Save your breath,
Poem maker
Keep it under wraps
In the tall tree of yourself
— Michael Davitt
Both quotes above are English translations of the original Irish language versions, just to be clear.
Poet Michael Davitt, born (on this day) in Cork, didn’t grow up speaking Irish at home. He learned it at school, which he writes about eloquently in his poem “3AG”. Munster Irish! His academic background in the Irish language gave him a different perspective than a person who grew up bilingual, hearing Irish spoken in the home, etc. Irish was a language to be learned and conquered.
Davitt (who sadly passed away far too young in 2005) was an Irish language poet. Unless you speak the language, you must content yourself with reading his work in translation. Luckily, some great contemporary Irish poets have done wonderful translations of his stuff (Paul Muldoon – my post about him here, Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide – my post about him here, and others), but Davitt’s work is meant to be read in the Irish. Something is always lost in translation.
To him, Irish was not a rural language. This set him apart from those who connected the Irish language with a pre-Industrial-Revolution society. He used the Irish language for contemporary subjects. He started publishing poetry in the 70s, when a lot of Irish language poets cropped up – a reclamation in a time of strife. Davitt was against “cultural McDonaldisation”, yet he disagreed with the thought that the Irish language should be isolated, or even COULD isolate those who spoke it. To him, Irish was not a “dead” language at all. Davitt did things with Irish that other more traditional writers wouldn’t. He wrote a poem for Bobby Sands. He wrote a heartbreaking poem about September 11, 2001.
Davitt founded a magazine – Innti – dedicated to Irish language poets (including Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whom I saw read once at the The Ireland House in New York City: an unforgettable night). He was also a producer/director at RTÉ. A vibrant man and also a huge intellect, he died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2005. He was only 55 years old.
First, I’ll post his poem Ciorrú Bóthair (Shortening the Road), which was translated by Irish author Philip Casey. I love that Davitt incorporates English words in his Irish, which gives the impression that ENGLISH is the foreign tongue here, the tongue that “doesn’t fit”. Of course I can’t read it, but I get excited when I recognize words. My sisters and I were driving around the outskirts of Áth Cliath (ie: Dublin), reading the dual-language street signs as we whizzed by them. We were lost. Jean sighed, “Well as long as we’re headed an lár …” (“city center”, “downtown”). She said it so casually. We still laugh about that. And we still say “let’s meet up an lár“.
More after the jump:
Shortening the Road
He told me he had spent
His life in horticulture,
Had always worked in the open air;
That was clear about the stranger
From his black nails and the smell of cut grass
Off his southern English.
Another sleet-shower;
Then the sun lit up
The road before us through Oranmore
East to Ballinasloe
And the car was a glasshouse
Warming to his gardening lore.
He had been spending a few days
With relatives west of Spiddal:
‘You have Irish then, I suppose?’
‘Not Irish, but Munster Irish … !’
A Muskerry man definitely, I thought; but no:
‘A Corkman out of the heart of Cork.’
That lit a spark, exploding into Irish
And we combed through our backgrounds
And upbringings,
And God it’s a small world
That we both could have travelled
The same backroads of dialect:
A Summer College in Ballingeary,
The Christian Brothers’ Grammar,
The pubs of the Dingle Peninsula,
Then the compromise and watering down
Of five or six years
In the city of Dublin.
‘It must be a great job in the summertime?’
‘Yes indeed, but I prefer the Spring,
A time of growth, it’s reassuring,
And there are miracles of colour in Autumn
That would keep a man off the booze …’
The spark had left his voice.
But he hated Christmas,
As would any single exile
Reaching forty-three
Loafing in the deluded paradise of the pub.
‘They’re closing the glasshouses down …
I’m a year and a half on the dole … ‘
He hadn’t slept for a week,
A polluted stream was meandering
Through his brain, he had nearly drowned,
He was running from the pain again
Going back to Camden Town
Where a lonely widow had a small pub of her own.
East across the Shannon through squally showers
Under the arches of fingery trees,
What had become an exchange of memories
Had become an alcoholic’s confession:
I the reluctant confessor
Under the spell of the windscreen wipers.
I stopped at Baggot Street bridge.
He said I’d given him hope,
That he would look for a job
In the north of the county,
That he’d love to be as steady as me,
That he’d see me again, please God, someday.
As he walked away into the fog
I imagined meeting the stranger again
On the verge of a foreign motorway
But I was the hitch-hiker
And he the confessor –
As steady as me,
As steady as me.
Next, is his 1982 poem Ó Mo Bheirt Phailistíneach (O My Two Palestinians), a timeless work and very relevant today. A reminder that Ireland was colonized longer than any other country. Ireland has muscle-memory of colonization, which gives them a highly developed awareness of oppression. English rule came to Ireland in the 11th century, when the country was handed over with a flick of the pen. The centuries following were marked by rebellions and revolutions, followed by centuries of oppression: the great hunger, the destruction of culture, arts, language. I was going to say “it’s weird that people forget this”, but honestly I don’t think they even knew in the first place.
O My Two Palestinians
(18/9/82, having watched a news report
on the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut )
I pushed open the door
enough to let light from the landing
on them:
blankets kicked off
they lay askew
as they had fallen:
her nightgown tossed above her buttocks
blood on her lace knickers,
from a gap in the back of her head
her chicken brain retched on the pillow,
intestines slithered from his belly
like seaweed off a rock.
liver-soiled sheets,
one raised bloodsmeared hand.
O my two Palestinians rotting in the central heat.
“What is important is to continue believing in the Irish language as a vibrant creative power while it continues to be marginalised in the process of cultural McDonaldisation.” — Michael Davitt
