The Books: The Redress of Poetry; ‘Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merriman’s “The Midnight Court”,’ by Seamus Heaney

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry.

Brian Merriman lived and worked in County Clare in the mid-to-late 1700s. Apparently he was a Math teacher. Not much else is known about him, except for his huge poem in Irish about the battle of the sexes in Ireland, called “The Midnight Court” (or Cúirt an Mheán Oíche). It’s an epic poem, a gigantic narrative, involving a poet who falls asleep in a field and then is dragged into a “Midnight Court,” run entirely by women, presided over by a female judge, who all find Irish men to be entirely lacking in sexual potency. As a matter of fact, Irish women are dying on the vine while you Irish boys bumble about and refuse to SATISFY the sexual needs of the women around you. And we hold you in contempt. Defend yourself! Defend yourself! It also lampooned the celibacy of priests. Pretty serious target practice there. Although the topic is a serious one (especially for the horny women begging to get laid), the tone of it is a rollick. Some of the translations (Heaney’s included) have them cursing in a very modern way. The judge declares at one point, “Fuck it!” It’s great.

I read the poem a long time ago, and thought it was hilarious, but didn’t think much more about it. I didn’t study it in a university setting or anything like that – which is probably a good thing. You could post-modern analyze the thing until all of the humor and sexiness is judged/damned/dismissed. What I do remember about it (and granted I was much younger when I read it) is that it was not just the fact that Irish people needed to procreate more, that these were sexually viable women who wanted to have babies and why couldn’t the men around them get it up for them? It wasn’t just about having babies. Sex was about pleasure and the Irish women in the poem were DYING for it. It’s still kind of radical, and the poem has come under attack from the humorless for being sexist or reductive or whatever critical word is in vogue at the moment. As though sexual pleasure for women is not one of the most important topics in the world, or as though because Brian Merriman was a man he can have nothing of use to say about women. Harrumph. As though things like easy birth control has not taken reproduction out of the cards, so that women can now “get theirs” without the fear of being bogged down by pregnancies – and we STILL have controversies surrounding that – we can see it now in some of these health care debates, with certain companies not wanting to cover birth control. Or you have to give a reason why you want birth control, as though “I would like to have sex without the possibility of pregnancy” ISN’T a valid answer. It’s barbaric. Female sexual pleasure, separate from procreation, is still seen as so threatening that it must be managed and corralled. There is still a lot of work to be done. Still, Merriman’s poem is angry, frank and funny. Yes, it’s heteronormative. It was written in the late 1700s. I’m not sure what else you want from the man.

It’s been a long long time since I read “The Midnight Court,” but Heaney’s lecture brings it all back.

You can check out “The Midnight Court” here, which is a pretty good website, and has the Irish text placed alongside the English text. I am sure there is much that is lost in translation, and that’s one of the things that Heaney addresses in his lecture, the issue of translation and the challenges that brings.

Translation from the Irish, a native language, into English, the language of the conqueror, is challenging on all sorts of levels, political, cultural, and – as Heaney points out below – gender-wise as well. The poem is a battle cry of women to get satisfaction, to be loved and touched and pleased as is their due. There have been some translations that have turned the language a very phallocentric (which I can’t discuss, since I don’t speak Irish, but Heaney talks about it): and so some of the more feminine subtleties of the original Irish version have been lost. An erasure of a certain kind of voice, there in the original. These are all extremely Irish concerns, but they affect us all. One of Heaney’s gifts is pointing it all out.

All in all, a fascinating topic. Heaney sees Merriman’s poem as a kind of re-imagining of Orpheus from out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the poet is torn apart by a bunch of maenads, basically punishing him for going gay. How dare you deny us your cock, in other words. Good thing I’m not a scholar.

Here’s an excerpt from Heaney’s Oxford lecture about Brian Merriman’s “Midnight Court”. He references the wonderful Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in the lecture, and I went to one of her poetry readings at The Ireland House here in New York City. She’s absolutely wonderful live, and although it was years ago, I still remember some of what she said word for word. She can’t write in English. The poetry just doesn’t come for her in English. It’s a foreign language to her, and she does not consider herself poetically fluent in it. She also spoke extensively about translation, and getting a good translator for your work, who will not take the “you” right out of it. Her work does get translated into English, from time to time, but not everything gets translated, and so she has paid a price (in prestige, wider recognition) because of that. She is willing to pay that price. She is an Irish-language poet and that’s all there is to it.

Tangent! But I highly recommend checking out the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Hearing her read it in Irish was a supreme pleasure, but the translations that are out there of her volumes of poetry are good enough to get the feel of what she is up to. (I recommend The Water Horse, in particular. I wrote about the book here, and you can see one of her poems there, both in Irish and in English translation.)

Onward, to Heaney’s discussion of Brian Merriman, reactions to his poem through the years, as well as the problem of translation.

Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry, ‘Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merriman’s “The Midnight Court”,’ by Seamus Heaney

If, therefore, we are prepared to make an artificial distinction between the poem’s socio-political quotient and its artistic quotient, we could argue that during the first half of the century and more, Cúirt an Mheán Oíche was important because it sponsored a libertarian and adversarial stance against the repressive conditions which prevailed during those years in Irish life, public and private. And we could further argue that in more recent times its importance has shifted: from being an ally in the war against sexual repression and a censorship obsessed with sexual morality, the poem has become a paradigm of the war initiated by the women’s movement for women’s empowerment, their restoration to the centre of language and consciousness and thereby also to the centre of all the institutions and functioning’s of society.

This shifting and salubrious relationship between the poem and its world can be illustrated by looking very briefly at its reception and interoperation at three different moments over the last hundred years. Seventy years ago, for example, when the Irish critic and cultural nationalist Daniel Corkery gave his account of it in The Hidden Ireland, he was fairly eager to play down Merriman’s send-up of clerical celibacy and his advocacy of unconstrained heterosexual activity between consenting adults. Rather than saluting these extravagances as fantastic possibilities to be savored in a spirit of hilarity and transgression, Corkery spoke with a certain primness of the poem’s treatment of “curious questions” and attributed the pagan force of the thing to its ideas as such. It was as if he were anxious not to find the poet guilty of some form of un-Irish activity. Corkery inclined therefore to blame what he called the poem’s “irreligious ideas” on foreign influences, and he favored the old academic notion that these ideas came from Voltaire and Rousseau, and that Merriman had picked them up through reading the books of these Enlightenment philosophes in the houses of the gentry he was supposed to have been so fond of visiting. Yet Corkery could not help recognizing that the poem’s subversiveness derives in large measure from a native strain of paganism surviving unregenerate at different levels in Irish popular culture. But he fudged the issue, presumably because it would have been an embarrassment for a propagandist of the new self-Gaelicizing Irish Free State to discover in the older Gaelic literature too gleeful an endorsement of anti-clerical attitudes and too robust a promulgation of the basic desirability of promiscuous sexual behavior.

Conditions have changed dramatically since Corkery’s book appeared in 1924. The literary and moral constraints have clearly eased when an Irish-language woman poet like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill can publish in Ireland, with an Irish publisher and to Irish acclaim, a poem like “Féar Suaithinseach” which implies that it is the sanctified male priest who is in need of the healing ministrations of the sexual woman and not the other way around; or when in another poem called “Gan do Chuid Eadaigh,” she expresses what might be called naked delight in imagining in erotic detail the body of a lover stripped of his clothes.

But even if Merriman’s poem can be read nowadays as a precursor of these free treatments of sexuality, and be seen as one of a line of precursors that includes James Joyce’s Ulysses and, indeed, Frank O’Connor’s 1945 translation of The Midnight Court itself, it is still not immune to moralistic criticism of a more recent kind. The poem still stands in danger of being accused for different reasons under the terms of a new feminist consensus. For example, I discovered that the political activist Mairin de Burca described it some thirteen years ago as ‘sexist rubbish.” She did concede that men may mean well, but she nevertheless maintained that they “cannot write intelligently about women’s oppression.” This in itself sounds like a lot of sexist rubbish; and I would certainly argue that Brian Merriman should be immune to the common feminist castigation of Irish men poets for representing women (and Ireland) in the passive, submissive roles of maiden and mother. In fact, Merriman deserves a specially lenient hearing in the women’s court, if only for having envisaged his own prosecution ahead of time and for having provided the outline of a case against himself. He was surely something of a progressive when it came to the representation of women. He gave them bodies and brains and let them speak as if they lived by them. He revised and implicitly criticized the ailing genre by burlesquing its idealized, victimized maiden in the figure of the beam-limbed bailiff; and he gave to the other young flesh-and-blood speirbhean in the witness box a transfusion of emotional and rhetorical energy long denied to women by poets who had preceded him.

Still, the fact that the poem is now probably read more in English translations than in the original Irish has by no means lessened the impression of machismo which surrounds it in the mind of the general reader. Of these translations, Frank O’Connor’s is probably the best and the best known, and since its emphatic bawdiness was meant to challenge the censor as much as it was meant to delight the reader, O’Connor very deliberately upped the sexual ante in a distinctly male idiom. In an introduction to the first 1945 edition of this version, he admits that there are qualities in the Irish which his own English, for better or worse, had tended to coarsen:

As always, when he deals with women’s human needs, [Merriman] puts real tenderness and beauty into the writing. My English cannot give the delicacy and fragrance of a line like ag súil trím chola le cigar ó’m cheile. There is nothing remarkable about it … no extravagance of imagery or language which you can translate; it is a pure classical beauty of vowels and consonants which you either hear or do not hear.

This amounts to an admission by O’Connor that in his translation the surface noise of his own provocative anti-puritanical agenda is going to be more audible than the under-music of the women’s voices; which means that those aspects of the poem most likely to offend a contemporary feminist are highlighted rather than mitigated by his treatment of them in English. A sensitized reader nowadays, man or woman, is going to be more uneasy than O’Connor ever was about, for example, the picture of the young woman setting her cap so assiduously for a man, or about the normative status which the poem – in spite of its subversive intent – grants to the status of marriage. So even though from a feminist viewpoint there has to be something admirable about the way Aiobheall of Craglee regulates the world of the poem (like a woman president in charge of the court and the country, a kind of aisling promise of Mary Robinson); and though there is a redemptive realism in the young witness’s revelation that women can be every bit as sexually capable and cupidinous as men, it is nevertheless true that the poem places much emphasis on woman as a kind of human brooder and mostly ignores her potential as a being independent of her sexual attributes and her reproductive apparatus.

But all of this has to be understood in the context of the poem’s overall drive to celebrate the creaturely over the ethereal in human beings, male or female.