Finders Keepers Read online

  Delivering the milk was a genuine expedition into an elsewhere. And the expedition gained in strangeness because the line that marked the division between the here and the there of it was more or less invisible. There was no indication on the road that you were leaving one jurisdiction for the other. But underneath the road, in a culvert that you would hardly notice if you didn’t know to look for it, there ran a small trickle of water, and this water was part of a long drain or stream that marked the boundary between the townland of Tamniarn and the townland of Anahorish, as well as the boundary between the parish of Bellaghy and the parish of Newbridge, and then, as I said, the boundary between the diocese of Derry and the archdiocese of Armagh. The name of this march drain or boundary stream was the Sluggan, another Irish word meaning ‘a marsh or a quagmire’, and the Sluggan ran on down through a low-lying spread of old wet meadows and plantations to become the border between the townlands of Creagh and Leitrim before it emptied into the waters of Lough Beg, a couple of miles away.

  Every day on my road to and from school I crossed and recrossed the Sluggan, and every time my sense of living on two sides of a boundary was emphasized. I never felt the certitude of belonging completely in one place and, of course, from the historical as well as the topographical point of view, I was right: all those townlands and parishes and dioceses that had once belonged firmly within the old pre-plantation, ecclesiastical geography of Gaelic Ireland had been subsumed in the meantime and been taken over and taken into another system and another jurisdiction. Many of the placenames I have just mentioned appear in a list of lands confiscated by the English after the Elizabethan conquest of Ulster, lands that were subsequently granted to Sir Thomas Phillips, the governor of what was then the County of Coleraine, in the period between the Flight of the Earls and the beginning of the Plantation of Ulster. The part of the grant which concerns me here is the area known as the ‘Lands of Moyola’ and which included the names of Tamniaran, Leitrim, and Shanmullagh – the old Gaelic name for the place we nowadays call Castledawson:

  Two buckets were easier carried than one.

  I grew up in between.

  My left hand placed the standard iron weight.

  My right tilted a last grain in the balance.

  Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

  When I stood on the central stepping stone

  I was the last earl on horseback in midstream

  Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

  One of the great figures of Irish history in the pre-plantation period was Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, the last native leader to hold out against the Tudor armies of Queen Elizabeth I, the last earl to make a stand, and one of the first to suffer within himself the claims of the two different political allegiances that still operate with such deadly force inside Northern Ireland to this day. By English law, O’Neill was the Earl of Tyrone, and therefore, in the understanding of Queen Elizabeth, the English queen’s loyal representative in the kingdom of Ireland. But by Irish birth and genealogy, O’Neill was descended from the mythic Irish leader, Niall of the Nine Hostages, and to the Irish he therefore appeared as the hereditary leader of the Gaelic O’Neills, with a destined role as the defender of the Gaelic interest against the English. This is not the place to go into a history of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland, which ended with the defeat of the Irish under Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell at Kinsale in 1601; but there is one incident that happened in the course of those long-drawn-out campaigns that never ceases to fascinate me.

  The event occurred one day early in September 1599, after O’Neill’s forces had drawn the English army up into his own territory, in the wooded countryside of Louth and Armagh. The leader of the English expedition was Queen Elizabeth’s favourite courtier, the Earl of Essex, and for months before he had taken this initiative the Queen had been ordering him into action. But O’Neill was a master negotiator and a great one for putting off the moment of confrontation, so he contrived to get Essex to come for a parley with him, on the banks of the River Glyde in what is now County Louth. O’Neill was on horseback, out in midstream, with the water up to his horse’s belly and his Irish-speaking soldiers behind him, speaking English to Essex, who was standing facing him on the other bank. Essex was under orders to pursue O’Neill as a traitor, but here he was in conversation, more like the old friend he had once been than the enemy he was destined to become – for O’Neill had been at the court of Elizabeth a generation earlier, and his patron in England at that time had been Essex’s father, Walter Devereux, the first Earl. So, for each of them, this meeting by the river was a mysterious turn, a hiatus, a frozen frame in the violent action, a moment when those on either bank could see what was happening but could not hear what was being said. Both men were alone and exposed to the consequences of their actions; O’Neill was already regarded as a traitor and Essex, by agreeing to a truce with him at this moment, was going to be seen as a betrayer by the Queen and in fact before the end of the year would be executed for treason. O’Neill’s ultimate defeat lay ahead also, in a couple of years’ time. But for the moment, the balance trembled and held, the water ran and the sky moved silently above them:

  Baronies, parishes met where I was born.

  When I stood on the central stepping stone

  I was the last earl on horseback in midstream

  Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

  There was no way, given their historical circumstances, that O’Neill and Essex could cross to each other’s side. Their march had turned into something irrevocably military. They were at the terminus in an extreme sense of that word. There was no room for two truths. The brutality of power would have to decide the issue, not the play of mind. And yet as we think about the scene, we want each of them to be released from the entrapment of history. We want the sky to open above them and grant them release from their earthbound fates. And even if we know that such a release is impossible, we still desire conditions where the longed-for and the actual might be allowed to coincide. A condition where borders are there to be crossed rather than to be contested:

  Running water never disappointed.

  Crossing water always furthered something.

  Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

  I wrote the ‘Terminus’ poem in the mid-1980s when the political situation in Northern Ireland was totally locked and blocked; in the post-hunger-strike world, when the IRA’s campaign showed no sign of abating and the Thatcher government was prepared to live with what was termed an acceptable level of violence. Maybe that is one reason why the poem ends in stasis, with the earl arrested in midstream and his opposite out of reach on the bank beyond him; the poem is saying that the inheritance of a divided world is a disabling one, that it traps its inhabitants and corners them in determined positions, saps their will to act freely and creatively. But before that moment and since that moment, things nevertheless were and have been different.

  Nearly thirty years ago, for example, long before I gave any thought to Bashō or Terminus or Hugh O’Neill or the Sluggan drain and all that they might mean, I wrote a poem called ‘The Other Side’. It began with a recollection of something a Presbyterian neighbour had said about a field of ours that marched a field of his and was divided from it by a little grassy stream, but then the poem went on to play with the notion of separation, of two sides of the march drain being like the two sides of the divided community in Northern Ireland – two sides divided by the way they pray, for example, and in little subtle but real ways (as I was suggesting earlier on), by the way they speak. The poem, however, ended up suggesting that a crossing could be attempted, that stepping stones could be placed by individuals who wanted to further things:

  Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

  mournfully on in the kitchen

  we would hear his step round the gable

  though not until after the litany

  would the knock come to the door

  and the casual whistle s
trike up

  on the doorstep, ‘A right-looking night,’

  he might say, ‘I was dandering by

  and says I, I might as well call.’

  But now I stand behind him

  in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

  He puts a hand in a pocket

  or taps a little tune with the blackthorn

  shyly, as if he were party to

  lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

  Should I slip away, I wonder,

  or go up and touch his shoulder

  and talk about the weather

  or the price of grass-seed?

  There were times during the last thirty years when I thought ‘The Other Side’ might be too consoling. Given the actual conditions on the roads and the streets, I thought it might be too benign, too tender in the face of assassination and explosion, too hopeful. And yet the subject had called words from my inner mind. They had dandered in and reminded me of the possible boundlessness of our sympathies. In the end they reminded me also of what Bashō called ‘the world of true understanding’, which is always lying just beneath the surface and just beyond the horizon of the actual words we speak. They reminded me that the marching season need not just be the season of parades and provocation but that in the ground of the language and the ground beneath our feet there is another march which promises far more creative conditions for the mind and soul. For it seems to me that the confrontation between O’Neill and Essex represents where we arrive if we walk in a military manner, a condition of stasis and embittered rigor vitae that hampers the emergence of a better future; but the encounter at the march drain represents the possibility of going out on the stepping stone in order to remove yourself from the hardness and fastness of your home ground. The stepping stone invites you to change the terms and the tearmann of your understanding; it does not ask you to take your feet off the ground but it refreshes your vision by keeping your head in the air and bringing you alive to the open sky of possibility that is within you. And that still seems something to write home about.

  Television script, BBC (Northern Ireland), 1998; reprinted in Princeton Library Chronicle, 1998

  Earning a Rhyme

  I

  The translation of a text from the Irish language into English by an English-speaking Irish writer usually involves considerations other than the strictly literary. The additional contexts are historical, cultural and political, as when a Native American author turns to material in one of the original languages of the North American continent. In each case, a canonical literature in English creates the acoustic within which the translation is going to be heard; an overarching old colonial roof inscribed ‘The land was ours before we were the land’s’ is made to echo with some such retort as ‘You don’t say!’

  The translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem by an English writer is a less complicated affair: what is missing is the element of answering back. The invasion of England by the Normans did bring about great changes in the language, but what occurred was a mutation rather than an obliteration. Native translations of the Old English deposits are acts of retrenchment rather than retaliation. They reinforce the English myth of continuity. They give new form to that from which English itself has been formed. The newness may be a disruption or countering of settled conventions, but it will not be a challenge to the deep structure. Hopkins’s innovations, for example, though not strictly translations, did in fact employ an Anglo-Saxon stress in order to produce the double-effect I have just outlined: they went against the grain of contemporary English verse-craft in a completely salutary way, and at the same time they went with an older English grain of collective memory and belonging.

  When, however, John Millington Synge created a new mandarin idiom in his plays and in his prose book, The Aran Islands, the purpose of the enterprise was very different. It may have looked the same: an attempt to refresh the language of English literature, one of those periodic returns to the spoken idiom which Donne and Dryden and Wordsworth had initiated in their times, and which T. S. Eliot would set in motion shortly after Synge’s own death. But Synge was more concerned to found a new literary tradition than to renovate the old one. The collective memory and sense of belonging that Synge aspired to resuscitate were not English; on the contrary, his search for a new style was just one of several moves afoot at the time to bring about the ‘de-anglicization of Ireland’. For Synge to base his style upon an otherness of usage in the absent Irish language was therefore more than a mere exoticism: it constituted solidarity with cultural and political efforts of a separatist nature going forward in other quarters.

  The Irish Literary Revival is by now an historical phenomenon. As are the Tudor Conquest of Ireland and the English colonization of North America. Yet in Northern Ireland in the late sixties and early seventies those remote happenings began to assume a new relevance. Questions about identity and cultural difference, which were being raised by Afro-Americans and Native Americans in the United States, were coming up urgently and violently in Ulster; the poets were being pressed, directly and indirectly, to engage in identity politics. The whole unfinished business of the England/ Ireland entanglement presented itself at a local level as a conflict of loyalties and impulses, and consequently the search was on for images and analogies that could ease the strain of the present. The poets were needy for ways in which they could honestly express the realities of the local quarrel without turning that expression into yet another repetition of the aggressions and resentments which had been responsible for the quarrel in the first place.

  It was under these circumstances that I began work in 1972 on Buile Suibhne, a Middle Irish text already well-known because of Flann O’Brien’s hilarious incorporation of its central character into the apparatus of At-Swim-Two-Birds. And Buile Suibhne is indeed strange stuff – the tale of a petty king from seventh century Ulster, cursed by a saint, transformed by the shock of battle into a demented flying creature, and doomed to an outcast’s life in the trees. But what had all this amalgam in verse and prose to do with me or the moment? How could a text engendered within the Gaelic order of medieval Ireland speak to a modern Ulster audience riven by divisions resulting from the final destruction of that order? The very meaning of the term ‘Ulster’ had been forced. Originally the name of an ancient Irish province and part of a native Gaelic cosmology, it had become through plantation by the English in the 1620s and partition by the British Parliament in the 1920s the name of a six-county British enclave that resisted integration with the Republic of Ireland, and indulged in chronic discriminatory practices against its Irish Nationalist minority in order to maintain the status quo. What had the translation of the tale of a Celtic wild man to do with the devastations of the new wild men of the Provisional IRA?

  My hope was that the book might render a Unionist audience more pervious to the notion that Ulster was Irish, without coercing them out of their cherished conviction that it was British. Also, because it reached back into a pre-colonial Ulster of monastic Christianity and Celtic kingship, I hoped the book might complicate that sense of entitlement to the land of Ulster which had developed so overbearingly in the Protestant majority, as a result of various victories and acts of settlement over the centuries. By extending the span of their historical memory into pre-British time, one might stimulate some sympathy in the Unionists for the Nationalist minority who located their lost title to sovereignty in that Gaelic dream-place.

  I did not, of course, expect Sweeney Astray so to affect things that political conversions would break out all over Northern Ireland. I did not even think of my intention in the deliberate terms which I have just outlined. I simply wanted to offer an indigenous text that would not threaten a Unionist (after all, this was just a translation of an old tale, situated for much of the time in what is now Co. Antrim and Co. Down), but that would fortify a Nationalist (after all, this old tale tells us we belonged here always and that we still remain). I wanted to deliver a work that could be read universally
as the-thing-in-itself but that would also sustain those extensions of meaning that our disastrously complicated local predicament made both urgent and desirable.

  II

  First time round, I went at the work speedily and a little overbearingly. I was actually taking off from J. G. O’Keefe’s parallel translation (published in 1913, volume 12 of the Irish Texts Society’s editions) more than I was attending to the Irish itself. I was afraid that I might not finish the whole thing, so in order to forestall as far as possible the let-down of such a failure, I hurled myself at the task. My main pitch, day by day, was to keep up an animated rate of production. I could not afford to dwell upon any single eddy of difficulty or subtlety in case it slowed me down to a discouraging rate. Consequently, the first draft was mostly in free verse, bowling along in the malleable quatrains that had become a habit with me in the course of writing Wintering Out.

  First time round I was also far more arrogant in my treatment of the sense. That is to say, I arrogated to myself the right to follow suggestions in the original, to develop a line of association out of the given elements of the Irish rather than to set down an obedient equivalent. I allowed myself to import echoes from the English literary tradition, from the Bible, to perform in metaphor what the text delivered in statement. O’Keefe, for example, gave the following direct translation of part of a typical Sweeney lament: