until the reader has realised them in his own consciousness.

Soldier from the war returning, Spoiler of the taken town.2

It is quite unimportant, though it is the kind of question not infrequently

asked, who the soldier is, what regiment he belongs to, what war he had been

fighting in, etc. The soldier is you or me, or the man next door. Only when it

throws light on our own experience, when these lines occur to us as we see,

say, the unhappy face of a stockbroker in the suburban train, does poetry

convince us of its significance. Th e test of a poet is the frequency and diversity

of the occasions on which we remember his poetry.

Memorable speech then. About what? Birth, death, the Beatific Vision,3 the

abysses of hatred and fear, the awards and miseries of desire, the unjust walk

ing the earth and the just scratching miserably for food like hens, triumphs,

earthquakes, deserts of boredom and featureless anxiety, the Golden Age

promised or irrevocably past, the gratifications and terrors of childhood, the

impact of nature on the adolescent, the despairs and wisdoms of the mature,

the sacrificial victim, the descent into Hell, the devouring and the benign

mother? Yes, all of these, but not these only. Everything that we remember no

matter ho w trivial: the mar k on the wall, the joke at luncheon, word games,

these, like the dance of a stoat4 or the raven's gamble, are equally the subject

of poetry.

We shall do poetry a great disservice if we confine it only to the major

experiences of life:

Th e soldier's pole is fallen,

Boys and girls are level now with men,

An d there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

They had a royal wedding. All his courtiers wished him well.

2. Beginning lines of a poem (in which "war" is 3. A sight of the glories of heaven. plural) by the English poet A. E. Housman (1859- 4. Weasel. 1936). \

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2440 / W. H. AUDEN

Th e horses pranced and the dancers danced. O Mister it was swell.

An d masculine is found to be Hadria the Adriatic Sea,5

have all their rightful place, and full appreciation of one depends on full appreciation of the others. A great many people dislike the idea of poetry as they dislike over-earnest people, because they imagine it is always worrying about the eternal verities.

Those, in Mr Spender's6 words, who try to put poetry on a pedestal only succeed in putting it on the shelf. Poetry is no better and no worse than huma n nature; it is profound and shallow, sophisticated and naive, dull and witty, bawdy and chaste in turn.

In spite of the spread of education and the accessibility of printed matter, there is a gap between what is commonly called 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' taste, wider perhaps than it has ever been.

The industrial revolution broke up the agricultural communities, with their local conservative cultures, and divided the growing population into two classes: those whether employers or employees who worked and had little leisure, and a small class of shareholders who did no work, had leisure but no responsibilities or roots, and were therefore preoccupied with themselves. Literature has tended therefore to divide into two streams, one providing the first with a compensation and escape, the other the second with a religion and a drug. The Art for Art's sake7 of the London drawing-rooms of the '90's, and towns like Burnley and Rochdale,s are complementary.

Nor has the situation been muc h improved by the increased leisure and educational opportunities which the population to-day as a whole possess. Were leisure all, the unemployed would have created a second Athens.

Artistic creations may be produced by individuals, and because their work is only appreciated by a few it does not necessarily follow that it is not good; but a universal art can only be the product of a community united in sympathy, sense of worth, and aspiration; and it is improbable that the artist can do his best except in such a society.

# s #

The 'average' man says: 'When I get home I want to spend my time with my wife or in the nursery; I want to get out on to the links9 or go for a spin in the car, not to read poetry. Wh y should I? I'm quite happy without it.' We must be able to point out to him that whenever, for example, he makes a good joke he is creating poetry, that one of the motives behind poetry is curiosity, the wish to know what we feel and think, and how, as E. M. Forster1 says, canknow what I think till I see what I say, and that curiosity is the only human passion that can be indulged in for twenty-four hours a day without satiety.

The psychologist maintains that poetry is a neurotic symptom, an attempt

5. A mnemonic to help remember that Hadria, Latin for the Adriatic Sea, is masculine, despite its typically feminine ending. The first quotation is a remembered version of Cleopatra's speech after Antony dies in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (4.16.67�70). The source of the middle quotation has not been identified. 6. Stephen Spender (1909-1995), English poet. 7. Phrase associated with aestheticism. 8. Once industrial mill towns in Lancashire, England. 9. Ground on which golf is played. 1. English novelist (1879-1970).

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Louis MACNEICE / 2441

to compensate by phantasy for a failure to meet reality. We must tell him that

phantasy is only the beginning of writing; that, on the contrary, like psychol

ogy, poetry is a struggle to reconcile the unwilling subject and object; in fact,

that since psychological truth depends so largely on context, poetry, the par

abolic2 approach, is the only adequate medium for psychology.

The propagandist, whether moral or political, complains that the writer

should use his powers over words to persuade people to a particular course of

action, instead of fiddling while Rome burns.3 But Poetry is not concerned

with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and

evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more

clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a

rational and moral choice.

* $ *

1935

2. I.e., akin to parable. 3. The Roman emperor Nero (37-68) reputedly fiddled while Rome burned. LOUIS MACNEICE 1907-1963

Born in Belfast, the son of a strong-willed Anglican rector (later to become a courageously independent bishop), Louis MacNeice illustrates the English critic Cyril Connolly's dictum that "the one golden recipe for Art is the ferment of an unhappy childhood working through a noble imagination." MacNeice's mother fell ill and died. "When I was five the black dreams came; / Nothing after was quite the same." Sent to English schools, where he lost his Irish accent, he was educated at Marlborough College and Merton College, Oxford. He became a lecturer in classics at Birmingham University and, later, at Bedford College, London. Following the breakup of his first marriage, he traveled to Iceland with his friend the poet W. H. Auden, then to Spain on the eve of�and again during�the Spanish Civil War, and to the United States at the beginning of World War II. After returning to England in 1940, he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation as a feature writer and producer and, except for a year and a half spent in Athens as director of the British Institute, worked for the BB C for the rest of his life.

He was a pioneer of radio drama, a playwright, a translator (of Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Goethe's Faust), and a literary critic. Best-known as a poet, however, he was early identified with the other liberal and leftist Oxford poets, Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis. Openness, honesty, and a consistently high level of craft characterize his poems. In a responsive, flexible voice, they ruminate tentatively and ponder without resolution. MacNeice delights in the surface of the world his senses apprehend and celebrates "the drunkenness of things being various," often (as in "Bagpipe Music") with wit and a wild gaiety. In love with life's irreducible multiplicity, he strives to embrace life's flux, despite an underlying sense of sadness and, sometimes, tragedy: "All our games are funeral games."

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2442 / Louis MACNEICE

Sunday Morning

Dow n the road someone is practising scales, The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails, Man's heart expands to tinker with his car For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar,

5 Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now, And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead1 anyhow, Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past, That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time

10 A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire Opens its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire To tell how there is no music or movement which secures Escape from the weekday time. Whic h deadens and endures.

1933 1935

The Sunlight on the Garden

Th e sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold,

5 When all is told We cannot beg for pardon.

Ou r freedom as free lances

Advances towards its end;

The earth compels, upon it

10 Sonnets and birds descend; An d soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances.

Th e sky was good for flying Defying the church bells

15 An d every evil iron Siren and what it tells: Th e earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying1

An d not expecting pardon,

20 Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you,

1. An upland district in Surrey popular for out-1. Cf. Antony's speech in Shakespeare's Antony ings. and Cleopatra 4.16.19: "I am dying, Egypt, dying."

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BAGPIPE MUSIC / 244 3

An d grateful too For sunlight on the garden.

1937,1938

Bagpipe Music

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw, All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow. Their knickers0 are made of crepe-de-chine,� their panties / silky material

shoes are made of python, Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,

Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,

Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,

Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,1

All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi. Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather, Wok e to hear a dance record playing of Ol d Vienna.

It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,

All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay2 declaring he was sober,

Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.

Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,

Said to the midwife "Take it away; I'm through with overproduction."

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,3

All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,

Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.

His brother caught three hundred cran4 when the seas were lavish,

Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.5

It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,

All we want is a packet of fags� whe n our hands are idle. cigarettes

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,

It's no go the country cot� with a pot of pink geraniums. cottage It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

1. Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), famous the-social evening spent singing and storytelling. osophist whose ideas were popular in some quar-4. A measure of fresh herrings, about 750 fish. ters in 1930s Britain. The poem is set in The Scottish herring industry failed in the 1930s; Depression-era Scotland, before World War II. the Herring Board (line 25) was a government 2. New Year's Eve (Scots). attempt to provide direction. 3. A Scottish Gaelic word pronounced kaley for a 5. I.e., "went on the county" (on relief)

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244 4 / DYLAN THOMAS

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Wor k your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. Th e glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

1937

Star-Gazer

Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night And the westward train was empty and had no corridors So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight

Of those almost intolerably bright Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks Ho w very far off they were, it seemed their light Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.

io And this remembering now I mark that what Light was leaving some of them at least then, Forty-two years ago, will never arrive In time for me to catch it, which light when It does get here may find that there is not

is Anyone left alive To run from side to side in a late night train Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.

Jan. 1963 1963

DYLAN THOMAS 1914-1953

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, and educated at Swansea Grammar School. After working for a time as a newspaper reporter, he was "discovered" as a poet in 1933 through a poetry contest in a popular newspaper. The following year his Eighteen Poems caused considerable excitement because of their powerfully suggestive obscurity and the strange violence of their imagery. It looked as though a new kind of visionary Romanticism had been restored to English poetry after the deliberately muted ironic tones of T. S. Eliot and his followers. Over time it became clear that Thomas was also a master of poetic craft, not merely a shouting rhapsodist. His verbal panache played against strict verse forms, such as the villanelle ("Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). "I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words," he wrote in his "Poetic Manifesto." His images were carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw the workings of biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and again and again in his poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate

.

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE / 2445

this unity ("The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age"). He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life again. Hence each image engenders its opposite in what he called "my dialectical method": "Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction." Thomas derives his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and Freud. In his poems of reminiscence and autobiographical emotion, such as "Poem in October," he communicates more immediately through compelling use of lyrical feeling and simple natural images. His autobiographical work Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and his radio play Under Milk Wood (1954) reveal a vividness of observation and a combination of violence and tenderness in expression that show he could handle prose as excitingly as verse.

Thomas was a brilliant talker, an alcoholic, a reckless and impulsive man whose short life was packed with emotional ups and downs. His poetry readings in the United States between 1950 and 1953 were enormous successes, in spite of his sometimes reckless antics. He died suddenly in New York of what was diagnosed as "an insult to the brain," precipitated by alcohol. He played the part of the wild bohemian poet, and while some thought this behavior wonderful, others deplored it. He was a stirring reader of his own and others' poems, and many people who do not normally read poetry were drawn to Thomas's by the magic of his own reading. After his premature death a reaction set in: some critics declared that he had been overrated as a poet because of his sensational life. The "Movement" poets, such as Philip Larkin, repudiated his rhetorical extravagance. Even so, Thomas is still considered an original poet of great power and beauty.

The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

Th e force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

5 My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Th e force that drives the water through the rocks

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams

Turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins

IO Ho w at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool1

Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind

Hauls my shroud sail.

And I am dumb to tell the hanging man

15 Ho w of my clay is made the hangman's lime.2

Th e lips of time leech to the fountain head;

Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood

Shall calm her sores.

1. The hand of the angel who troubles the water 2. Quicklime was sometimes poured into the of the pool Bethesda, thus rendering it curative, in graves of public hangmen's victims to accelerate John 5.1-4. decomposition.

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244 6 / DYLAN THOMAS

2 0An d I am dum b to tell a weather's wind Ho w time has ticked a heaven round the stars. An d I am dum b to tell the lover's tomb Ho w at my sheet goes the same crooked worm. 1933 The Hunchback in the Park 5Th e hunchback in the park A solitary mister Propped between trees and water Fro m the opening of the garden lock That lets the trees and water enter Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark' ioEating bread from a newspaper Drinking water from the chained cup That the children filled with gravel In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship Slept at night in a dog kennel But nobody chained him up. 15Like the park birds he came early Like the water he sat down An d Mister they called He y mister Th e truant boys from the town Running when he had heard them clearly On out of sound 2 0Past lake and rockery0 Laughing when he shook his paper Hunchbacked in mockery Through the loud zoo of the willow groves Dodging the park keeper Wit h his stick that picked up leaves. rock garden 253 0 An d the old dog sleeper Alone between nurses and swans While the boys among willows Made the tigers jum p out of their eyes To roar on the rockery stones An d the groves were blue with sailors Made all day until bell time A woma n figure without fault Straight as a young elm Straight and tall from his crooked bones 1. The bell indicates the park's closing for the night.

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POEM IN OCTOBER / 2447

3 5 That she might stand in the night After the locks and chains 40All night in the unmade park After the railings and shrubberies Th e birds the grass the trees the lake An d the wild boys innocent as strawberries Ha d followed the hunchback To his kennel in the dark. 1941 1946 Poem in October 5ioIt was my thirtieth year to heaven Wok e to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood An d the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore Th e morning beckon Wit h water praying and call of seagull and rook� An d the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. crow 152 0My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses An d I rose In rainy autumn An d walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border An d the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. 2 530A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summer y On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Com e in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Win d blow cold In the wood faraway under me. An dPale rain over the dwindling harbour over the sea wet church the size of a snail Wit h its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls

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2448 / DYLAN THOMAS

35 But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel My birthday 40 Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples

45 Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables Of sun light 50 And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy

55 In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery Sang alive 60 Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun.

65 It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart's truth Still be sung 70 On this high hill in a year's turning.

1944 1946

Fern Hill1

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle2 starry, Time let me hail and climb

1. Name of the Welsh farmhouse, home of his idays as a boy. aunt Ann Jones, where Thomas spent summer hoi- 2. Deep dell or hollow, usually wooded.

.

FERN HILL / 2449

Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley Dow n the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

An d the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air And playing, lovely and watery An d fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away, All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the night-jars3

Flying with the ricks,0 and the horses haystacks Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all Shining, it was Ada m and maiden,4 Th e sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day. So it must have been after the birth of the simple light In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long, In the sun born over and over, I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay An d nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, In the moon that is always rising, Nor that riding to sleep

Species of bird. 4. Cf. Genesis 1.

.

245 0 / DYLA N THOMA S 50 I should hear hi m fly with the high fields An d wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land. Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Tim e held me green and dying Thoug h I sang in my chains like the sea. 1945 1946 Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night Do not go gentle into that good night, Ol d age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 5Thoug h wise me n at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Goo d men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a greenRage, rage against the dying of the light. bay, I O Wil d me n who caught and sang the sun in flight, An d learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. 15Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. An d you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, IDo not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. pray. 1951 1952

.

Voices f: rom World War II

In December 1939, a few months after the start of World War II, a leading article in The Times Literary Supplement urged poets to do their duty: "it is for the poets to sound the trumpet call. . . . The monstrous threat to belief and freedom which we are fighting should urge new psalmists to fresh songs of deliverance." The biblical diction reveals the underlying expectation that the poets of 1940 would come forward, like those of 1914, to sanctify the cause with images of sacrifice derived from Jesus Christ's precedent and precept: "greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Far from taking up trumpets, the poets responded bitterly�C. Day Lewis with the poem "Where Are the War Poets?":

They who in folly or mere greed

Enslaved religion, markets, laws,

Borrow our language now and bid

Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

It is the logic of our times,

No subject for immortal verse�

That we who lived by honest dreams

Defend the bad against the worse.

Stephen Spender responded with an essay, in which he wrote: "At the beginning of the last war Rupert Brooke and others were 'trumpets singing to battle.' Wh y did not Bupert Brooke step forward 'young and goldenhaired' this time? No doubt, in part, precisely because one had done so last time. There is another reason: the poetry of the war of democracy versus fascism had already been written by English, French, Spanish, German and Italian emigre poets during the Spanish war."

With few exceptions the British poets of the 1930s had been born shortly before

the outbreak of World War I, and those who were to be the poets of World War II

were born during that earlier conflict. They grew up not, as Bupert Brooke, in the

sunlit peace of Georgian England but amid wars and rumors of wars. They lived

through the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Introduced to the horrors of

the last war�increased to mythic proportions by their fathers, uncles, and elder

brothers�they were continually reminded of it by a flood of best-selling battle mem

oirs: Edmun d Blunden's Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves's Goodb)'e to All

That (1929), Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry1 Officer (1930) and Sherston's

Progress (1936), and David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937). By then another myth, that

of the Next War, was taking even more terrifying shape. Western intellectuals' last

hope for the 1930s rested with the ragged troops of the left-wing Spanish Bepublic

in their civil war against the right-wing Spanish Army that had mutinied in 1936

against the country's elected government. Democracy and fascism were at last in the

open, fighting a war that many thought would determine not simply the future of

Spain but the future of Europe. The conscience of the West was aroused as never

since the Greek War of Independence against the Turks in 1821�29, in which Byron

had lost his life. With the final defeat of the Spanish Bepublicans in 1938, the Next

Wa r ceased to be a myth so muc h as an all-but-inescapable certainty. At the start of

W. B. Yeats's poem "Lapis Lazuli" (1938), "hysterical women say": everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done

2451

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2452 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II

Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,

Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in

Until the town lie beaten flat.

World Wa r I had been fought, for the most part, on the land, and its emblem in popular mythology was the trench. After the indiscriminate killing of civilians in a bombing raid�by German aircraft�on the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937, everyone knew or else should have known that the emblem of the Next War would be the bomb, the fire from heaven.

So it proved. On September 1, 1939, Germany, in pursuit of imperial ambitions and without warning, launched a savage attack on Poland by land and air. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. By the end of the month, Germany and its ally Russia had between them defeated and partitioned Poland. Russia then attacked Finland, and in April 1940 Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. For Britain and France the period of inactivity that came to be known as "The Phoney War" ended in May, when the German Army overran Luxembourg and invaded The Netherlands and Belgium; their armored columns raced for the English Channel. Cut off, the British forces were evacuated by sea, with heavy losses, from Dunkirk, and in June France signed an armistice with Germany. In August, as prelude to an invasion, the German Lujhvaffe (Air Force) attacked England. Over the months that followed, the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force (RAF) challenged the enemy bombers' nightly blitz of London and other major cities. The Battle of Britain, as it came to be called, cost the Luftwaffe twenty-three hundred planes and the RAF, nine hundred and caused the Germans to abandon their plans for invasion.

In 1941, Virginia Woolf imagined the coming fury, which would be a factor in her suicide. At the end of Woolf's novel Between the Acts, the village pageant of English history is over, and Mr. Streatfield's speech of thanks is interrupted: "A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead." The following year Edith Sitwell depicted the blitz in "Still Falls the Rain," as did

T. S. Eliot in part 2 of "Little Gidding." The Battle of Britain, however, was not the only battle, and British poets were already responding to war on land and at sea as well as in the air. Some of their work shows the influence of their predecessors: Alun Lewis acknowledges a debt to Edward Thomas, whereas the diction and pararhyming of Keith Douglas's poems clearly owe something to Wilfred Owen's. Their voices, however, are their own, and the dominant mood of their poetry is strikingly unlike that from and about the trenches of the Western Front. Just as the heroics of 1914 were impossible in 1940 (although there was no lack of heroism), so too was the antipropagandist indignation of a Siegfried Sassoon. Now that everybody knew about the Battle of the Somme, the bombing of Guernica, London, Dresden, who could be surprised by evidence of "Man's inhumanity to man"? In the draft preface to his poems, one of the more influential poetic manifestos of the twentieth century, Owen had written: "All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful." His warnings and those of his contemporaries had been uttered in vain, but the poets of World War II knew they must be truthful, true to their wartime experience of boredom and brutality, true to their humanity, and above all resistant to the murderous inhumanity of the machines. EDITH SITWELL 1887-1964

Edith Sitwell's father was an extremely eccentric English baronet; her mother, the daughter of an earl. Sitwell, an eccentrically gifted poet, objected to the subdued rural descriptions and reflections of the Georgian poets (of whom Rupert Brooke was the

.

SITWELL: STILL FALLS THE RAIN / 245 3

most popular) and reacted in favor of a highly abstract verbal experimentation that exploited the sounds and rhythms and suggestions of words and phrases, often with remarkable pyrotechnic display. She edited and was a substantial contributor to the six "cycles" of Wheels (1916�21), an annual anthology of modern poems, in which she displayed her verbal and rhythmic virtuosity and encouraged others to follow her example. Her poem sequence Faqade (1922), with its cunning exploration of rhymes and rhythms, was set to music by the composer Sir William Walton, whose intensely sympathetic treatment of the words enhanced their impact. The 1923 performance in London's Aeolian Hall was a sensation: Sitwell intoned the poems from behind a screen, and Walton conducted the orchestra.

But Sitwell was more than a flashy manipulator of surfaces. Throughout her poetry she hints at profounder meanings, sometimes with mocking laughter, sometimes with anguish, and in her later work she attacks the pettiness and philistinism of the high society of her time. In still later poems, influenced by William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and her friend Dylan Thomas, Sitwell wished to achieve, she said in her autobiography, "a greater expressiveness, a greater formality, and a return to rhetoric," rejecting "the outcry for understatement, for quietness, for neutral tints in poetry." These poems, such as "Still Falls the Bain," are much concerned with the horrors of war, the varieties of human suffering produced by modern civilization, and the healing powers of a faith in God, combined with a sense of the richness and variety of nature.

Still Falls the Rain

The Raids, 1940.1 Night and Dawn

Still falls the Rain� Dark as the world of man, black as our loss� Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upo n the Cross.

Still falls the Rai n With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-

beat In the Potter's Field,2 and the sound of the impious feet On the Tomb:

Still falls the Rai n In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the huma n brain Nurtures its greed, that wor m with the brow of Cain. 3

Still falls the Rai n At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us � On Dives and on Lazarus:4 Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

1. During the Battle of Britain the German air sanctuary, and departed; and he went away and force carried out many raids on London, often with hanged himself. And the chief priests took the incendiary bombs (see lines 27 and 30). pieces of silver . . . and bought with them the pot2. Cf. Matthew 27.3-8: "Then Judas, which ter's field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field betrayed [Jesus], when he saw that he was con-was called, The field of blood, unto this day." demned, repented himself, and brought back the 3. The first murderer (Genesis 4). 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, 4. In Jesus' parable the rich man Dives was sent saying, I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent to hell, while the leprous beggar Lazarus went to blood. But they said, What is that to us? see thou heaven (Luke 16.19�31). This is not the same Lazto it. And he cast down the pieces of silver into the arus who was raised from the dead.

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2454 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II

Still falls the Rain�

Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side: He bears in His Heart all wounds,�those of the light that died, Th e last faint spark In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark, The wounds of the baited bear,5� The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat On his helpless flesh . . . the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain� Then� O He leape up to my God: who pulles me doune� See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:6 It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart That holds the fires of the world,�dark-smirched with pain As Caesar's laurel crown.7

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man Was once a child who among beasts has lain� "Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."

1942

5. A medieval and Elizabethan sport in which dogs with Mephistopheles. fought a bear chained to a post. 7. Traditionally worn by victorious generals, and 6. Faustus's despairing cry at the end of Christo-perhaps here associated with Jesus' crown of pher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus (1604), when thorns (Matthew 27.29). he realizes that he has been damned for his pact HENRY REED 1914-1986

Henry Reed was born and educated in Birmingham, at the King Edward VI School and at Birmingham University, where he gained a first-class degree in classics (having taught himself Greek) and began an M.A. thesis on Thomas Hardy. After leaving the university in 1934, he tried teaching, like many other British writers of the 1930s, but, again like most of them, hated it and left to make his way as a freelance writer and critic. During World War II he served�"or rather studied," as he put it�in the Boyal Army Ordnance Corps for a year. A notable mimic, he would entertain his friends with a comic imitation of a sergeant instructing new recruits. After a few performances he noticed that the words of the weapon-training instructor, couched in the style of the military manual, fell into certain rhythmic patterns. His fascination with these patterns eventually informed his Lessons of the War, the first of which, "Naming of Parts," is probably the most anthologized poem prompted by World War II.

From 1942 to 1945 Reed worked as a cryptographer and translator at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley. In the evenings he wrote much of his first radio play�an adaptation of Melville's Moby-Dick�and many of the poems to be published in A Map of Verona (1946). After the war, he produced a number of other successful�and often funny�radio plays, verse translations of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), and more fine poems. Many of the best of these

.

REED: LESSONS OF THE WAR / 245 5

were found in manuscript at his death, and with the posthumous publication of his Collected Poems (1991), he emerged as a poet whose lifelong quest for lasting homosexual love�which he never found�led him through Edenic landscapes of desire, like the setting of "Naming of Parts."

From Lessons of the War

To Alan Michell

Vixi duellis nuper idoneus Et militavi non sine gloria1

1. Naming of Parts Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. An d tomorrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. Japonica2 Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,

And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see, Whe n you are given your slings. An d this is the piling swivel, Whic h in your case you have not got. Th e branches Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

Whic h in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released Wit h an easy flick of the thumb. An d please do not let me See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy If you have any strength in your thumb. Th e blossoms Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

Any of them using their finger.

An d this you can see is the bolt. Th e purpose of this Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this Easing the spring.' An d rapidly backwards and forwards Th e early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy If you have any strength in your thumb; like the bolt, And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance, Whic h in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom

1. "Lately I have lived in the midst of battles, cred-encapsulates the theme of the Lessons). itably enough, / and have soldiered, not without 2. A shrub with brilliant scarlet flowers. glory" (Horace's Odes 3.26.1�2, with the letter p 3. An operation that, by ejecting the bullets from of puellis�girls�turned upside down to produce the magazine of a rifle, takes the pressure off the duellis�battles; an emendation, an exchange, that magazine spring.

.

2456 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II

Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards, 30 For today we have naming of parts.

1945

KEITH DOUGLAS 1920-1944

Keith Douglas was born in Tunbridge Wells, the son of a regular army officer, who had won the Military Cross in World War I and who, in 1927, deserted his wife and son. Like Byron, whose army officer father died in the poet's youth, Douglas developed an almost obsessive interest in warfare. At the age of ten he wrote a poem about the Battle of Waterloo, and later, at Christ's Hospital School in London, he divided his leisure time between developing his precocious talents as poet and artist, riding, playing rugby football, and participating enthusiastically in the Officer Cadet Corps. At Merton College, Oxford, he was tutored by Edmund Blunden, a distinguished soldier poet of World War I. In 1940 Douglas enlisted in a cavalry regiment that was soon obliged to exchange its horses for tanks and in August 1942 he went into battle against German field marshal Rommel's Africa Corps in the Egyptian desert. Forced to remain in reserve behind the lines, Douglas commandeered a truck and, directly disobeying orders, drove off to join his regiment.

His subsequent achievement as a poet and as the author of a brilliant memoir of the desert campaign, Alamein to Ze m Zem (1966), was to celebrate the last stand of the chivalric hero. His poem "Aristocrats" ends perhaps with a distant echo of Boland's horn, sounded in the Pass of Roncevalles at the end of the twelfth-century French chivalric epic La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland). Douglas's poem succeeds where most of the would-be heroic poems of 1914 and 1915 fail. Sharply focused, it acknowledges both the stupidity and the chivalry, the folly and the glamour of cavalrymen on mechanical mounts, dueling in the desert. Douglas's language, spare and understated, finely responsive to his theme, fuses ancient and modern: his heroes are "gentle"�like Chaucer's "verray parfit gentil knight" in The Canterbury Tales� and at the same time "obsolescent."

Douglas survived the desert campaign, but was killed in the assault on the Normandy beaches, on June 6, 1944.

Gallantry

Th e Colonel' in a casual voice

spoke into the microphone a joke

Which through a hundred earphones broke

into the ears of a doomed race.2

]. Lt. Col. J. D. Player, killed in Tunisia, Enfidaville, February 1943, left .3,000 to the Beaufort Hunt, and directed that the incumbent of the living in his gift [i.e., the church whose vicar he was entitled to appoint] should be a 'man who approves of hunting, shooting, and all manly sports, which

are the backbone of the nation.' [Douglas's note on one of the manuscripts of "Aristocrats." Player was in fact killed in April.]

2. Cf. Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (p. 1971).

.

DOUGLAS : VERGISSMEINNICH T / 245 7 5 Into the ears of the doomed boy, the fool whose perfectly mannered flesh fell in opening the door for a shell as he had learnt to do at school. 1 0Conrad luckily survived the winter: he wrote a letter to welcome the auspicious spring: only his silken intentions severed with a single splinter. isWa s George fond of little boys? We always suspected it, but who will say: since George was hit we never mention our surmise. 2 0It was a brave thing the Colonel said, but the whole sky turned too hot and the three heroes never heard what it was, gone deaf with steel and lead. But the bullets cried with laughter, the shells were overcome with mirth, plunging their heads in steel and earth� (the air commented in a whisper). El Ballah, General Hospital, Apr. 194 3 1949 Vergissmeinnicht1 Three weeks gone and the combatantsreturning over the nightmare ground we found the place again, and found the soldier sprawling in the sun. gone 5 Th e frowning barrel of his gun overshadowing. As we came on that day, he hit my tank with one like the entry of a demon. 10Look. Here in the gunpit spoil the dishonoured picture of his girl who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht in a copybook gothic script. 15We see hi m almost with content, abased, and seeming to have paid and mocked at by his own equipment that's hard and good when he's decayed. 1. Forget me not (German).

.

2458 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II

But she would weep to see today

how on his skin the swart0 flies move; black

the dust upon the paper eye

20 and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart.

And death who had the soldier singled

has done the lover mortal hurt.

Tunisia, 1943 1944

Aristocrats1

"I think I am becoming a God"2

Th e noble horse with courage in his eye clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst: away fly the images of the shires3 but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.

5 Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88:4 it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance. I saw him crawling on the sand; he said It's most unfair, they've shot my foot off.

Ho w can I live among this gentle

io obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep? Unicorns, almost, for they are falling into two legends in which their stupidity and chivalry are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.

is Th e plains were their cricket pitch15 and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences6 brought down some of the runners. Here then under the stones and earth they dispose themselves, I think with their famous unconcern.

20 It is not gunfire I hear but a hunting horn.7

Enfidaville, Tunisia, 1943 1946

1. Another version of this poem is entitled 4. A German tank fitted with an eighty-eight" Sportsmen." millimeter gun. 2. The dying words of Roman Emperor Vespasian 5. Field on which the game of cricket is played. were supposedly "Alas! I suppose 1 am turning into 6. Fences in the course of a steeplechase horse a god." race. 3. Counties. Cf. Owen's "Anthem for Doomed 7. See n. 1, p. 2456. Youth," line 8 (p. 1971).

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2459

CHARLES CAUSLEY 1917-2003

Born and educated in Launceston, Cornwall, Charles Causley followed the tradition of his seafaring people and served in the Royal Navy from 1940 to 1946. His experiences on a destroyer and an aircraft carrier had a catalytic effect on him as a poet. "It was Hitler who pushed a subject under my nose," he wrote. "I think the event that affected me more than anything else in those years was the fact that the companion who had left my home-town with me for the navy in 1940 was later lost in a convoy to Russia. From the moment I heard this news, I found myself haunted by the words in the twenty-fourth chapter of St Matthew: 'Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.' If my poetry is 'about' anything, it is this."

Causley's Cornishness shows in his skillful use of verse forms and narrative strategies drawn from an oral folk tradition. A formally conservative poet, he was a master of the ballad told in a voice that is at once impersonal�the voice of the anonymous early balladeers�and unmistakably his own. Causley's seeming simplicity, like that of the early balladeers, can be misleading; his jaunty cadences, bis spry interweaving of ancient and modern diction, heighten the poignancy of elegies such as the ones printed here.

From 1947 to 1976 he taught at a school in Cornwall. He wrote many volumes of poems and several plays�some of each, with great success, for children.

At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux1

I walked where in their talking graves

An d shirts of earth five thousand lay,

Whe n history with ten feasts of fire

Ha d eaten the red air away.

5 I am Christ's boy, I cried, I bear

In iron hands the bread, the fishes.2

I hang with honey and with rose

This tidy wreck of all your wishes.

On your geometry of sleep

10 Th e chestnut and the fir-tree fly,

And lavender and marguerite

Forge with their flowers an English sky.

Turn now towards the belling town

Your jigsaws of impossible bone,

15 An d rising read your rank of snow

Accurate as death upon the stone.

About your easy heads my prayers

I said with syllables of clay.

What gift, I asked, shall I bring now

20 Before I weep and walk away?

1. Near the coast of northwest France, the scene in June 1944. of heavy fighting following the Normandy landings 2. Cf. Matthew 14.19�20.

.

246 0 / VOICE S FRO M WORL D WA R I I Take, they replied, the oak and laurel.3 Take our fortune of tears and live Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask Is the one gift you cannot give. 1957 Armistice Day I stood with three comrades in Parliament Square1 November her freights of grey fire unloading, No sound from the city upon the pale air Above us the sea-bell eleven exploding. 5 Dow n by the bands and the burning memorial Beats all the brass in a royal array, But at our end we are not so sartorial: Ou t of (as usual) the rig of the day. ioStarry is wearing a split pusser's flannel2 Rubbed, as he is, by the regular tide; Oxo the ducks3 that he ditched in the Channel In June, 1940 (when he was inside). isKitty recalls his abandon-ship station, Running below at the Ol d Man's salute4 An d (with a deck-watch) going down for duration' Wearing his oppo's pneumonia-suit.6 2 0Comrades, for you the black captain of carracks7 Writes in Whitehall8 his appalling decisions, But as was often the case in the Barracks Several ratings are not at Divisions.9 Into my eyes the stiff sea-horses stare, Over my head sweeps the sun like a swan. As I stand alone in Parliament Square A cold bugle calls, and the city moves on. 195 7

3. Trees whose leaves are traditionally taken as emblems of courage and victory, respectively. 1. An annual "Remembrance Sunday" service is held at the Cenotaph, a stone memorial to the dead of the two World Wars, in London's Parliament Square. It includes a two-minute silence after the last stroke of eleven o'clock. 2. A torn navy-issue shirt. 3. Sailor's white tunic and trousers. 4. A British naval tradition calls for the Captain (Old Man) of a sinking ship to go down saluting.

5. I.e., for the duration of the war; a phrase common during World War II. 6. Canvas suit�belonging to his friend ("opposite number")�worn while painting the ship. 7. Large merchant ships equipped for warfare. 8. London street in which stands the Admiralty (navy headquarters). 9. I.e., noncommissioned sailors are absent from church parade, the religious service on board ship.

.

Nation and Language

Armies and navies, cannons and guns helped spread and consolidate British rule across vast areas of the earth's surface, but so too did the English language. Over many years, in many different parts of the world, the language of the British Empire displaced or commingled with indigenous languages. Then the twentieth century witnessed the decolonization and devolution of the British Empire, from early-century Ireland to midcentury India and Africa and the Caribbean to late-century Hong Kong. Imaginative writers from these and other regions have thus had to wrestle with questions of nation and language. Should they write stories, plays, and poems in the language and traditions of the colonizer, or should they repudiate English and employ their indigenous languages? Is English an enabling tool by which peoples of different nationalities can express their identities, or is it contaminated by a colonial history and mentality that it insidiously perpetuates? If English is chosen for imaginative writing, should it be a standardized English of the imperial center or an English inflected by contact with indigenous languages�a Creole, patois, pidgin, even a synthetic composite of a local vernacular and Standard English? Since American power has sustained the global reach of English long after the withdrawal of British colonial administrators and armies, debates over such questions have persisted in many parts of the world where English still thrives in the aftermath of a dead empire.

Having tried to subdue the Irish people for centuries, the British outlawed the use of the Irish language (or Gaelic) in Ireland, and Brian Friel explores the painful effects of the forcible displacement of Irish in his important historical play, Translations. Because of Ireland's long and bloody colonial history and the flowering there of cultural nationalism, early-twentieth-century Irish writers were already expressing a powerful ambivalence toward English as both a vital literary inheritance and the language of colonial subjugation. Recalling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English "wars of extermination" against the Irish, W. B. Yeats acknowledges a historical hatred of the English but then reminds himself that, as an English-language writer, "I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate" (see his "Introduction," excerpted in this volume). In the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's autobiographical persona, Stephen Dedalus, reflects on his conversation with an academic dean, an Englishman: "The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. .. . I cannot speak or write these [English] words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language." Yet Yeats and Joyce, despite this vexed relation to the language, wrote some of the most innovative English-language poetry and fiction of the twentieth century. Indeed, their conflicted relation to the English language and its literary inheritance�that "unrest of spirit" in its shadow�may paradoxically have impelled their massive literary achievements.

Transplanted in different parts of the world, English has sometimes seemed strange and estranging. When African and Caribbean schoolchildren with British colonial educations tried to write poems, as Kamau Brathwaite and other writers have attested, they would follow the conventions of English poetry, composing iambic pentameter verse about snowfall or daffodils, which they had never seen. English language and

2461

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246 2 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

English literature thus risked alienating colonized peoples from their local environments and distinctive cultural histories.

The feeling that the English language is alienating, inextricably bound to colonialism, has led some nativist writers, such as the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, to reject it outright. If language is a "collective memory bank," then a people cannot recover its colonially suppressed identity and history without returning to an indigenous language. But the novelist Salman Rushdie, who often writes in an Indianized, or "chutnified," English, takes the opposite stance: "The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago," he asserts. English has become a local language even in parts of the world, such as India, where it was once imposed. Rushdie and other cosmopolitan writers reject the assumption that the English language has an inherent relationship to only one kind of national or ethnic experience. "The English language is nobody's special property," asserts the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott.

For the colonial orpostcolonial writer who embraces English, the question remains, Which English? The imported standard or a local vernacular? Or if both, should they be intermingled or kept apart? At one end of the spectrum are writers, such as V. S. Naipaul and Wole Soyinka, who think Standard English, perhaps slightly altered, can bespeak a postcolonial experience of race, identity, and history. At the other end are vernacular writers who feel the language of the center cannot do justice to their experience at the margins of empire. The poet Louise Bennett, for example, gives voice to everyday Jamaican experience in her witty and wily use of Jamaican Creole or Patois; she mocks its denigration as a "corruption of the English language," pointing out that Standard English is but an amalgam of dialects and foreign languages. "It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master," Brathwaite has written, "and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he perhaps most effectively rebelled."

Between the Standard English writer and the vernacular writer range a host of other possibilities. Some poets and novelists, such as the Jamaican-born Claude McKay and the Scottish nationalist Hugh MacDiarmid, spend a substantial part of their careers writing in one version of English and then shift dramatically to another. Others employ either Standard English or a local vernacular depending on the perspective they are presenting. Two of Caribbean-born writer Jean Rhys's stories written during the same period offer two distinct points of view, one in the normative English of a white West Indian child, the other in the creolized (or hybridized) English of a mulatto immigrant in London. Finally, many writers, such as Walcott, Brathwaite, and the Yorkshire poet Tony Harrison, switch between standard and "dialect" within or across individual works, creating juxtapositions, tensions, and new relationships between languages that have traditionally been kept hierarchically discrete. They linguistically embody their interstitial experience of living in between metropolis and margin, canon and Creole, schoolbooks and the street.

Whether using slightly or heavily creolized English, or a medley of both, writers from across the world�Barbadians and Bombayites and "Black Britons"�have employed a diverse array of distinctive idioms, dialects, Creoles to defy imperial norms, express emerging cultural identities, and inaugurate rich new possibilities for literature in English.

.

2463

CLAUDE McKAY 1890-1948

Claude McKay was born into a poor farmworking family in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, and spent the first half of his life on the British Caribbean island. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker and then a wheelwright and served for less than a year as a police constable in Kingston. An English linguist and folklorist, Walter Jekyll, encouraged him to write in Jamaican dialect, or Creole. Drawing on the example of the Scottish-dialect poet Robert Burns, McKay harnessed Jamaican idiom in poems collected in two books published in 1912, Constab Ballads and Songs of Jamaica, including "Old England," a seemingly reverent imaginative journey, in a new literary language, to the imperial "homeland." The first major poet to make effective literary use of Jamaican English, he influenced many later Afro-Caribbean poets who went further, such as Louise Bennett.

For his poetry McKay won a prize that enabled him to travel to the United States and study at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute and at Kansas State College, before moving to Harlem in 1914. Switching in his poetry from Jamaican to Standard English, he helped precipitate the Harlem Renaissance with his Harlem Shadows (1922), which included sonnets addressing the vexed racial experience of an Afro-Caribbean immigrant. For most of the 1920s into the mid-1930s, McKay, identifying with the radical left, lived and wrote novels and short stories mainly in England, France, and Morocco. He died in poverty in Chicago, where he taught in his last years for a Catholic youth organization. His sonnet "If We Must Die," written in response to the American antiblack riots of the summer of 1919, became a World War II rallying cry after Winston Churchill read it, without attribution, to the British people.

Old England

I've a longin' in me dept's of heart dat I can conquer not, 'Tis a wish dat I've been havin' from since I could form a t'o't," thought 'Tis to sail athwart the ocean an' to hear de billows roar, Whe n de m ride aroun' de steamer,0 whe n de m beat on England's steamship shore.

5 Just to view de homeland England, in de streets of London walk, An' to see de famous sights dem 'bouten which dere's so much talk, An' to watch de fact'ry chimneys pourin' smoke up to de sky, An' to see de matches-children, dat I hear 'bout, passin' by.1

I would see Saint Paul's Cathedral,2 an' would hear some of de great

10 Learnin' comin' from de bishops, preachin' relics of old fait'; I would ope me mout' wid wonder at de massive organ soun', An' would 'train me eyes to see de beauty lyin' all aroun'.

I'd go to de City Temple,3 where de old fait' is a wreck,

An' de parson is a-preachin' views dat most folks will not tek;

15 I'd go where de me n of science meet togeder in deir hall, To give light unto de real truths, to obey king Reason's call.

1. Cf. the short story "The Little-Match Seller," (1830?�1902), both about a poor match-selling by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen girl who freezes to death on New Year's Eve. (1805-1875), and the poem "The Little Match 2. In London, cathedral of the Anglican bishop. Girl," by the Scottish writer William McGonagall 3. Victorian church in central London.

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246 4 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

I would view Westminster Abbey,4 where de great of England sleep, An' de solemn marble statues o'er deir ashes vigil keep; I would see immortal Milton an' de wul'-famous Shakespeare, Past'ral Wordswort', gentle Gray,5 an' all de great souls buried dere.

I would see de ancient chair where England's kings deir crowns put on, Soon to lay dem by again when all de vanity is done; An' I'd go to view de lone spot where in peaceful solitude Rests de body of our Missis Queen,6 Victoria de Good.

An' dese places dat I sing of now shall afterwards impart All deir solemn sacred beauty to a weary searchin' heart; So I'll rest glad an' contented in me min'� for evermore, mind Whe n I sail across de ocean back to my own native shore.

1912

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot.

5 If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the commo n foe!

io Thoug h far outnumbered let us show us brave, An d for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! Wha t though before us lies the open grave? Like me n we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

1919, 1922

4. London church, where monarchs are crowned yard." and the famous, including poets, are buried. 6. So-called in Jamaica, Victoria reigned during 5. Thomas Gray (1716-1771), English poet and the emancipation of slaves in 1837. author of "Elegy Written in a Country Church- HUGH MACDIARMID 1892-1978

Hugh MacDiarmid, often said to be the greatest Scottish poet since Robert Burns, was born Christopher Murray Grieve in the Scottish border town of Langholm. After a short period of training as a teacher, he turned to journalism. His political convictions made for a turbulent life. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland, but it expelled him in 1933 because of his communism. He then joined the

.

MACDIARMID: [THE SPLENDID VARIETY OF LANGUAGES] / 246 5

Communist Party of Great Britain, but it expelled him as well, because of his Scottish nationalism.

From the 1920s MacDiarmid was the central figure of the Scottish Renaissance movement. He published short lyrics in a revived Scots, or "Lallans" (i.e., Lowland Scots), a language that fused the rich vocabulary of medieval Scottish poets, modern dialect Scots, and Standard English. In A Drunk Man Loolzs at the Thistle (1926), he built up an epic statement about Scotland out of a series of related lyrics and passages of descriptive and reflective poetry. In such early poems MacDiarmid proved the vigor and robust physicality of Scots as a medium for modern poetry, after the Burns tradition had declined into sentimentality and imitation. In essays such as "English Ascendancy in British Literature" (excerpted below), he argued vehemently against confining "British literature" to the Standard English literature of England, championing instead the varieties of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh literatures written in locally distinctive forms of English and other languages of the British Isles.

MacDiarmid wrote little poetry in Scots after the mid-1950s, when he turned to an ambitious "poetry of fact and first-hand experience and scientific knowledge," including the long poem In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), written in colloquial English but formally patterned by carefully controlled shifts in tempo. In it he affirms the essential kinship of everything in the world that is fully realized and properly possessed of its identity�a theme that clearly bears on his lifelong preoccupation with Scottish nationality, language, and culture.

[The Splendid Variety of Languages and Dialects]1

* * * Burns2 knew what he was doing when he reverted from 18th century English to a species of synthetic Scots and was abundantly justified in the result. He was not contributing to English literature but to a clearly defined and quite independent tradition of Scottish poetry hailing from the days of Dunbar and the other great 15 th century 'makars'3�the golden age of Scottish poetry whe n the English impulse seemed to have gone sterile and Scotland, not England, was apparently destined to produce the great poetry of the United Kingdom. To ask why this promise was not redeemed and why English, a far less concentrated and expressive language, became the medium of such an incomparably greater succession of poets, involves deep questions of the relationship of literature to economic, political and other considerations and both the causal and the casual in history: but at the momen t it is more germane to ask if the potentialities of the Scottish literary tradition can yet be realized? There are signs that they may be. The problem of the British Isles is the problem of English Ascendancy. Ireland after a protracted struggle has won a considerable measure of autonomy;4 Scotland and Wales may succeed in doing the same; but what is of importance to my point in the meantime is that, in breaking free (or fairly free) politically, Ireland not only experienced the Literary Revival associated with the names of Yeats, 'A. E.', Synge5 and the others, but has during the past half century recovered almost entirely her ancient Gaelic literature. * * *

1. Excerpted from "English Ascendancy in British them. Literature," first published in T. S. Eliot's journal 4. The Irish Free State was established in 1922, The Criterion. "Ascendancy": dominance. though Northern Ireland remained part of the U.K. 2. Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scottish poet. 5. John Millington Synge (1871-1909), Irishplay3. Poets (Scots); term used for the courtly poets wright. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish known as the Scottish Chaucerians. William Dun-poet. "A. E." was the pseudonym of the Irish poet bar (1460?�1530?) was the dominant poet among and mystic George Russell (1867�1935).

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246 6 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

* * 4 Literature, so far from manifesting any trend towards uniformity or standardization, is evolving in the most disparate ways; and there are few literatures in which dialect elements, and even such extreme employments of� and plays upon�them as render them permanently untranslatable and unintelligible to all but a handful of readers in their own countries, are not peculiarly and significantly active. On this account (as isolating it from general contemporary tendency which must have some deep-seated relation to the needs of modern, and prospective, consciousness) it is a pity that English literature is maintaining a narrow ascendancy tradition instead of broad-basing itself on all the diverse cultural elements and the splendid variety of languages and dialects, in the British Isles. (I do not refer here to the Empire, and the United States of America, though the evolution of genuine independent literatures in all of these is a matter of no little consequence and, already clearly appreciated in America, is being increasingly so realized in most of the Dominions, 6 which is perhaps the cultural significance of the anti-English and other tendencies in most of them which are making for those changes in the Imperial organization which will deprive England of the hegemony it has maintained too long.) To recognize and utilize these, instead of excluding them, could only make for its enrichment. It is absurd that intelligent readers of English, who would be ashamed not to know something (if only the leading names, and roughly, what they stand for) of most Continental literatures, are content to ignore Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Gaelic literatures, and Scots Vernacular literature. Surely the latter are nearer to them than the former, and the language difficulty no greater. These Gaelic, and Scots dialect poets were products of substantially the same environment and concerned for the most part with the same political, psychological, and practical issues, the same traditions and tendencies, the same landscapes, as poets in English to whom, properly regarded, they are not only valuably complementary, but (in view of their linguistic, technical, and other divergencies) corrective. Confinement to the English central stream is like refusing to hear all but one side of a complicated case�and in view of the extent to which the English language is definitely adscripted7 in certain important moral and psychological directions, and incapable of dealing with certain types of experience which form no inconsiderable part of certain other European literatures and may well be of far greater consequence to the future of humanity as a whole than the more 'normal matters' with which it is qualified to deal, becomes a sort of self-infliction of an extensive spiritual and psychological blindness. * * *

From A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle 1. Farewell to Dostoevski' Th e wa n leafs shak, atour� us like the snaw. around Here is the cavaburd2 in which Earth's tint.0 lost

6. Self-governing nations in the British Common-1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Russian wealth. novelist. 7. Attached (to the soil). 2. Dense snowstorm.

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MACDIARMID: IN MEMORIAM JAMES JOYCE / 246 7

There's naebody but Oblivion and us, Puir gangrel0 buddies, waunderin' hameless in't. wanderer

5 Th e stars are larochs� o' auld cottages, foundations An d a' Time's glen is fu' o' blinnin'0 stew.0 blinding / storm Nae freen'ly lozen� skimmers:0 and the wund� window/gleams /wind Rises and separates even me and you.

I ken nae Russian and you ken nae Scots.

10 We canna tell oor voices frae the wund. The snaw is seekin' everywhere: oor herts At last like roofless ingles0 it has fund . hearths

An d gethers there in drift on endless drift, Oor broken herts that it can never fill; 15 An d still�its leafs like snaw, its growth like wund � Th e thistle3 rises and forever will!

1926

2. Yet Ha'e I Silence Left Yet ha'e I Silence left, the croon0 o' a'. crown

No' her, wha on the hills langsyne0 I saw long ago Liftin' a foreheid o' perpetual snaw.

No' her, wha in the how-dumb-deid o' nicht4 5 Kyths,5 like Eternity in Time's despite.

No' her, withooten0 shape, wha's nam e is Daith,� without /death No' Him , unkennable0 abies0 to faith unknowable /except

�Go d whom, gin� e'er He saw a Man,'ud be if E'en mair dumfooner'd6 at the sicht0 than he. sight

io �Rut Him, whom nocht� in man or Deity, nothing Or Daith or Dreid or Laneliness can touch,

Wha's deed crwre often and has seen owre muchJ

O I ha'e Silence left.

1926

From In Memoriam James Joyce We Must Look at the Harebell1

We must look at the harebell as if We had never seen it before.

The emblem of Scotland. 7. Who has died too often and seen too much. The still center of night. 1. The Scottish bluebell, a blue flower with a bell- Makes herself known, appears. shaped blossom. More dumbfounded.

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246 8 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

Remembrance gives an accumulation of satisfaction Yet the desire for change is very strong in us 5 An d change is in itself a recreation. To those who take any pleasure In flowers, plants, birds, and the rest An ecological change is recreative. (Come. Clim b with me. Even the sheep are different 1 0 An d of new importance. Th e coarse-fleeced, hardy Herdwick, Th e Hampshire Down, artificially fed almost from birth, An d butcher-fat from the day it is weaned, Th e Lincoln-Longwool, the biggest breed in England, is Wit h the longest fleece, and the Southdown Almost the smallest�and between them thirty other breeds, Some whitefaced, some black, Some with horns and some without, Some long-wooled, some short-wooled, 2 0 In England where the men, and women too, Are almost as interesting as the sheep.) Everything is different, everything changes, Except for the white bedstraw which climbs all the way Up from the valleys to the tops of the high passes 2 5 Th e flowers are all different and more precious Demanding more search and particularity of vision. Look! Here and there a pinguicula2 eloquent of the Alps Still keeps a purple-blue flower On the top of its straight and slender stem. 30 Bog-asphodel, deep-gold, and comely in form, Th e queer, almost diabolical, sundew, An d when you leave the bog for the stag moors and the rocks Th e parsley fern�a lovelier plant Tha n even the proud Osmund a Regalis3 � 3 5 Flourishes in abundance Showing off oddly contrasted fronds From the cracks of the lichened stones. It is pleasant to find the books Describing it as "very local." 40 Here is a change indeed! Th e universal i s the particular. 1955

Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries1

It is a God-damned lie to say that these Saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride. They were professional murderers and they took Their blood money and impious risks and died.

2. The butterwort, a genus of small herbs whose fronds. leaves secrete a sticky substance in which small 1. Cf. A. E. Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of insects are caught. Mercenaries" (p. 1953), to which this is a 3. The flowering, or royal, fern; a plant with large response.

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BENNETT: JAMAICA LANGUAGE / 246 9

5

In spite of all their kind some elements of worth

With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

1935

LOUISE BENNETT 1919-2006

Louise Bennett, the preeminent West Indian poet of Creole verse, was born and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, in the British West Indies, her mother a dressmaker, her father a baker. After she had published her first book of poetry, Dialect Verses (1942), she attended London's Boyal Academy of Dramatic Art. As "Miss Lou" she won a mass following in the Caribbean through her vibrant stage performances of her poetry and of folk song; her weekly "dialect" poems published from 1943 in Jamaica's national newspaper, the Gleaner; her radio show, "Miss Lou's Views" (1966�82); and her children's-television program, "Ring Ding" (1970�82).

Bennett helped dismantle the view that Jamaican English is a corruption of Standard English, a prejudice she lambastes in radio monologues such as "Jamaica Language" and in poems such as "Dry-Foot Bwoy," which humorously juxtaposes a metaphor-rich Creole with a hollowly imitative British English. From a young age she felt the humor, wit, and vigor of Creole were largely untapped possibilities for writing and performing poetry, even though this commitment to Jamaican English prevented her from being recognized as a poet until after the black cultural revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. In her poetry she often assumed the perspective of a West Indian trickster, such as the woman who cunningly subverts gender and geographic hierarchies in "Jamaica Oman [Woman]." Bennett made wily and ebullient use of received forms, employing the ironic possibilities of dramatic monologue, the contrasts and inversions afforded by the ballad stanza, and the time-tested wisdom and pith of Jamaican proverbs. Both on the page and in her recorded performances, Bennett's vital characters and robust imagination help win over readers unfamiliar with Jamaican English, who can join in the laughing seriousness of poems such as "Col

onization in Reverse," which ironically inverts Britain's xenophobic apprehension at the postwar influx of Jamaican immigrants, while also casting a suspicious eye on some Jamaicans' reverse exploitation of their exploiters. No one is safe from the multiple ironies and carnivalesque irreverence of Bennett's verse.

Jamaica Language1

Listen, na!

My Aunty Roachy seh dat it bwile2 her temper an really bex' her fi true

anytime she hear anybody a style we Jamaican dialec as "corruption of the

English language." For if dat be de case, den dem shoulda call English Lan

guage corruption of Norman French an Latin an all dem tarra4 language what

dem seh dat English is derived from.

Oonoo s hear de wud? "Derived." English is a derivation but Jamaica Dialec

is corruption! Wha t a unfairity!

1. Originally broadcast sometime between 1979 3. Vexes, and 1981, this radio monologue has been reprinted 4. Other. from Aunty Roachy Seh (1993), ed. Mervyn Morris. 5. You (plural). 2. Boils.

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247 0 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

Aunty Roachy seh dat if Jamaican Dialec is corruption of de English Language, den it is also a corruption of de African Tw i Language to, a oh!

For Jamaican Dialec did start when we English forefahders did start musan- boun'' we African ancestors fi stop talk fi-dem African Language altogedder an learn fi talk so-so7 English, because we English forefahders couldn understan what we African ancestors-dem wasa seh to dem one anodder when dem wasa talk eena dem African Language to dem one annodder!

But we African ancestors-dem pop8 we English forefahders-dem. Yes! Pop dem an disguise up de English Language fi projec fi-dem African Language in such a way dat we English forefahders-dem still couldn understan what we African ancestors-dem wasa talk bout when dem wasa talk to dem one annodder!

Yes, bwoy!

So till now, aldoah plenty a we Jamaica Dialec wuds-dem come from English wuds, yet, still an for all, de talkin is so-so Jamaican, an when we ready we can meek it soun like it no got no English at all eena it! An no so-so Englishtalkin smaddy cyaan9 understan weh we a seh if we doan want dem to understan weh we a seh, a oh!

An we fix up we dialec wud fi soun like whatsoever we a talk bout, look like! For instance, when we seh sinting "kooroo-kooroo"1 up, yuh know seh dat it mark-up mark-up. An if we seh one house "rookoo-rookoo"2 up, it is plain to see dat it ole an shaky-shaky. An when we seh smaddy "boogoo-yagga", everybody know seh dat him outa-order; an if we seh dem "boonoonoonoos",3 yuh know seh dat dem nice an we like dem. Mmmm.

Aunty Roachy seh dat Jamaica Dialec is more direc an to de point dan English. For all like how English smaddy would seh "Go away", Jamaican jus seh "Gweh!" An de only time we use more wuds dan English is when we want fi meek someting soun strong: like when dem seh sinting "batter-batter" up, it soun more expressive dan if yuh seh "it is battered." But most of all we fling weh all de bangarang an trimmins4-dem an only lef what wantin, an dat's why when English smaddy seh "I got stuck by a prickle" Jamaican jus seh "Macca5 jook me"!

So fi-we Jamaica Language is not no English Language corruption at all, a

oh! An we no haffi shame a it, like one gal who did go a Englan go represent

we Jamaican folk-song "One shif me got" as "De sole underwear garment I

possess", and go sing "Mumma, Mumma, dem ketch Puppa" as "Mother,

Mother, they apprehended Father"!

A y ya yie!

1979-81 1993

Dry-Foot Bwoy1

Wh a wrong wid Mary dry-foot bwoy? De m gal got him fi mock,� The girls are mocking him

6. Compel. 3. Beautiful; wonderful (term of endearment). 7. Only. "Boogoo-yagga": ill-mannered. 8. Outwitted. 4. Miscellaneous trash and trimmings. 9. Can't. "Smaddy": people. 5. A prickly plant. 1. Rough; rocky. "Sinting": something. 1. Thin-legged (inexperienced) boy. 2. Unsteady.

.

BENNETT: DRY-FOOT BWOY / 2471

An when me meet him tarra night De bwoy gi me a shock!

Me tell him seh him auntie an Hi m cousin dem sen howdy2 An ask him how him getting awn. Hi m seh, 'Oh, jolley, jolley!'

Me start fi feel so sorry fi

De po bad-lucky soul, Me tink him come a foreign lan Com e ketch bad foreign cole!

Me tink him got a bad sore-troat, But as him chat-chat gwan Me fine out seh is foreign twang De bwoy wasa put awn!3

For me notice dat him answer To nearly all me seh Wa s 'Actually', 'What', 'Oh deah!' A n all dem sinting deh.� All of them things there

Me gi a joke, de gal dem laugh; But hear de bwoy, 'Haw-haw! I'm sure you got that bally-dash� nonsense, balderdash Out of the cinema!'

Same time me laas me temper, an Me holler,'Bwoy, kirout!0 clear out No chat to me wid no hot pittata Eena yuh mout!'

Hi m tan� up like him stunted, den stand

Hear him no, 'How silley! I don't think that I really Understand you, actually.'

Me seh, 'Yuh understan me, yaw! No yuh name Cudjoe Scoop? Always visit Nan a kitchen an Gi laugh fi gungoo soup!4

'An now all yuh can seh is "actually"? Bwoy, but tap! Wh a happen to dem sweet Jamaica

Joke yuh use fi pop?'

2. I told him that his auntie and his cousins sent 4. Chastising the boy for his pretensions, the [or send] greetings. speaker reminds him that he is Afro-Jamaican. 3. But as he kept talking I realized his foreign Cudjoe and Nana are African names used in accent was put on. Jamaica. "Gungoo": Congo pea.

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247 2 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

Hi m get bex� and walk tru de door, vexed Hi m head eena de air; De gal-dem bawl out affa him,5 'Not going? What! Oh deah!'

45 An from dat night till tedeh, mah, De m all got him fi mock. Miss Mary dry-foot bwoy! Cyaan get over de shock!

1957

Colonization in Reverse

Wha t a joyful news, Miss Mattie; Ah feel like me heart gwine burs � Jamaica people colonizin Englan in reverse.1

5 By de hundred, by de tousan, Fro m country an from town, By de ship-load, by de plane-load, Jamaica is Englan boun.

De m a pour out a Jamaica;

io Everybody future plan Is fi get a big-time job An settle in de motherlan.

What a islan! What a people! Ma n an woman, ole an young 15 Jussa pack dem bag an baggage An tun history upside dung!� down

Some people doan like travel, But fi show dem loyalty De m all a open up cheap-fare

20 To-Englan agency;

An week by week dem shippin off De m countryman like fire Fi immigrate an populate De seat a de Empire.

25 Oonoo� se how life is funny, you (plural) Oonoo see de tunabout? Jamaica live fi box bread Ou t a English people mout.

5. The girls went crying after him. hundred thousand Jamaicans migrated to Britain 1. Encouraged by the postwar labor shortage in from 1948 to 1962. England and the scarcity of work at home, three

.

BENNETT: JAMAICA OMAN / 247 3

For when dem catch a Englan

30 An start play dem different role Some will settle down to work An some will settle fi de dole.0 for unemployment benefits

Jane seh de dole is not too bad Because dey payin she 35 Tw o pounds a week fi seek a job Dat suit her dignity.

Me seh Jane will never fine work At de rate how she dah look For all day she stay pon Aunt Fan couch

40 An read love-story book.

Wha t a devilment a Englan! De m face war an brave de worse; But ah wonderin how dem gwine stan Colonizin in reverse.

1957

Jamaica Oman1

Jamaica oman cunny, sah!� cunning, sir Is how dem jinnal SO?� how are they so tricky? Look how long dem liberated An de man dem never know!

5 Look how long Jamaica oman �Modder, sister, wife, sweetheart� Outa road an eena yard0 deh pon home A dominate her part!

From Maroon Nanny2 teck her body

10 Bounce bullet back pon man, To when nowadays gal-pickney� tun girl-child Spellin-Bee champion.

From de grass root to de hill-top, In profession, skill an trade, is Jamaica oman teck her time Dah mount an meek de grade.

Some backa man a push, some side-a Ma n a hole him han, Some a lick sense eena man head,

20 Some a guide him pon him plan!

1. Woman. tury. Bullets reputedly ricocheted off her and killed 2. Jamaican national hero who led the Maroons, her enemies. fugitive slaves, in battle during the eighteenth cen

.

247 4 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

Neck an neck an foot an foot wid man She buckle hole0 her own; While man a call her 'so-so rib' Oman a tun backbone!3 she take hold 25 An long before Oman Lib4 bruck out Over foreign lan Jamaica female wasa work Her liberated plan! 30Jamaica oman know she strong, She know she tallawah,0 But she no want her pickney0 dem Fi start call her 'Puppa'.� sturdy children Papa 35So de cunny Jamma0 oman Gwan like pants-suit is a style, An Jamaica man no know she wear De trousiz all de while! Jamaican 40So Jamaica oman coaxin Fambly budget from explode A so Jamaica man a sing 'Oman a heaby load!'5 But de cunny Jamma oman Ban her belly,6 bite her tongue, Ketch water, put pot pon fire An jus dig her toe a grung.7 45 For 'Oman luck deh a dungle',8 Some rooted more dan some, But as long as fowl a scratch dungle heap Oman luck mus come! 50Lickle by lickle man start praise her, Day by day de praise a grow; So him praise her, so it sweet her, For she wonder if him know. 1975

3. Eve is said to have come from Adam's rib (Gen-6. Binds her belly (a practice associated with grief; esis 2.21-22). also a suggestion of belt tightening, as in hunger). 4. Women's Liberation Movement. 7. And just digs her toes into the ground. 5. A folk song often sung while working in the 8. I.e., woman's luck will be rediscovered (proverfields. bial). "Dungle": garbage dump.

.

2475

BRIAN FRIEL

b. 1929 For the renowned playwright Brian Friel, as for his Irish predecessors W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, the vexed issue of language and national identity has been a central preoccupation. His play Translations (1980), which reimagines the transitional moment when the language of the colonizer is supplanting the language of the colonized, is one of the richest late-twentieth century meditations on the role of the English language in British colonialism.

Set in 1833 in the rural village of Baile Beag, County Donegal, on the northwest corner of Ireland, the play dramatizes two key processes in the linguistic transformation of a colonized nation: remapping and education. Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland, English officers in the Royal Engineers, have been sent to Ireland to help remap it with anglicized and standardized place-names. An intermediary figure, Owen, originally from Baile Beag but employed by the English as an interpreter, is helping the imperial military, as he puts it, "to translate the quaint, archaic tongue" of the Irish "into the King's good English." To produce Britain's first Ordnance Survey of Ireland, ordered by Parliament in 1824, each Gaelic name is replaced either by a translated English equivalent (Cnoc na Ri becomes Kings Head) or a similar English sound (Druim Dubh becomes Dromduff). Language is crucial in claiming the land for the British crown�ridding it of ambiguity and opacity, making it readable, knowable, taxable, militarily penetrable, evacuating its linguistically embodied history and memory. After Lieutenant Yolland and the Irishwoman Maire fall in love�a cross- linguistic and cross-ethnic romance with tragic consequences�the psychic violence of this colonial renaming becomes a matter of brutal physical force. The play widens the scope of its profound reflection on naming and identity through suggestive parallels with other acts of nomination�the nearly mute Sarah's vocalizing her name, the ritual naming of a baby, Owen's accidental renaming as Boland by the English officers, even an allusion to Adam's naming of the animals.

At the very time when the Ordnance Survey is remaking Irish topography, a new English-language system of National Education is being put into place, and it will supplant the local Irish-speaking schools, or hedge schools, greatly accelerating the anglicization of the still-Gaelic-speaking regions of Ireland. Hugh O'Donnell presides over the hedge school, and while his classroom is a barn where the English language and its literary canon (e.g., William Wordsworth) are unknown, the ancient Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, such as flashing-eyed Athena, are vital and immediate presences in classical languages. The conflicted schoolmaster, who initially dismisses English as useful "for the purposes of commerce" and then seeks employment in the new English schools, foresees the loss of an educational system and, to a significant degree, of a culture; he muses elegiacally but realistically that a community's language cannot remain frozen in the face of massive historical change: "We must learn where we live. We must learn to make [the new English names] our own. We must make them our new home." The English language, the play evocatively suggests, has both dispossessed and rehoused, unified and fragmented, advanced and oppressed the Irish, like the many other peoples remapped and reeducated by the empire.

Friel was born in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and spent much of his youth in Derry (or Londonderry), Northern Ireland, with vacations across the border in County Donegal, in the Irish Republic, with his maternal relatives. He attended St. Patrick's College, Ireland's national seminary, in Maynooth, but instead of becoming a Roman Catholic priest, taught school in Derry for ten years, before turning full-time to writing in 1960. Having published short stories, essays, and radio plays, he increasingly devoted himself to writing stage dramas, such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! (first produced in 1964), Faith Healer (1979), and Dancing at Lughnasa

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247 6 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

(1990), which have been performed and garnered prizes in Derry, Dublin, New York, London, and elsewhere. In 1969 Friel moved across the border from Northern Ireland into Derry's hinterland in County Donegal, and in 1980 he cofounded the Field Day Theatre Company, which has brought professional drama to many parts of Ireland and Northern Ireland, while seeking to break down calcified polarities of Northern Irish politics (Catholic vs. Protestant, Unionist vs. Republican, etc.). Translations was Field Day's first production, with the company's cofounder, the actor Stephen Rea, playing the role of Owen, and Liam Neeson playing Doalty.

PRONOUNCING GLOSSARY

As an aid for performance and reading, the following phonetic spellings provide a rough guide to the pronunciation of Irish names and words. Standard Irish diacritical marks are given in the glossary, though omitted by Friel in the playscript.

Anna na mBreag: ANN-na nuh MRAYG

Baile Beag: BOLL-ya bYUG (BOLL rhymes with doll)

Baile na gGall: BOLL-ya nuh NOW L (NOW L rhymes with owl; nuh has the it sound as in English up)

Beann na Gaoithe: bYOWN na GWEE- ha (YOWN rhymes with town)

Buncrana: bunn KRAAH-na (where AA is an elongated version of the a sound in apple)

Bun na hAbhann: BUNN nuh HOW-un

Caitli'n Dubh Nic Reactainn: katt- LEEN DUV neek ROK-tin

Carraig na Rf: KORR-ig nuh REE (KORR: the o sound as in English on and off)

Carraig an Phoill: KORR-ig on f-WEE L

Catach: KOTT-ukh

Ceann Balor: kYOWN BA-lor (YOWN as above; "Balor" rhymes with valor)

Cnoc na Mona: k-NUKH nuh MOW-na (MO W as in English)

Cnoc na nGabhar: k-NUKH nuh NOWer (NOW as in English) Cnoc na Rf: k-NUCK nuh REE Cuchulainn: KOO-kuhl-lin

Diarmuid: DEER-med

Donegal: dunny-GAWL

Druim Dubh: drimm DU V (the u sound of the English tin-)

Druim Luachra: Drim LOO-krah Eamon: AIM-en

Grania: GRAW-nya

Inis Meadhon: IN-ish MAA N (where AA is an elongated version of the a sound in apple)

Lag: log (exactly like the English word

log) Lis Maol: liss MAY-ull (liss rhymes with English kiss) Lis na Muc: LISS nuh MUK Lis na nGall: Liss nuh nALL

Lis na nGradh: LISS nuh nRA W (a gentle little n sound before the RAW)

Loch an Iubhair: LUK H un OO-er

Loch na nEan: LUK H nuh NAY-un

Luachra: LOO-akh-ra

Machaire ban: MOKH-ur-uh BAW N

Machaire Buidhe: MOKH-i-reh bWE E (the middle i is short like the English

in)

Machaire Mor: MOKH-i-reh MOO R

Maire Chatach: MAW-reh KHOTT-ukh

Manus: MAAH-nuss

Mullach Dearg: MULL-ukh JA-rug (hard

J as inJohn)

Poll na gCaorach: POW L nuh GAY-rukh

(POW L rhymes with cowl)

Port: purt (rhymes with hurt)

Poteen: puh-TCHEEN

Ruadh: ROO-uh

Seamus: SHAY-muss

Sean: shawn

Tobair Bhriain: TUB-er vr-EE-un

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 1 / 247 7

Tobair Vree: TUB-er vrEE (the letter V is Tra Bhan: trAW VAWN

an anglicization) Tukc h Ajainn; xULL-ukh AW-linn

Tor: tur (as in the first syllable of the

English word turret)

Translations

MANUS BRIDGET

SARAH HUGH

JIMMY JACK OWEN

MAIRE CAPTAIN LANCEY

DOALTY LIEUTENANT YOLLAND

The action takes place in a hedge-school' in the townland of Baile Beag/Ballybeg, an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal.2

ACT ONE An afternoon in late August 1833.

ACT TWO A few days later.

ACT THREE The evening of the following day.

Act One

The hedge-school is held in a disused ham or hay-shed or byre. Along the back wall are the remains of five or six stalls�wooden posts and chains�where cows were once milked and bedded. A double door left, large enough to allow a cart to enter. A window right. A wooden stairway without a banister leads to the upstairs living-quarters (off ) of the schoolmaster and his son. Around the room are broken and forgotten implements: a cart-wheel, some lobster-pots, farming tools, a battle3 of hay, a churn, etc. There are also the stools and bench-seats which the pupils use and a table and chair for the master. At the door a pail of water and a soiled towel. The room is comfortless and dusty and functional� there is no trace of a woman's hand.

When the play opens, MANUS is teaching SARAH to speak. He kneels beside her. She is sitting on a low stool, her head down, very tense, clutching a slate on her knees. He is coaxing her gently and firmly and�as with everything he does� with a kind of zeal.

MANUS is in his late twenties/early thirties; the master's older son. He is pale- faced, lightly built, intense, and works as an unpaid assistant�a monitor�to his father. His clothes are shabby; and when he moves we see that he is lame.

SARAHS speech defect is so bad that all her life she has been considered locally to be dumb and she has accepted this: when she wishes to communicate, she grunts and makes unintelligible nasal sounds. She has a waiflike4 appearance and coidd be any age from seventeen to thirty-five.

JIMMY JACK CASSIE�known as the Infant Prodigy�sits by himself, contentedly

reading Homer in Greek and smiling to himself. He is a bachelor in his sixties,

1. Peasant school in which the Irish language was 2. In the northwest corner of Ireland, now in the the primary medium of instruction; the hedge Republic of Ireland. Baile Beag/Ballybeg is the school was so called because it was beside a hedge imaginary community in which many of Friel's (or in the open air or in a barn). Such schools were plays are set. formed because education of Roman Catholics in 3. Compact bundle. Ireland had been officially proscribed by the Penal 4. Like a homeless child. Laws passed in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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247 8 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

lives alone, and comes to these evening classes partly for the company and partly for the intellectual stimidation. He is fluent in Latin and Greek hut is in no way pedantic�to him it is perfectly normal to speak these tongues.5 He never washes. His clothes�heavy top coat, hat, mittens, which he wears ncnv�are filthy and he lives in them summer and winter, day and night. He now reads in a quiet voice and smiles in profound satisfaction. For JIMMY the world of the gods and the ancient myths is as real and as immediate as everyday life in the townland of Baile Beag.

MANUS holds SARAH'S hands in his and he articulates slowly and distinctly into her face.

MANUS We're doing very well. An d we're going to try it once more�just once more. Now�relax and breathe in . . . deep . . . and out . . . in . . . and out . . .

[SARAH shakes her head vigorously and stubbornly.] MANUS Com e on, Sarah. This is our secret.

[Again vigorous and stubborn shaking of SARAH'S head.] MANUS Nobody's listening. Nobody hears you. JIMMY 'Ton d'emeibet epeita thea glaukopis Athene . . .'6 MANUS Get your tongue and your lips working. 'My name�' Come on. One

more try. 'My name is�' Good girl.

SARAH My . . .

MANUS Great. 'My name�'

SARAH My . . . my . . .

MANUS Raise your head. Shout it out. Nobody's listening.

JIMMY '. . . alia hekelos estai en Atreidao domois . . . '7

MANUS Jimmy, please! Once more�just once more�'My name�' Good girl.

Come on now. Head up. Mouth open.

SARAH My . . .

MANUS Good.

SARAH My . . .

MANUS Great.

SARAH My name . . .

MANUS Yes?

[SARAH pauses. Then in a rush.]

SARAH My name is Sarah.

MANUS Marvellous! Bloody marvellous!

[MANUS hugs SARAH. She smiles in shy, embarrassed pleasure.]

Did you hear that, Jimmy?�'My name is Sarah'�clear as a bell. [To SARAH.]

The Infant Prodigy doesn't know what we're at.

[SARAH laughs at this. MANUS hugs her again and stands up.]

No w we're really started! Nothing'Il stop us now! Nothing in the wide world!

[JIMMY, chuckling at his text, comes over to them.] JIMMY Listen to this, Manus. MANUS Soon you'll be telling me all the secrets that have been in that head

of yours all these years.

5. Latin and Greek were taught and used in the of Homer's epic, she plots Odysseus' return home, hedge schools. after his ten-year absence. A disguise, as a dirty and 6. But the grey-eyed goddess Athene then replied shriveled old man, will enable him to trick and kill to him (Odyssey, XIII, 420) [Friel's note]. Athena, the suitors to his wife, Penelope. ancient Greek goddess of war, wisdom, and the 7. But he sits at ease in the halls of the Sons of city, was a tutelary god to the hero Odysseus, also Athens (Odyssey, XIII, 423-4) [Friel's note]. known by the Roman name Ulysses. In this scene

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 1 / 247 9

Certainly, James�what is it? [To SARAH. | Maybe you'd set out the stools?

[MANUS runs up the stairs. ] JIMMY Wait till you hear this, Manus. MANUS Go ahead. I'll be straight down. JIMMY HOS ara min phamene rabdo epemassat Athene�' 'After Athene had

said this, she touched Ulysses with her wand. She withered the fair skin of his supple limbs and destroyed the flaxen8 hair from off his head and about his limbs she put the skin of an old man . . . '! The divil! The divil!

[MANUS has emerged again with a howl of milk and a piece of bread.] JIMMY" And wait till you hear! She's not finished with him yet! [As MANUS descends the stairs he toasts SARAH with his bowl.]

JIMMY 'Knuzosen de oi osse�' 'She dimmed his two eyes that were so beautiful and clothed hi m in a vile ragged cloak begrimed with filthy smoke . . .'! D'you see! Smoke! Smoke! D'you see! Sure look at what the same turf-smoke has done to myself! [He rapidly removes his hat to display his bald head.] Woul d you call that flaxen hair?

MANUS Of course I would.

JIMMY 'And about him she cast the great skin of a filthy hind,9 stripped of the hair, and into his hand she thrust a staff and a wallet'! Ha-ha-ha! Athene did that to Ulysses! Made him into a tramp! Isn't she the tight one?

MANUS You couldn't watch her, Jimmy. JIMMY' You know what they call her? MANUS 'Glaukopis Athene.' JIMMY' That's it! The flashing-eyed Athene! By God, Manus, sir, if you had a

woman like that about the house, it's not stripping a turf1-bank you'd be

thinking about�eh? MANUS She was a goddess, Jimmy. JIMMY Better still. Sure isn't our own Grania a class of a goddess and � MANUS Who? JIMMY' Grania�Grania�Diarmuid's Grania.2 MANUS Ah. JIMMY An d sure she can't get her fill of men. MANUS Jimmy, you're impossible. JIMMY I was just thinking to myself last night: if you had the choosing

between Athene and Artemis and Helen of Troy�all three of them Zeus's girls3�imagine three powerful-looking daughters like that all in the one parish of Athens!�now, if you had the picking between them, which would you take?

MANUS [To SARAH.] Whic h should I take, Sarah?

JIMMY N O harm to Helen; and no harm to Artemis; and indeed no harm to our own Grania, Manus. But I think I've no choice but to go bull-straight for Athene. By God, sir, them flashing eyes would fair keep a man jigged4 up constant!

8. A pale strawlike color. Jimmy is continuingwith their attempt to escape capture by Fionn. the same scene of the Odyssey. 3. I.e., daughters of the most powerful Greekgod. 9. Female red deer. As goddess of wild animals, vegetation, and the 1. Peat; dried and used for fuel. hunt, Artemis was contrasted with Athena, god2. Young and beautiful Irish princess betrothed to dess of the city. Helen's abduction was the legenthe aged but powerful Fionn mac Cumhaill; many dary cause of the Trojan War. medieval stories recount the flight of Grania and 4. jerked, caught. her lover, Dairmud, over the Irish countryside in

.

248 0 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

[Suddenly and momentarily, as if in spasm, JIMMY stands to attention and salutes, his face raised in pained ecstasy. MANUS laughs. So does SARAH. JIMMY goes hack to his seat, and his reading.]

MANUS You're a dangerous bloody man, Jimm y Jack.

JIMMY 'Flashing-eyed'! Hah! Sure Homer knows it all, boy. Homer knows it

all.

[MANUS goes to the window and looks out.]

MANUS Where the hell has he got to? [SARAH goes to MANUS and touches his elhow. She mimes rocking a baby. ]

MANUS Yes, I know he's at the christening; but it doesn't take them all day

to put a name on a baby, does it?

[SARAH mimes pouring drinks and tossing them back quickly.] MANUS YOU may be sure. Which pub? [SARAH indicates. ] MANUS Gracie's?

[No. Further away.]

MANUS Con Connie Tim's?

[No. To the right of there.]

MANUS Ann a na mBreag's?

[Yes. That's it.]

MANUS Great. She'll fill him up. I suppose I may take the class then. [MANUS begins to distribute some books, slates and chalk, texts etc. beside the seats.

SARAH goes over to the straw and produces a bunch of flowers she has hidden there. During this.]

JIMMY 'Autar o ek limenos prosebe�' 'But Ulysses went forth from the harbour and through the woodland to the place where Athene had shown him he could find the good swineherd who� o oi biotoio malista kedeto'�what's that, Manus?

MANUS 'Who cared most for his substance'.

JIMMY That's it! 'The good swineherd who cared most for his substance above

all the slaves that Ulysses possessed . . .'5

[SARAH presents the flowers to MANUS.]

MANUS Those are lovely, Sarah. [But SARAH has fled in embarrassment to her seat and has her head buried in a book, MANUS goes to her.]

MANUS Flow�ers. [Pause, SARAH does not look up.] MANUS Say the word: flow�ers. Com e on�flow�ers.

SARAH Flowers.

MANUS YOU see?�you're off! [MANUS leans down and kisses the top of SARAH'S head.]

MANUS An d they're beautiful flowers. Than k you. [MAIRE enters, a strong-minded, strong-bodied woman in her twenties with a head of curly hair. She is carrying a small can of milk.]

5. At the beginning of book 14 of the Odyssey, Odysseus seeks, at Athena's instruction, the field hand who has been most attentive to the hero's estate in his absence.

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 1 / 2481

MAIRE Is this all's here? Is there no school this evening?

MANUS If my father's not back, I'll take it.

[MANUS stands awkwardly, having heen caught kissing SARAH and with

the flowers almost formally at his chest.]

MAIRE Well now, isn't that a pretty sight. There's your milk. How's Sarah? [SARAH grunts a reply.] MANUS I saw you out at the hay.

[MAIRE ignores this and goes to JIMMY.] MAIRE And how's Jimmy Jack Cassie? JIMMY Sit down beside me, Maire. MAIRE Would I be safe? JIMMY No safer ma n in Donegal.

[MAIRE flops on a stool heside JIMMY.] MAIRE Ooooh. Th e best harvest in living memory, they say; but I don't want

to see another like it. [Showing JIMMY her hands.] Look at the blisters. JIMMY Esne fatigata ? MAIRE Sum fatigatissima. JIMMY Bene! OptimeJ6 MAIRE That's the height of my Latin. Fit me better if I had even that muc h

English. JIMMY English? I thought you had some English? MAIRE Three words. Wait�there was a spake7 I used to have off by heart.

What's this it was?

[Her accent is strange because she is speaking a foreign language and because she does not understand what she is saying.]

'In Norfolk8 we besport ourselves around the maypoll.' Wha t about that! MANUS Maypole.9 [Again MAIRE ignores MANUS.] MAIRE God have mercy on my Aunt Mary�she taught me that when I was

about four, whatever it means. Do you know what it means, Jimmy? JIMMY Sure you know I have only Irish like yourself. MAIRE An d Latin. An d Greek. JIMMY I'm telling you a lie: I know one English word. MAIRE What? JIMMY Bo�som. MAIRE What's a bo�som? JIMMY YOU know� [H e illustrates with his hands.]�bo�som�bo�som�you

know-�Diana, the huntress,1 she has two powerful bosom. MAIRE YOU may be sure that's the one English word you would know. [Rises.] Is there a drop of water about?

[MANUS gives MAIRE his bowl of milk.] MANUS I'm sorry I couldn't get up last night. MAIRE Doesn't matter. MANUS Biddy Hanna sent for me to write a letter to her sister in Nova Scotia.

All the gossip of the parish. 'I brought the cow to the bull three times last

week but no good. There's nothing for it now but Big Ned Frank.'

MAIRE [Drinking.] That's better.

6. Are you tired? / I am very tired. / Good! Excel-9. Tall decorated pole around which traditional lent! [Friel's note]. English dances were conducted in springtime. 7. Speech. 1. Roman goddess, comparable to the Greek Arte8. County of eastern England. mis.

.

248 2 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

MANUS And she got so engrossed in it that she forgot who she was dictating to: 'The aul drunken schoolmaster and that lame son of his are still footering about in the hedge-school, wasting people's good time and money.'

[MAIRE has to laugh at this.] MAIRE She did not! MANUS An d me taking it all down. 'Thank Go d one of them new national

schools2 is being built above at Poll na gCaorach.' It was after midnight by the time I got back. MAIRE Great to be a busy man. [MAIRE moves away, MANUS follows. \ MANUS I could hear music on my way past but I thought it was too late to call. MAIRE [To SARAH.] Wasn't your father in great voice last night? [SARAH nods and smiles.] MAIRE It must have been near three o'clock by the time you got home?

[SARAH holds up four fingers.] MAIRE Wa s it four? No wonder we're in pieces. MANUS I can give you a hand at the hay tomorrow. MAIRE That's the name of a hornpipe,3 isn't it?�'The Scholar In The Hay

field'�or is it a reel?4 MANUS If the day's good. MAIRE Suit yourself. The English soldiers below in the tents, them sapper5

fellas, they're coming up to give us a hand. I don't know a word they're saying, nor they me; but sure that doesn't matter, does it? MANUS Wha t the hell are you so crabbed6 about?! [DOALTY and BRIDGET enter noisily. Both are in their twenties. DOALTY is brandishing a surveyor's pole. He is an open-minded, openhearted, generous and slightly thick young man. BRIDGET is a plump, fresh young girl, ready to laugh, vain, and with a countrywoman's instinctive cunning.

DOALTY enters doing his imitation of the master. ] DOALTY Vesperal7 salutations to you all. BRIDGET He's coming down past Carraig na Ri and he's as full as a pig! DOALTY Ignari, stulti, rustici8�pot-boys and peasant whelps9�semi-literates

and illegitimates. BRIDGET He's been on the batter1 since this morning; he sent the wee ones home at eleven o'clock. DOALTY Three questions. Question A�-Am I drunk? Question B�A m I

sober? [Into MAIRE'S face.] Responde�responde!2 BRIDGET Question C, Master�When were you last sober? MAIRE What's the weapon, Doalty? BRIDGET I warned him. He'll be arrested one of these days. DOALTY Up in the bog with Bridget and her aul fella, and the Red Coats were

2. In 1831, two years earlier, a new system of 6. Annoyed. English-speaking schools had been introduced; 7. Evening. these would eventually supplant the hedge schools. 8. Ignoramuses, fools, peasants [Latin; Friel's 3. Vigorous dance performed by a sole person to note], a wind instrument. 9. Young wild animals. "Pot-boys": assistants who 4. Lively dance performed by couples facing each serve beer in a pub. other. 1. On the bottle. 5. Soldier who works in saps, i.e., fortifications,or 2. Answer�answer! [Latin; Friel's note]. does field work.

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 1 / 248 3

just across at the foot of Cnoc na Mona, dragging them aul chains and peeping through that big machine they lug about everywhere with them� you know the name of it, Manus?

MAIRE Theodolite.3 BRIDGET Ho w do you know? MAIRE They leave it in our byre4 at night sometimes if it's raining. JIMMY Theodolite�what's the etymology of that word, Manus? MANUS No idea. BRIDGET Get on with the story. JIMMY Theo�theos5�something to do with a god. Maybe thea�a goddess!

Wha t shape's the yoke?

DOALTY 'Shape!' Will you shut up, you aul eejit6 you! Anyway, every time they'd stick one of these poles into the ground and move across the bog, I'd creep up and shift it twenty or thirty paces to the side.

BRIDGET God!

DOALTY Then they'd come back and stare at it and look at their calculations and stare at it again and scratch their heads. And Cripes7, d'you know what they ended up doing?

BRIDGET Wait till you hear!

DOALTY They took the bloody machine apart! [And immediately he speaks in gibberish�an imitation of two very agitated and confused sappers in rapid conversation. ]

BRIDGET That's the image of them! MAIRE You must be proud of yourself, Doalty. DOALTY What d'you mean? MAIRE That was a very clever piece of work. MANUS It was a gesture. MAIRE Wha t sort of a gesture? MANUS Just to indicate .. . a presence. MAIRE Hah! BRIDGET I'm telling you�you'll be arrested.

[When DOALTY is embarrassed�or pleased�he reacts physically. He now grabs BRIDGET around the waist.] DOALTY Wha t d'you make of that for an implement, Bridget? Wouldn't that make a great aul shaft for your churn? BRIDGET Let go of me, you dirty brute! I've a headline to do before Big Hughie comes. MANUS I don't think we'll wait for him. Let's get started.

[Slowly, rehictantly they begin to move to their seats and specific tasks. DOALTY goes to the bucket of water at the door and washes his hands. BRIDGET sets up a hand-mirror and combs her hair.]

BRIDGET Nellie Ruadh's baby was to be christened this morning. Did any of yous hear what she called it? Di d you, Sarah?

[SARAH grunts: No.] BRIDGET Did you, Maire? MAIRE NO. BRIDGET Our Seamus says she was threatening she was going to call it after

its father.

3. A portable instrument for surveying. 6. Idiot. 4. Barn. 7. Christ (mild oath). 5. God (Greek).

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248 4 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

DOALTY Who's the father? BRIDGET That's the point, you donkey you! DOALTY Ah. BRIDGET So there's a lot of uneasy bucks about Baile Beag this day. DOALTY She told me last Sunday she was going to call it Jimmy. BRIDGET You're a liar, Doalty. DOALTY Woul d I tell you a lie? Hi, Jimmy, Nellie Ruadh's aul fella's looking

for you. JIMMY For me? MAIRE Com e on, Doalty. DOALTY Someone told him . . . MAIRE Doalty! DOALTY He heard you know the first book of the Satires of Horace8 off by

heart. . . JIMMY That's true. DOALTY . . . and he wants you to recite it for him. JIMMY I'll do that for him certainly, certainly. DOALTY He's busting to hear it.

[JIMMY fumbles in his -pockets.] JIMMY I came across this last night�this'll interest you�in Book Two of

Virgil's Georgics.9 DOALTY Be God, that's my territory alright. BRIDGET You clown you! [To SARAH.] Hold this for me, would you? [Her

mirror.] JIMMY Listen to this, Manus. 'Nigra fere et presso pinguis sub vomere terra . . . ' DOALTY Steady on now�easy, boys, easy�don't rush me, boys�[H e mimes great concentration.]

JIMMY Manus?

MANUS 'Land that is black and rich beneath the pressure of the

plough . . .' DOALTY Give me a chance! JIMMY 'And with cui putre�with crumbly soil�is in the main best for corn.'

There you are! DOALTY There you are. JIMMY 'From no other land will you see more wagons wending homeward

behind slow bullocks.'1 Virgil! There! DOALTY 'Slow bullocks'! JIMMY Isn't that what I'm always telling you? Black soil for corn. That's what

you should have in that upper field of yours�corn, not spuds.

DOALTY Would you listen to that fella! Too lazy be Jasus to wash himself and

he's lecturing me on agriculture! Woul d you go and take a running race at

yourself, Jimm y Jack Cassie! [Grabs SARAH.] Come away out of this with me,

Sarah, and we'll plant some corn together.

MANUS Alright�alright. Let's settle down and get some work done. I know

Sean Beag isn't coming�he's at the2 salmon. What about the Donnelly

twins? [To DOALTY.] Are the Donnelly twins not coming any more?

8. Latin lyric poet (65�8 B.C.E.). 1. Bulls or, loosely, cattle. 9. Four books of poems on farming and rural life 2. Fishing for. by the Roman poet (70�19 B.C.E.).

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 1 / 248 5

[DOALTY shrugs and turns away.]

Did you ask them? DOALTY Haven't seen them. Not about these days. [DOALTY begins whistling through his teeth. Suddenly the atmosphere is silent and alert.]

MANUS Aren't they at home? DOALTY No. MANUS Wher e are they then? DOALTY HOW would I know? BRIDGET Our Seamus says two of the soldiers' horses were found last night

at the foot of the cliffs at Machaire Buide and . . .

[She stops suddenly and begins writing with chalk on her slate.]

D'you hear the whistles of this aul slate? Sure nobody could write on an aul

slippery thing like that. MANUS Wha t headline did my father set you? BRIDGET 'It's easier to stamp out learning than to recall it.' JIMMY Book Three, the Agricola of Tacitus.3 BRIDGET God but you're a dose.4 MANUS Can you do it? BRIDGET There. Is it bad? Will he ate me? MANUS It's very good. Keep your elbow in closer to your side. Doalty? DOALTY I'm at the seven-times table. I'm perfect, skipper.

[MANUS moves to SARAH.] MANUS Do you understand those sums? [SARAH nods: Yes. MANUS leans down to her ear.]

MANUS My name is Sarah. [MANUS goes to MAIRE. While he is talking to her the others swop hooks, talk quietly, etc.]

MANUS Can I help you? What are you at? MAIRE Ma p of America. [Pause.] The passage money came last Friday. MANUS Yo u never told me that. MAIRE Because I haven't seen you since, have I? MANUS You don't want to go. You said that yourself. MAIRE There's ten below me to be raised and no ma n in the house. Wha t do

you suggest? MANUS Do you want to go? MAIRE Did you apply for that job in the new national school? MANUS NO. MAIRE YOU said you would. MANUS I said I might. MAIRE Whe n it opens, this is finished: nobody's going to pay to go to a hedge-

school.

MANUS I know that and I . . . [He breaks off because he sees SARAH, obviously listening, at his shoulder. She moves away again.] I was thinking that maybe I could . . .

MAIRE It's .5 6 a year you're throwing away. MANUS I can't apply for it.

3. Roman historian (ca. 56�ca. 120 C.E.), author law, including an account of his career in Britain. of De Vita Julii Agricolae (The Life of Julius Agric-4. I.e., a dose of medicine, or an unpleasant expeola), or the Agricola, a biography of his father-in-rience.

.

248 6 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

MAIRE You promised me you would. MANUS My father has applied for it.

MAIRE He has not!

MANUS Day before yesterday. MAIRE For God's sake, sure you know he'd never� MANUS I couldn't�I can't go in against him.

[MAIRE looks at him for a second. Then.]

MAIRE Suit yourself. [To BRIDGET.] I saw your Seamus heading off to the Port fair early this morning.

BRIDGET And wait till you hear this�I forgot to tell you this. He said that as soon as he crossed over the gap at Cnoc na Mona�just beyond where the soldiers are making the maps�the sweet smell was everywhere.

DOALTY YOU never told me that. BRIDGET It went out of my head. DOALTY He saw the crops in Port? BRIDGET Some. MANUS HOW did the tops look? BRIDGET Fine�I think. DOALTY In flower? BRIDGET I don't know. I think so. He didn't say. MANUS Just the sweet smell�that's all? BRIDGET They say that's the way it snakes in, don't they? First the smell; and

then one morning the stalks are all black and limp. DOALTY Are you stupid? It's the rotting stalks makes the sweet smell for God's sake. That's what the smell is�rotting stalks.

MAIRE Sweet smell! Sweet smell! Every year at this time somebody comes back with stories of the sweet smell. Sweet God, did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag? Well, did they ever�ever? Never! There was never blight here. Never. Never. But we're always sniffing about for it, aren't we?� looking for disaster. The rents are going to go up again�the harvest's going to be lost�the herring have gone away for ever-�there's going to be evictions. Honest to God, some of you people aren't happy unless you're miserable and you'll not be right content until you're dead!

DOALTY Bloody right, Maire. And sure St. Colmcille prophesied there'd never be blight here. He said:

The spuds will bloom in Baile Beag Till rabbits grow an extra lug.'

And sure that'll never be. So we're alright.

Seven threes are twenty-one; seven fours are twenty-eight; seven fives are forty-nine� Hi, Jimmy, do you fancy my chances as boss of the new national school?

JIMMY What's that?�what's that? DOALTY Agh, g'way back home to Greece, son. MAIRE You ought to apply, Doalty. DOALTY D'you think so? Cripes, maybe I will. Hah! BRIDGET Did you know that you start at the age of six and you have to stick

5. Ear. St. Comcille (521�597), also known as St. Scotland. Cf. Friel's play about his life, The Enemy Columba, was born in Donegal and established Within (1962). monasteries and churches throughout Ireland and

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 1 / 2487

at it until you're twelve at least�no matter how smart you are or how much

you know. DOALTY Who told you that yarn? BRIDGET And every child from every house has to go all day, every day, sum

mer or winter. That's the law. DOALTY I'll tell you something�nobody's going to go near them�they're not going to take on�law or no law. BRIDGET And everything's free in them. You pay for nothing except the books you use; that's what our Seamus says. DOALTY 'Our Seamus'. Sure your Seamus wouldn't pay anyway. She's making

this all up. BRIDGET Isn't that right, Manus? MANUS I think so. BRIDGET And from the very first day you go, you'll not hear one word of Irish

spoken. You'll be taught to speak English and every subject will be taught through English and everyone'll end up as cute as the Buncrana6 people.

[SARAH suddenly grunts and mimes a warning that the master is coming. The atmosphere changes. Sudden business. Heads down. ]

DOALTY He's here, boys. Cripes, he'll make yella meal out of me for those

bloody tables. BRIDGET Have you any extra chalk, Manus? MAIRE And the atlas for me.

[DOALTYgoes to MAIRE who is sitting on a stool at the hack.] DOALTY Swop you seats. MAIRE Why? DOALTY There's an empty one beside the Infant Prodigy. MAIRE I'm fine here. DOALTY Please, Maire. I want to jouk7 in the back here.

[MAIRE rises.] God love you. [Aloud.] Anyone got a bloody table-book? Cripes, I'm wrecked. [SARAH gives him one.]

God, I'm dying about you.

[In his haste to get to the hack seat DOALTY humps into BRIDGET who is kneeling on the floor and writing laboriously on a slate resting on top of a bench-seat.]

BRIDGET Watch where you're going, Doalty! [DOALTY gooses8 BRIDGET. She squeals.

Now the quiet hum of work: JIMMY reading Homer in a low voice; BRIDGET copying her headline; MAIRE studying the atlas; DOALTY, his eyes shut tight, mouthing his tables; SARAH doing sums.

After a few seconds.]�

BRIDGET Is this 'g' right, Manus? How do you put a tail on it?

DOALTY Will you shut up! I can't concentrate! [A few more seconds of work. Then DOALTY opens his eyes and looks around. ]

False alarm, boys. The bugger's9 not coming at all. Sure the bugger's hardly fit to walk.

6. Small coastal town northwest of Derry. 8. Pokes or tickles in an erogenous place. 7. Perch. 9. Vulgar term of abuse.

.

248 8 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

[And immediately HUGH enters. A large man, with residual dignity, shabbily dressed, carrying a stick. He has, as always, a large quantity of drink taken, but he is by no means drunk. He is in his early sixties.]

HUGH Adsum, Doalty, adsum.' Perhaps not in sobrietate perfecta2 but ade

quately sobrius3 to overhear your quip. Vesperal salutations to you all.

[Various responses.] JIMMY Ave,4 Hugh. HUGH James.

[He removes his hat and coat and hands them and his stick to MANUS,

as if to a footman. ]

Apologies for my late arrival: we were celebrating the baptism of Nellie

Ruadh's baby. BRIDGET [Innocently.] What name did she put on it, Master? HUGH Was it Eamon? Yes, it was Eamon. BRIDGET Eamon Donal from Tor! Cripes! HUGH And after the caerimonia nominationis1'�Maire? MAIRE The ritual of naming. HUGH Indeed�we then had a few libations to mark the occasion. Altogether

very pleasant. The derivation of the word 'baptise'?�where are my Greek

scholars? Doalty? DOALTY Would it be�ah�ah� HUGH Too slow. James? JIMMY 'Baptizein'�to dip or immerse. HUGH Indeed�our friend Pliny Minor6 speaks of the 'baptisterium'�the cold

bath. DOALTY Master. HUGH Doalty? DOALTY I suppose you could talk then about baptising a sheep at sheep-

dipping, could you?

[Laughter. Comments. ]

HUGH Indeed�the precedent is there�the day you were appropriately

named Doalty�seven nines? DOALTY What's that, Master? HUGH Seven times nine? DOALTY Seven nines�seven nines�seven times nine�seven times nine

are�Cripes, it's on the tip of my tongue, Master�I knew it for sure this

morning�funny that's the only one that foxes7 me� BRIDGET [Prompt.] Sixty-three. DOALTY What's wrong with me: sure seven nines are fifty-three, Master. HUGH Sophocles from Colonus would agree with Doalty Dan Doalty from

Tulach Alainn: 'To know nothing is the sweetest life.'8 Where's Sean Beag? MANUS He's at the salmon. HUGH And Nora Dan? MAIRE She says she's not coming back any more.

1. I am present [Latin; Friel's note]. Roman administrator who wrote an important col2. With complete sobriety [Latin; Friel's note]. lection of letters. 3. Sober [Latin; Friel's note], 7. Befuddles. 4. Hail [Latin; Friel's note]. 8. From Ajax, by the ancient Greek playwright 5. Ceremony of naming [Latin; Friel's note], Sophocles (ca. 496�406 B.C.E.), born in the village 6. Or Pliny the Younger (61 or 62�ca. 113 C.E.), of Colonus, near Athens.

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 1 / 2489

HUGH Ah. Nora Dan can now write her name�Nora Dan's education is complete. And the Donnelly twins?

[Brief-pause. Then.]

BRIDGET They're probably at the turf.9 [She goes to HUGH.] There's the oneand- eight I owe you for last quarter's arithmetic and there's my one-and-six1 for this quarter's writing.

HUGH Gratias tihi ago.2 [He sits at his table.] Before we commence our studia3 I have three items of information to impart to you�[To MANUS.] a bowl of tea, strong tea, black�

[MANUS leaves.]

Item A: on my perambulations today�Bridget? Too slow. Maire? MAIRE Perambulare�to walk about. HUGH Indeed�I encountered Captain Lancey of the Boyal Engineers who

is engaged in the ordnance survey of this area. He tells me that in the past few days two of his horses have strayed and some of his equipment seems to be mislaid. I expressed my regret and suggested he address you himself on these matters. He then explained that he does not speak Irish. Latin? I asked. None. Greek? Not a syllable. He speaks�on his own admission� only English; and to his credit he seemed suitably verecund�James?

JIMMY Verecundus�humble.

HUGH Indeed�he voiced some surprise that we did not speak his language. I explained that a few of us did, on occasion�outside the parish of course� and then usually for the purposes of commerce, a use to which his tongue seemed particularly suited�[SJiotits.] and a slice of soda bread�and I went on to propose that our own culture and the classical tongues made a happier conjugation�Doalty?

DOALTY Conjugo�I join together. [DOALTY is so pleased with himself that he prods and winks at BRIDGET.]

HUGH Indeed�English, I suggested, couldn't really express us. And again to his credit he acquiesced to my logic. Acquiesced�Maire?

[MAIRE turns away impatiently. HUGH is unaware of the gesture.]

Too slow. Bridget?

BRIDGET Acquiesco.4 HUGH Procede. BRIDGET Acquiesco, acquiescere, acquievi, acquietum.

HUGH Indeed�and Item B . . . MAIRE Master. HUGH Yes?

[MAIRE gets to her feet uneasily hut determinedly. Pause.]

Well, girl?

MAIRE We should all be learning to speak English. That's what my mother says. That's what I say. That's what Dan O'Connell5 said last month in Ennis. He said the sooner we all learn to speak English the better.

[Suddenly several speak together.]

9. I.e., cutting turf. 1. One and a half shillings�eighteen pennies� in the old British currency. "One-and-eight": one shilling and eight pence, or twenty pennies. 2. I thank you [Latin; Friel's note]. 3. Studies [Latin; Friel's note[. 4. Acquiescere: to rest, to find comfort in [Latin; Friel's note]. 5. Irish lawyer and nationalist leader (1775� 1847), born in Kerry and known as the Liberator, who argued for Ireland's adoption of the English language. The first Roman Catholic member of Parliament, he regained civil rights for Irish Catholics and urged the reestablishment of the Irish Parliament in Dublin.

.

249 0 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

JIMMY What's she saying? What? What? DOALTY It's Irish he uses when he's travelling around scrounging votes. BRIDGET And sleeping with married women. Sure no woman's safe from that fella.

JIMMY Who-who-who? Who's this? Who's this? HUGH Silentium! [Pause. ] Who is she talking about? MAIRE I'm talking about Daniel O'Connell. HUGH Does she mean that little Kerry politician? MAIRE I'm talking about the Liberator, Master, as you well know. And what he said was this: 'The old language is a barrier to modern progress.' He said that last month. And he's right. I don't want Greek. I don't want Latin. I want English. [MANUS reappears on the platform above.] I want to be able to speak English because I'm going to America as soon as the harvest's all saved. [MAIRE remains standing. HUGH puts his hand into his pocket and produces a flask of whisky. He removes the cap, pours a drink into it, tosses it back, replaces the cap, puts the flask back into his pocket. Then.] HUGH We have been diverted�diverto�divertere�Where were we? DOALTY Three items of information, Master. You're at Item B. HUGH Indeed�Item B�Item B�yes�On my way to the christening this morning I chanced to meet Mr George Alexander, Justice of the Peace. We discussed the new national school. Mr Alexander invited me to take charge of it when it opens. I thanked him and explained that I could do that only if I were free to run it as I have run this hedge-school for the past thirty- five years�filling what our friend Euripides6 calls the 'aplestos pithos'� James? JIMMY 'The cask that cannot be filled'. HUGH Indeed�and Mr Alexander retorted courteously and emphatically that he hopes that is how it will be run. [MAIRE now sits.] Indeed. I have had a strenuous day and I am weary of you all. [He rises.] Manus will take care of you. [HUGH goes towards the steps. OWEN enters. OWEN is the younger son, a handsome, attractive young man in his twenties. He is dressed smartly�a city man. His manner is easy and charming: everything he does is invested with consideration and enthusiasm. He now stands framed in the doorway, a travelling bag across his shoulder.] OWEN Could anybody tell me is this where Hugh Mor O'Donnell holds his hedge-school? DOALTY It's Owen�Owen Hugh! Look, boys�it's Owen Hugh! [OWEN enters. As he crosses the room he touches and has a word for each person. ] OWE N Doalty! [Playftd punch.] How are you, boy? facobe, quid agis?7 Are you well? JIMM Y Fine. Fine. OWE N And Bridget! Give us a kiss. Aaaaaah! BRIDGET You're welcome, Owen.

6. Greek playwright (ca. 484�406 B.C.E.) . 7. James, how are you? [Latin; Friel's note].

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11

OWEN It's not�? Yes, it is Maire Chatach! God! A young woman! MAIRE How are you, Owen? [OWEN is now in front of HUGH. He puts his two hands on his father's shoidders, ] OWEN And how's the old man himself? HUGH Fair�fair. OWEN Fair? For God's sake you never looked better! Come here to me. [He

embraces HUGH warmly and genuinely.] Great to see you, Father. Great to

be back.

[HUGH'S eyes are moist�partly joy, partly the drink.] HUGH I�I'm�I'm�pay no attention to� OWEN Come on�come on�come on�[He gives HUGH his handkerchief] Do you know what you and I are going to do tonight? We are going to go up to

Anna na mBreag's . . . DOALTY Not there, Owen. OWEN Why not? DOALTY Her poteen's8 worse than ever. BRIDGET They say she puts frogs in it! OWEN All the better. [To HUGH.] And you and I are going to get footless drunk.

That's arranged.

[OWEN sees MANUS coming down the steps with tea and soda hread. They meet at the bottom.]

And Manus! MANUS You're welcome, Owen. OWEN I know I am. And it's great to be here. [He turns round, arms out

stretched.] I can't believe it. I come back after six years and everything's just as it was! Nothing's changed! Not a thing! [Sniffs.] Even that smell�that's the same smell this place always had. What is it anyway? Is it the straw?

DOALTY Jimmy Jack's feet.

[General laughter. It opens little pockets of conversation round the room.]

OWEN And Doalty Dan Doalty hasn't changed either!

DOALTY Bloody right, Owen.

OWEN Jimmy, are you well? JIMMY Dodging about.

OWEN Any word of the big day?

[This is greeted with 'ohs' and 'ahs'.]

Time enough, Jimmy. Homer's easier to live with, isn't he? MAIRE We heard stories that you own ten big shops in Dublin9�is it true? OWEN Only nine. BRIDGET And you've twelve horses and six servants. OWEN Yes�that's true. God Almighty, would you listen to them�taking a

hand at me! MANUS When did you arrive? OWEN We left Dublin yesterday morning, spent last night in Omagh and got

here half an hour ago. MANUS You're hungry then. HUGH Indeed�get him food�get him a drink.

8. Local whiskey illegally distilled to evade British 9. Ireland's capital was the site of English military taxation. and political power.

.

25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

OWEN Not now, thanks; later. Listen�am I interrupting you all? HUGH By no means. We're finished for the day. OWEN Wonderful. I'll tell you why. Two friends of mine are waiting outside

the door. They'd like to meet you and I'd like you to meet them. May I bring

them in? HUGH Certainly. You'll all eat and have . . . OWEN Not just yet, Father. You've seen the sappers working in this area for

the past fortnight, haven't you? Well, the older man is Captain Lancey . . . HUGH I've met Captain Lancey. OWEN Great. He's the cartographer in charge of this whole area. Cartogra

pher�James?

[OWEN begins to play this game�his father's game�partly to involve his classroom audience, partly to show he has not forgotten it, and indeed partly because he enjoys it.]

JIMMY A maker of maps. OWEN Indeed�and the younger man that I travelled with from Dublin, his

name is Lieutenant Yolland and he is attached to the toponymic depart

ment�Father?�responde�responde! HUGH He gives names to places. OWEN Indeed�although he is in fact an orthographer�Doalty?�too slow�

Manus? MANUS The correct spelling of those names. OWEN Indeed�indeed!

[OWEN laughs and claps his hands. Some of the others join in.]

Beautiful! Beautiful! Honest to God, it's such a delight to be back here with

you all again�'civilised' people. Anyhow�may I bring them in? HUGH Your friends are our friends. OWEN I'll be straight back.

[There is general talk as OWEN goes towards the door. He stops beside SARAH.]

OWEN That's a new face. Who are you?

[A very brief hesitation. Then. ] SARAH My name is Sarah. OWEN Sarah who? SARAH Sarah Johnny Sally. OWEN Of course! From Bun na hAbhann! I'm Owen�Owen Hugh Mor.

From Baile Beag. Good to see you.

[During this OWEN�SARAH exchange.] HUGH Come on now. Let's tidy this place up. [He rubs the top of his table with his sleeve.] Move, Doalty�lift those books off the floor. DOALTY Right, Master; certainly, Master; I'm doing my best, Master.

[OWEN stops at the door.]

OWEN One small thing, Father.

HUGH Silentium!

OWEN I'm on their pay-roll.

[SARAH, very elated at her success, is beside MANUS.]

SARAH I said it, Manus!

[MANUS ignores SARAH. He is much more interested in OWEN noiv.]

MANUS You haven't enlisted, have you?!

[SARAH moves away.]

OWEN Me a soldier? I'm employed as a part-time, underpaid, civilian inter

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11

preter. My job is to translate the quaint, archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King's good English. [He goes out.] HUGH Move�move�move! Put some order on things! Come on, Sarah� hide that bucket. Whose are these slates? Somebody take these dishes away.

Festinate! Festinate!' [HUGH pours another drink. MANUS goes to MAIRE who is busy tidying.]

MANUS YOU didn't tell me you were definitely leaving.

MAIRE Not now.

HUGH Good girl, Bridget. That's the style. MANUS You might at least have told me. HUGH Are these your books, James? JIMMY Thank you. MANUS Fine! Fine! Go ahead! Go ahead! MAIRE YOU talk to me about getting married�with neither a roof over your

head nor a sod of ground under your foot. I suggest you go for the new school; but no�'My father's in for that.' Well now he's got it and now this is finished and now you've nothing.

MANUS I can always . . . MAIRE What? Teach classics to the cows? Agh�

[MAIRE moves away from MANUS.

OWEN enters with LANCEY and YOLLAND. CAPTAIN LANCEY is middle- aged; a small, crisp officer, expert in his field as cartographer hut uneasy with people�especially civilians, especially these foreign civilians. His skill is with deeds, not words.

LIEUTENANT YOLLAND is in his late twenties/early thirties. He is tall and thin and gangling, blond hair, a shy, awkward manner. A soldier by accident.]

OWEN Here we are. Captain Lancey�my father. LANCEY Good evening. [HUGH becomes expansive, almost courtly with his visitors.]

HUGH You and I have already met, sir.

LANCEY Yes.

OWEN And Lieutenant Yolland�both Royal Engineers�my father. HUGH You're very welcome, gentlemen.

YOLLAND HOW do you do. HUGH Gaudeo vos hie adesse.2

OWEN And I'll make no other introductions except that these are some of the people of Baile Beag and�what?�well you're among the best people in Ireland now. [He pauses to allow LANCEY to speak, LANCEY does not.] Would you like to say a few words, Captain?

HUGH What about a drop, sir? LANCEY A what? HUGH Perhaps a modest refreshment? A little sampling of our aqua vitae?3

LANCEY NO, no. HUGH Later perhaps when . . . LANCEY I'll say what I have to say, if I may, and as briefly as possible. Do they

speak any English, Roland?

1. Hurry! [Latin; Friel's note], 3. "Aqua vitae": spirits; literally, in Latin, water of 2. Welcome! [Latin; Friel's note]. life.

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249 4 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

OWEN Don't worry. I'll translate. LANCEY I see. [He clears his throat. He speaks as if he were addressing children� a shade too loudly and enunciating excessively.] You may have seen me�seen me�working in this section�section?�working. We are here� here�in this place�you understand?�to make a map�a map�a map and�

JIMMY Nonne Latine loquitur?4

[HUGH holds up a restraining hand.] HUGH James. LANCEY [To JIMMY.] I do not speak Gaelic, sir. [He looks at OWEN.] OWEN Carry on. LANCEY A map is a representation on paper�a picture�you understand pic

ture?�a paper picture�showing, representing this country�yes?�showing your country in miniature�a scaled drawing on paper of�-of�of�

[Suddenly DOALTY sniggers. Then BRIDGET. Then SARAH. OWEN leaps in

quickly.] OWEN It might be better if you assume they understand you� LANCEY Yes? OWEN And I'll translate as you go along. LANCEY I see. Yes. Very well. Perhaps you're right. Well. What we are doing

is this. [He looks at OWEN. OWEN nods reassuringly.] His Majesty's government has ordered the first ever comprehensive survey of this entire country� a general triangulation which will embrace detailed hydrographic and topographic information and which will be executed to a scale of six inches to the English mile.

HUGH [Pouring a drink.] Excellent�excellent. [LANCEY looks fltlOWEN.]

OWEN A new map is being made of the whole country. [LANCEY looks to OWEN: Is that all? OWEN smiles reassuringly and indicates to proceed.]

LANCEY This enormous task has been embarked on so that the military authorities will be equipped with up-to-date and accurate information on every corner of this part of the Empire.

OWEN The job is being done by soldiers because they are skilled in this work. LANCEY And also so that the entire basis of land valuation can be reassessed for purposes of more equitable taxation. OWEN This new map will take the place of the estate-agent's map so that from now on you will know exactly what is yours in law.

LANCEY In conclusion I wish to quote two brief extracts from the white paper which is our governing charter: [Reads.] 'All former surveys of Ireland originated in forfeiture and violent transfer of property; the present survey has for its object the relief which can be afforded to the proprietors and occupiers of land from unequal taxation.'

OWEN The captain hopes that the public will cooperate with the sappers and

that the new map will mean that taxes are reduced. HUGH A worthy enterprise�opus honestum! And Extract B? LANCEY 'Ireland is privileged. No such survey is being undertaken in England.

So this survey cannot but be received as proof of the disposition of this government to advance the interests of Ireland.' My sentiments, too.

4. Does he not speak Latin? [Friel's note].

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FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11

OWEN This survey demonstrates the government's interest in Ireland and the

captain thanks you for listening so attentively to him. HUGH Our pleasure, Captain. LANCEY Lieutenant Yolland? YOLLAND I�I�I've nothing to say�really� OWEN The captain is the man who actually makes the new map. George's

task is to see that the place-names on this map are . . . correct. [To YOLLAND.] Just a few words�they'd like to hear you. [To class.] Don't you want to hear George, too?

MAIRE Has he anything to say? YOLLAND [To MAIRE.] Sorry�sorry? OWEN She says she's dying to hear you. YOLLAND [To MAIRE.] Very kind of you�thank you . . . [To class.] I can only

say that I feel�I feel very foolish to�to be working here and not to speak your language. But I intend to rectify that�with Roland's help�indeed I do.

OWEN He wants me to teach him Irish! HUG H You are doubly welcome, sir. YOLLAND I think your countryside is�is�is�is very beautiful. I've fallen in

love with it already. I hope we're not too�too crude an intrusion on your

lives. And I know that I'm going to be happy, very happy, here. OWEN He is already a committed Hibernophile5� JIMMY He loves� OWEN Alright, Jimmy�we know�he loves Baile Beag; and he loves you all. HUGH Please . . . May I . . . ?

[HUGH is now drunk. He holds on to the edge of the table.] OWEN Go ahead, Father. [Hands up for quiet.] Please�please. HUGH And we, gentlemen, we in turn are happy to offer you our friendship,

our hospitality, and every assistance that you may require. Gentlemen� welcome!

[A few desultory6 claps. The formalities are over. General conversation. The soldiers meet the locals. MANUS and OWEN meet down stage. ]

OWEN Lancey's a bloody ramrod but George's alright. How are you anyway? MANUS What sort of a translation was that, Owen? OWEN Did I make a mess of it? MANUS You weren't saying what Lancey was saying! OWEN 'Uncertainty in meaning is incipient poetry'�who said that? MANUS There was nothing uncertain about what Lancey said: it's a bloody

military operation, Owen! And what's Yolland's function? What's 'incorrect'

about the place-names we have here? OWEN Nothing at all. They're just going to be standardised. MANUS YOU mean changed into English? OWEN Where there's ambiguity, they'll be Anglicised. MANUS And they call you Roland! They both call you Roland! OWEN Shhhhh. Isn't it ridiculous? They seemed to get it wrong from the very

beginning�or else they can't pronounce Owen. I was afraid some of you bastards would laugh. MANUS Aren't you going to tell them?

5. Lover of Ireland (in Latin, Hibernia). 6. Scattered.

.

25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

OWEN Yes�yes�soon�soon. MANUS But they. . . OWEN Easy, man, easy. Owen�Roland�what the hell. It's only a name. It's

the same me, isn't it? Well, isn't it? MANUS Indeed it is. It's the same Owen. OWEN And the same Manus. And in a way we complement each other.

[He punches MANUS lightly, playfully and turns to join the others. As he goes.]

Alright�who has met whom? Isn't this a job for the go-between?

[MANUS watches OWEN move confidently across the floor, taking MAIRE

by the hand and introducing her to YOLLAND.

HUGH is trying to negotiate the steps.

JIMMY is lost in a text.

DOALTY and BRIDGET are reliving their giggling.

SARAH is staring at MANUS.]

Act Two

SCENE ONE

The sappers have already mapped most of the area, YOLLAND'S official task, which OWEN is now doing, is to take each of the Gaelic names�every hill, stream, rock, even every patch of ground which possessed its own distinctive Irish name� and Anglicise it, either by changing it into its approximate English sound or by translating it into English words. For example, a Gaelic name like Cnoc Ban could become Knockban or�directly translated�Fair Hill. These new standardised names were entered into the Name-Book, and when the new maps appeared they contained all these new Anglicised names, OWEN'S official function as translator is to pronounce each name in Irish and then provide the English translation.

The hot weather continues. It is late afternoon some days later. Stage right: an improvised clothes-line strung between the shafts of the cart and a nail in the wall; on it are some shirts and socks.

A large map�one of the new blank maps�is spread out on the floor, OWEN is on his hands and knees, consulting it. He is totally engrossed in his task, which he pursues with great energy and efficiency.

YOLLAND'S hesitancy has vanished�he is at home here now. He is sitting on the floor, his long legs stretched out before him, his back resting against a creel,7 his eyes closed. His mind is elsewhere. One of the reference books�a church registry�lies open on his lap.

Around them are various reference books, the Name-Book, a bottle of poteen, some cups etc. OWEN completes an entry in the Name-Book and returns to the map on the floor.

OWEN Now. Where have we got to? Yes�the point where that stream enters

the sea�that tiny little beach there. George! YOLLAND Yes. I'm listening. What do you call it? Say the Irish name again? OWEN Bun na hAbhann. YOLLAND Again. OWEN Bun na hAbhann.

7. Large wicker basket.

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FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11

YOLLAND Bun na hAbhann. OWEN That's terrible, George. YOLLAND I know. I'm sorry. Say it again. OWEN Bun na hAbhann. YOLLAND Bun na hAbhann. OWEN That's better. Bun is the Irish word for bottom. And Abha means river.

So it's literally the mouth of the river. YOLLAND Let's leave it alone. There's no English equivalent for a sound like that. OWEN What is it called in the church registry?

[Only now does YOLLAND open his eyes.]

YOLLAND Let's see . . . Banowen.

OWEN That's wrong. [Consults text.] The list of freeholders calls it Owen- more�that's completely wrong: Owenmore's the big river at the west end of the parish. [Another text.] And in the grand jury lists it's called�God!� Binhone!�wherever they got that. I suppose we could Anglicize it to Bunowen; but somehow that's neither fish nor flesh.

[YOLLAND closes his eyes again.] YOLLAND I give Up. OWEN [At map.] Back to first principles. What are we trying to do? YOLLAND Good question. OWEN We are trying to denominate and at the same time describe that tiny

area of soggy, rocky, sandy ground where that little stream enters the sea, an area known locally as Bun na hAbhann . . . Burnfoot!8 What about Burnfoot?

YOLLAND [Indifferently.] Good, Roland. Burnfoot's good. OWEN George, my name isn't . . . YOLLAND B-u-r-n-f-o-o-t? OWEN I suppose so. What do you think?

YOLLAND Yes.

OWEN Are you happy with that?

YOLLAND Yes.

OWEN Burnfoot it is then. [He makes the entry into the Name-Book.] Bun na

nAbhann�B-u-r-n- YOLLAND You're becoming very skilled at this. OWEN We're not moving fast enough. YOLLAND [Opens eyes again.] Lancey lectured me again last night. OWEN When does he finish here? YOLLAND The sappers are pulling out at the end of the week. The trouble is,

the maps they've completed can't be printed without these names. So London screams at Lancey and Lancey screams at me. But I wasn't intimidated.

[MANUS emerges from upstairs and descends.]

'I'm sorry, sir,' I said, 'But certain tasks demand their own tempo. You cannot rename a whole country overnight.' Your Irish air has made me bold. [To MANUS.] D O you want us to leave?

MANUS Time enough. Class won't begin for another half-hour. YOLLAND Sorry�sorry? OWEN Can't you speak English?

[MANUS gathers the things off the clothes-line, OWEN returns to the map. ]

8. "Burn" is an Ulster-Scots word for river.

.

25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

OWEN We now come across that beach . . . YOLLAND Tra�that's the Irish for beach. [To MANUS.] I'm picking up the odd word, Manus.

MANUS SO. OWEN ... on past Burnfoot; and there's nothing around here that has any

name that I know of until we come down here to the south end, just about

here . . . and there should be a ridge of rocks there . . . Have the sappers

marked it? They have. Look, George. YOLLAND Where are we? OWEN There. YOLLAND I'm lost. OWEN Here. And the name of that ridge is Druim Dubh. Put English on that,

Lieutenant. YOLLAND Say it again. OWEN Druim Dubh. YOLLAND Dubh means black. OWEN Yes. YOLLAND And Druim means . . . what? a fort? OWEN We met it yesterday in Druim Luachra. YOLLAND A ridge! The Black Ridge! [To MANUS.] You see, Manus? OWEN We'll have you fluent at the Irish before the summer's over. YOLLAND Oh I wish I were. [To MANUS as he crosses to go hack upstairs.] We

got a crate of orange from Dublin today. I'll send some up to you. MANUS Thanks. [To OWEN.] Better hide that bottle. Father's just up and he'd

be better without it. OWEN Can't you speak English before your man? MANUS Why? OWEN Out of courtesy. MANUS Doesn't he want to learn Irish? [To YOLLAND.] Don't you want to learn

Irish? YOLLAND Sorry�sorry? I�I� MANUS I understand the Lanceys perfectly but people like you puzzle me. OWEN Manus, for God's sake! MANUS [Still to YOLLAND.] HOW'S the work going? YOLLAND The work?�the work? Oh, it's�it's staggering along�I think�[To

OWEN.]�isn't it? But we'd be lost without Roland. MANUS [Leaving.] I'm sure. But there are always the Rolands, aren't there? [He goes upstairs and exits.]

YOLLAND What was that he said?�something about Lancey, was it? OWEN He said we should hide that bottle before Father gets his hands on it.

YOLLAND Ah .

OWEN He's always trying to protect him.

YOLLAND Was he lame from birth?

OWEN An accident when he was a baby: Father fell across his cradle. That's

why Manus feels so responsible for him. YOLLAND Why doesn't he marry? OWEN Can't afford to, I suppose. YOLLAND Hasn't he a salary? OWEN What salary? All he gets is the odd shilling Father throws him�and

that's seldom enough. I got out in time, didn't I?

[YOLLAND is pouring a drink.]

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11

Easy with that stuff�it'll hit you suddenly. YOLLAND I like it. OWEN Let's get back to the job. Druim Dubh�what's it called in the jury

lists? [Consults texts.] YOLLAND Some people here resent us. OWEN Dramduff�wrong as usual. YOLLAND I was passing a little girl yesterday and she spat at me. OWEN And it's Drimdoo here. What's it called in the registry? YOLLAND D O you know the Donnelly twins? OWEN Who? YOLLAND The Donnelly twins. OWEN Yes. Best fishermen about here. What about them? YOLLAND Lancey's looking for them. OWEN What for? YOLLAND He wants them for questioning. OWEN Probably stolen somebody's nets. Dramduffy! Nobody ever called it

Dramduffy. Take your pick of those three. YOLLAND My head's addled. Let's take a rest. Do you want a drink? OWEN Thanks. Now, every Dubh we've come across we've changed to

Duff. So if we're to be consistent, I suppose Druim Dubh has to become

Dromduff.

[YOLLAND is now looking out the window.]

You can see the end of the ridge from where you're standing. But D-r-u-m

or D-r-o-m? [Name-Book.] Do you remember�which did we agree on for

Druim Luachra? YOLLAND That house immediately above where we're camped�

OWEN Mm?

YOLLAND The house where Maire lives.

OWEN Maire? Oh, Maire Chatach.

YOLLAND What does that mean?

OWEN Curly-haired; the whole family are called the Catachs. What about it?

YOLLAND I hear music coming from that house almost every night.

OWEN Why don't you drop in?

YOLLAND Could I?

OWEN Why not? We used D-r-o-m then. So we've got to call it D-r-o-m-d-u-f

f�alright? YOLLAND Go back up to where the new school is being built and just say the

names again for me, would you?

OWEN That's a good idea. Poolkerry, Ballybeg�

YOLLAND No, no; as they still are�in your own language.

OWEN Poll na gCaorach,

[YOLLAND repeats the names silently after him.]

Baile Beag, Ceann Balor, Lis Maol, Machaire Buidhe, Baile na gGall, Car

raig na Ri, Mullach Dearg�

YOLLAND D O you think I could live here?

OWEN What are you talking about?

YOLLAND Settle down here�live here.

OWEN Come on, George.

YOLLAND I mean it.

OWEN Live on what? Potatoes? Buttermilk?

YOLLAND It's really heavenly.

.

25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

OWEN For God's sake! The first hot summer in fifty years and you think it's Eden. Don't be such a bloody romantic. You wouldn't survive a mild winter here.

YOLLAND DO you think not? Maybe you're right.

[DOALTY enters in a rush.] DOALTY Hi, boys, is Manus about? OWEN He's upstairs. Give him a shout. DOALTY Manus!

The cattle's going mad in that heat�Cripes, running wild all over the place. [To YOLLAND.] Ho w are you doing, skipper?

[MANUS appears.] YOLLAND Thank you for�I�I'm very grateful to you for� DOALTY Wasting your time. I don't know a word you're saying. Hi, Manus,

there's two bucks down the road there asking for you. MANUS [Descending.] Wh o are they? DOALTY Never clapped eyes on them. They want to talk to you. MANUS Wha t about? DOALTY They wouldn't say. Come on. The bloody beasts'11 end up in Loch an

Iubhair if they're not capped.9 Good luck, boys!

[DOALTY rushes off. MANUS follows him.] OWEN Good luck! What were you thanking Doalty for? YOLLAND 1 was washing outside my tent this morning and he was passing

with a scythe across his shoulder and he came up to me and pointed to the long grass and then cut a pathway round my tent and from the tent down to the road�so that my feet won't get wet with the dew. Wasn't that kind of him? And I have no words to thank him . . .

I suppose you're right: I suppose I couldn't live here . . .

Just before Doalty came up to me this morning, I was thinking that at that moment I might have been in Bombay instead of Ballybeg. You see, my father was at his wits end with me and finally he got me a job with the East India Company1�-some kind of a clerkship. This was ten, eleven months ago. So I set off for London. Unfortunately I�I� I missed the boat. Literally. An d since I couldn't face Father and hadn't enough money to hang about until the next sailing, I joined the Army. An d they stuck me into the Engineers and posted me to Dublin. And Dublin sent me here. And while I was washing this morning and looking across the Tra Bhan, I was thinking how very, very lucky I am to be here and not in Bombay.

OWEN DO you believe in fate?

YOLLAND Lancey's so like my father. I was watching him last night. He met every group of sappers as they reported in. He checked the field kitchens. He examined the horses. He inspected every single report�even examining the texture of the paper and commenting on the neatness of the handwriting. Th e perfect colonial servant: not only must the job be done�it must be done with excellence. Father has that drive, too; that dedication; that indefatigable energy. He builds roads�hopping from one end of the Empire to the other. Can't sit still for five minutes. He says himself the longest time

9. Surpassed. to I8th- and 19th-century British imperialism in 1. English trade company in India, South Asia, the region. and Southeast Asia, chartered in 1600 and central

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11

he ever sat still was the night before Waterloo when they were waiting for

Wellington to make up his mind to attack.2 OWEN What age is he? YOLLAND Born in 1789�the very day the Bastille fell.3 I've often thought

maybe that gave his whole life its character. Do you think it could? He inherited a new world the day he was born�the Year One. Ancient time was at an end. Th e world had cast off its old skin. There were no longer any frontiers to man's potential. Possibilities were endless and exciting. He still believes that. Th e Apocalypse is just about to happen . . . I'm afraid I'm a great disappointment to him. I've neither his energy, nor his coherence, nor his belief. Do I believe in fate? Th e day I arrived in Ballybeg,�no, Baile Beag�the moment you brought me in here, I had a curious sensation. It's difficult to describe. It was a momentary sense of discovery; no�not quite a sense of discovery�a sense of recognition, of confirmation of something I half knew instinctively as if I had stepped . . .

OWEN Back into ancient time?

YOLLAND No, no. It wasn't an awareness of direction being changed but of experience being of a totally different order. I had moved into a consciousness that wasn't striving nor agitated, but at its ease and with its own conviction and assurance. And when I heard Jimmy Jack and your father swopping stories about Apollo and Cuchulain and Paris and Ferdia4�as if they lived down the road�it was then that I thought�I knew�perhaps I could live here . . . [Now embarrassed.] Where's the pot-een?

OWEN Poteen.

YOLLAND Poteen�poteen�poteen. Even if I did speak Irish I'd always be an outsider here, wouldn't I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won't it? Th e private will always be . . . hermetic,5 won't it?

OWEN You can learn to decode us. [HUGH emerges from upstairs and descends. He is dressed for the road. Today he is physically and mentally jaunty and alert�almost selfconsciously jaunty and alert. Indeed, as the scene progresses, one has the sense that he is deliberately parodying himself.

The moment HUGH gets to the bottom of the steps YOLLAND leaps respectfully to his feet.]

HUGH [As he descends.] Quantumvis cursum longum fessumque moratur Sol, sacro tandem carmine vesper adest.

I dabble in verse, Lieutenant, after the style of Ovid.6

[To OWEN.] A drop of that to fortify me. YOLLAND You'll have to translate it for me. HUGH Let's see�

No matter how long the sun may linger on his long and weary journey At length evening comes with its sacred song.

2. Dublin-born Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852), brother, Cuchulainn, the greatest hero of the duke of Wellington, vanquished the French medieval Ulster Cycle, an extensive series of stories emperor Napoleon's army on June 18, 1815, in focused on the warriors of King Conchobar's court Waterloo, Belgium. in Northern Ireland. "Apollo": Greek god of arts, 3. The French Revolution began on July 14, 1 789, music, and prophecy, who helped the Trojan with the storming of the Bastille (a jail in Paris). prince Paris kill the greatest Greek hero, Achilles, The French monarchy was later overthrown and in the Trojan War. replaced by the First Republic. 5. Secret, hidden. 4. Mythical Irish warrior, slain by his foster 6. Roman poet (43 B.C.E.-I7? C.E.).

.

25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE

YOLLAND Very nice, sir. HUGH English succeeds in making it sound . . . plebeian.7 OWEN Where are you off to, Father? HUGH An expedition with three purposes. Purpose A: to acquire a testimonial

from our parish priest�[To YOLLAND.] a worthy man but barely literate; and since he'll ask me to write it myself, how in all modesty can I do myself justice?

[To OWEN.] Where did this [Drink.[ come from? OWEN Anna na mBreag's. HUGH [To YOLLAND.] In that case address yourself to it with circumspection.

[And HUGH instantly tosses the drink hack in one gidp and grimaces.] Aaaaaaagh! [Holds out his glass for a refill.]

Anna na mBreag means Anna of the Lies. And Purpose B: to talk to the builders of the new school about the kind of living accommodation I will require there. I have lived too long like a journeyman9 tailor.

YOLLAND Some years ago we lived fairly close to a poet�well, about three

miles away. HUGH His name? YOLLAND Wordsworth�William Wordsworth.1 HUGH Did he speak of me to you? YOLLAND Actually I never talked to him. I just saw him out walking�in the

distance.

HUGH Wordsworth? . . . no. I'm afraid we're not familiar with your literature, Lieutenant. We feel closer to the warm Mediterranean.2 We tend to overlook your island.

YOLLAND I'm learning to speak Irish, sir. HUGH Good. YOLLAND Roland's teaching me. HUGH Splendid. YOLLAND I mean�I feel so cut off from the people here. And I was trying to

explain a few minutes ago how remarkable a community this is. To meet people like yourself and Jimmy Jack who actually converse in Greek and Latin. And your place-names�what was the one we came across this morning?� Termon, from Terminus, the god of boundaries.3 It�it�it's really astonishing.

HUGH We like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited. YOLLAND And your Gaelic literature�you're a poet yourself� HUGH Only in Latin, I'm afraid. YOLLAND I understand it's enormously rich and ornate. HUGH Indeed, Lieutenant. A rich language. A rich literature. You'll find, sir,

that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. I suppose you could call us a spiritual people.

OWEN [Not unkindly; more out of embarrassment before YOLLAND.] Will you stop that nonsense, Father. HUGH Nonsense? What nonsense?

7. Of the common people. poetry while walking through England's Lake Dis8. Expedition [Latin; Friel's note], trict. 9. Hireling, subservient. 2. I.e., Greek and Latin literature. 1. Romantic poet (1770�1850), who composed 3. In Roman mythology.

.

FRIEL: TRANSLATIONS, ACT 3 / 25 11

OWEN Do you know where the priest lives? HUGH At Lis na Muc, over near . . . OWEN No, he doesn't. Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has become Swine-

fort. [Now turning the pages of the Name-Book�a page per name. | And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new school isn't at Poll na gCaorach� it's at Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way?

[HUGH pours himself another drink. Then.]

HUGH Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception�a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to . . . inevitabilities.