It’s been a while since my last (mis)translation. Not for the first time, I have traduced a Brazilian.
Leda Beatriz Abreu Spinardi (often known by the mononym Ledusha), is a poet, translator and journalist. This poem comes from her self-published second collection Risco no Disco (‘Scratches on the Record’), which first appeared in 1981 and was republished in 2016. Risco no Disco also later became the title of her poetry column in the Folha de Sao Paolo newspaper in the late 1990s.
This collection was the one that made her name, and characterised her, and perhaps a generation of young urban Brazilian women who were emerging from the Seventies towards the equal rights they would finally achieve with the Citizen’s Constitution of 1988.
Ledusha’s poetry, both feminist and feminine, reflected a women’s perspective within the movement of marginais poets and musicians who came of age and defined a generation in the Eighties.
Reticence
my love
away from you
I come upon disrespectful poems
away from you
my desire destroys doors
and quotations
away from you
I cover myself
with such mischief
you could only compare it
to how unfaithful
some metaphors can be.
I guess I’ve been quiet for quite some time on this blog. It seemed to me wise to adhere to a particular wisdom that takes various forms in various cultures.
“Whatever you say, say nothing.”
“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”
I’ve been reading the Hávamál for the first time recently. I’m somewhat of a Norse wannabe. I like the mythology. I can relate to the sense of bone-chilling cold, the strict code of honour and morality. These are familiar things to me. But I am, somewhat unusually for people from the Atlantic Archipelago, entirely lacking in Norse genetics. I’m a wannabe.
My kids on the other hand are of Viking descent (and no doubt other things too). Both have clear blue eyes. One is blond. The other is descended from a town literally founded by Vikings and named for its fjord. I however, am pure Celt. This is less of a boast than a lament on my part. How astonishing it would be to have a diverse lineage. How interesting it would be.
Nevertheless, when Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford University tested me some years ago, I proved to be almost entirely of North-Eastern Irish origin. The slight question mark was in relation to the possibility that I might have had some Icelandic heritage. However, that’s because the settlers of Iceland came from Norway and, en route, realised they’d forgotten a crucial component for settling a new land – women. So they – erm – collected a few in Antrim en route across the Atlantic.
Thus was a nation born. However, the likelihood that a stray Viking of Antrim descent returned to form part of my lineage is tiny. I accept the fact that my ancestors most likely never traveled further than the Hebrides in thousands of years (and most likely not even that far.)
As an Irishman – a very Irish man genetically in fact – I have a patrimony worth valuing. One of the oldest mythologies in the world is mine to claim. I can also lay claim to other aspects of Irishness, however constituted or conceived. The invention of whiskey and the pneumatic tyre alone justifies the existence of my people I would suggest.
Nevertheless, I choose not to be so parochial. Indeed, I was not raised to be parochial. The education I received valued the cultures of Judeo-Christianity, of Greece and Rome, of the (mostly Italian) Renaissance, and the (mostly Anglo-German) Enlightenment.
By the time I reached university education, postcolonialism was assuming its position in the canon. (I was later to teach this at Trinity College Dublin.) I was exposed to the (English language) literature of Africa, India, the Caribbean.
Later again, I began to find certain other cultures of interest. I was intrigued by China and Tibet, and visited both. I’ve since spent a lot of time exploring Buddhist thought. I likewise found the ancient Mesoamerican cultures fascinating and visited Mexico to witness their ruins and remains, where I encountered their nation’s founding mestizo mythology – the value in a blended culture.
More recently, I have found the palimpsestic cultures of both Turkey and Israel to be absolutely intriguing. Anatolia, arguably the omphalos of the world, has given home to the Hittites, the Hellenes, the Byzantines, and later a series of Turkic arrivals, culminating in the Ottoman Empire, which arguably led the world for centuries.
Likewise, the history of the land variously historically known as Judea, Palestine (and various other monikers) has had an outsized influence on the culture of the entire world. The Abrahamic monotheisms all stem from this slender sliver of land. Some of the cultures there are of extremely ancient origin. Jericho, for example, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet.
And the persistence – against enormous odds – of the Jewish people, and in a less attenuated timeframe the Palestinian people, remains astonishing in light of the many, many cultures which have come and went in the meantime. I was educated among Jewish people, and work alongside them. They are an industrious, imaginative and above all, hopeful people. I likewise have Palestinian friends. They too have sustained their culture through enormous trials.
ALL of these have influenced me. They have influenced my thinking. They have influenced who I am. It would be foolish of me to argue otherwise. Likewise, many other cultures, ancient and modern, distant from my birthplace and blood or closely proximate, have also. (It would be beyond foolish, for example, to deny the influence of the English on me. I was educated in their system, watched their TV, imbibed their culture and ultimately lived there teaching English culture to English kids in England.) I don’t believe I am alone in this. Arguably, only the isolate cultures of the Andaman Islands or the inner Amazon could truly argue for their cultural purity.
It is for this reason that, even as I taught postcolonial theory and literature, I innately rejected the concept of cultural appropriation. All of these cultures, ideas, practices are within me. No one loses if I choose to eat Jamaican jerk chicken, or strike a Hindu yoga pose, or chant a Tibetan mantra, or listen to urban American rap, or read 19th century Russian literature. No one. If anything, the people embedded in or descended from those cultures potentially gain a friend, an ally.
So I’ll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate, if you don’t mind (and even if you do.) Tonight I will read the Hávamál. I’m not a Viking and never will be. I may be related to some of their descendants, and have visited the lands they inhabited, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I value these cultures, in my own way.
Don’t let anyone police what you find interesting.
Thus far I’ve tried to avoid Irish language poetry, partly because it reminds me of the shame of not speaking my indigenous tongue, and partly because such poems come a little too close to home sometimes.
That said, I’ve tackled Scatha’s warning to Cuchullain in the past, so I guess there’s not really a rule as such here. Therefore, I have added to the hilltop of poetry translations yet another version of the Song of Amergin.
Amergin, in short, was one of the Milesian invaders who displaced the Tuatha de Danaan, or Children of Danu, from Ireland. The latter later morphed in mythology to become the undying, the supernatural race of the Aos Si, or people of the Sidhe, ie the underworld.
The Milesians, or sons of Mil, were according to the same mythological history, Celts who came to Ireland from Iberia originally to invade. This history is told in Ireland’s mythological repository, the aptly named Leabhar Gabala, or Book of Invasions, for many were the invasions of Ireland.
Amergin comes to Ireland therefore as a conqueror, intending to displace the people of the land and take ownership himself. It is told that as the Milesians approached the coast of Ireland, Amergin was suddenly possessed of poetic inspiration and thus emerged his enigmatic song.
I don’t wish to comment or critique it too much. It is after all a product of ancient pagan imagination, likely filtered through layers of Christian sentiment before reaching us in its current forms. What we can safely say is that Amergin expresses the confidence of the conqueror, but a very unusually expressed confidence, in which he already seems to be merging with the flora and fauna, the geography and meteorology, of Ireland itself.
In this sense, he is declaring himself to be a suitable king and custodian of the land, for in that scapegoat primitive society, the wellbeing of the ruler was intimately braided with that of the kingdom and the land itself. Often, in times of famine, a king would be put to death to placate the land and the gods. In his song, therefore, Amergin displays an expansive kind of amor fati. He is accepting this gamble, this fate, and pledging his capacity to fulfill the role of leadership by himself becoming one with the land.
Amergin, however, did not become king, or Ri, of Ireland. He was a bard and sorcerer, a druid not a ruler. Instead the island was divided (then like now) into two kingdoms, north and south, each ruled by one of his brothers. This being Ireland, of course that led to its own difficulties later, even as Amergin became the chief poet and judge of the land.
We can perhaps accept that, in his divinely inspired song, he had at least earned that title. The song is, in a sense, the first judgement he handed down.
“The Coming of the Sons of Miled,” illustration by J. C. Leyendecker in T. W. Rolleston’s Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race, 1911.
The Song of Amergin
I am the air that moves the sea.
I am the sea wave moving.
I am the ocean’s bellow.
I am the seven-antlered stag.
I am the ox who fought seven times.
I am the hawk descending from the cliff.
I am the beam of sunlight in a dewdrop.
I am the most beautiful of flowers.
I am a boar in courage.
I am a salmon through water.
I am a flood on the plain.
I am a hilltop of sorcery and poems.
I am the tip of the battle spear.
I am the god who ignites fires in the mind.
Who is it who sheds light where the mountains meet?
Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve been busy. There will be some updates about, inter alia, the Caucasus, the origins of wine, and the Religious Futurisms project imminently.
In the meantime, I hope you may be satisfied with this talk I gave on WW3 last November.
There’s a lot of REALLY great points raised in this article here, by a Georgian journalist and media scholar, but unfortunately I disagree with most of the author’s conclusions. She claims that noise (ie everything from clickbait to fake news – all the bullshit online, basically) is the new censorship, because it’s drowning out the signal, ie all that is truthful.
Let me clarify. Noise is a major problem, but it’s still not the new censorship. The old censorship is very much still censorship (just ask Chinese people, or North Koreans, or indeed any citizen of a nation propping up the Global Press Freedom Index, or indeed a few near the top too.)
And new forms of censorship are the new censorship – ‘cancelling’ people for holding different opinions, ‘deplatforming’, boycotting, and so on.
This article blames Big Tech for the logarithmic rise in noise online. But to my mind, journalism has only itself to blame for the endless acceleration of the noise-to-signal ratio. In the democratised field of modern tech-enabled communication, journalism could and should have thrived as the pure signal offering. Instead, it allowed itself to become (even more) partisan, skewed, and untrustworthy than it already was.
The general public are not as stupid as journalists (who aren’t as smart as they think) think they are. They have learned how to ‘read between the lines’ of stories which often make little coherent sense, and glean what the missing data points are.
This has eroded trust in their former gatekeeping role.We’re now in a ‘boy who cried wolf’ scenario. The public remember every instance when the media got it wrong, or deliberately misrepresented factuality, or presented partisan viewpoint as objective reportage. So when the media, as it does, presents legitimate and reliable work for public consumption, many people simply no longer trust it.
And so they turn to the charlatans’ parade of liars, cynics, clickbait peddlars, conspiracy theorists and ideologues online instead, thereby amplifying those noises and drowning out what little truth there is.
It’s a shitshow, no bones about it. But it’s disingenuous to put the entire blame at the door of Big Tech, much as I loathe them. Journalism needs to take a long look in the mirror to find the cause of its own woes. And I don’t mean the British redtop.
World War One started in July 1914, but when did it end? Conventionally, people assume it ended in November 1918, with the surrender of Germany.
But people were still dying many years later. My own grandfather suffered for decades with lungs rotted out by mustard gas at the Somme, and didn’t die for many years, gasping and coughing nightly.
The most recent victims, astonishingly, were as recently as March 2014, almost exactly a century after the conflict started. How is that possible? They were construction workers, who accidentally triggered an unexploded bomb buried beneath where they were working.
During WW1, a ton of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory along the front.
As a result, the French Département du Déminage (Department of Mine Clearance) recovers about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year. They call it the Iron Harvest.
Unexploded ordinance is left behind after all conflicts. Children are maimed and killed every year as a result of uncleared mines and bombs in Asia and Africa.
The wars we fight today will kill not only us but our grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. It’s time to make war history.
I read somewhere that most academic articles in the humanities never receive a single citation. It seemed sad and odd, so I thought to look it up. It’s actually 92% that go uncited!
And yet social media is full of people advertising their latest papers or calls for more papers. Why? Well, obviously they’re proud of their hard work and want to let people know about it. And they’d rather like their hard work to be among the 8% of papers which do get noticed.
But most people connect with more than just other academics in their field, so they know that such posts might come across as a bit spammy to those not in the field of Higher Education. Like family or friends.
So why do they continue to do so? Because they are required to as part of their job.
Publishers will demand to know how academics intend to promote their work. And universities measure academics against things that are actually impossible for them to guarantee – the shibboleths of ‘impact’ and ‘outreach’ primarily. And these are counted in purely numerical terms – the clicks, the tweets, the retweets and reposts, but most of all the citations.
So there’s a lot of work being produced and hence a lot of people trying to get their voice heard in the shouting gallery of social media, pleading with anyone who’s listening to read their work, or even just click on it.
But yet I rarely hear anyone say that they READ a great academic article recently.
Since academia became a publish-or-perish game, it has incentivised academics to churn out endless articles but it doesn’t actually incentivise them to read any, except perhaps as footnote fodder for their own outputs. No academic is set targets for how much they will read in the forthcoming semester or year.
Universities don’t just apply arbitrary (and sky-high) publishing targets to academics. They also demand things it simply isn’t in an academic’s control to offer, ie impact, outreach, virality and citations. It all adds up to a lot of pressure, and undoubtedly affects the quality of the papers being written.
The downstream affects of this ought to be obvious, especially in fields and disciplines which move quickly and require scholars to stay up-to-date with the latest discoveries or thinking.
Now I no longer have work targets for publication set by paper-shuffling administrators, I’ve really come to appreciate the ability to read and learn.
Universities should find ways to incentivise academics to read more and write less. Students and scholars and the sum of human knowledge would all benefit. But then, the bean counters wouldn’t have anything to count, and would no longer be able to bully or overwork staff with arbitrary and often punitive targets, or metrics they have no way of being able to guarantee.
In most areas of life, you can pursue quantity or quality. If universities really want their research to reach people, inspire them, change the game of a research field, or make a difference to society or the public, then they need to facilitate time and space for academics to read, and let them deliver work that really counts
What if no one noticed for the same reason that for a long time no one noticed that industrialisation was causing the climate to change? What if World War III is a hyperobject?
We live at a time when empires are decaying, arising and reformulating themselves in new structures and alliances. Does knowing this help us at all? Are we like Europe in 1914, on the brink of a seemingly inevitable global conflagration? Or more like the great empires of the Bronze Age, which collapsed in darkness three millennia ago following their own tragic but elusive hyperobjective moment?
Perhaps AI might yet save us from ourselves, if only it too were not a hyperobject, or worse, the oscillating image of multiple potential hyperobjects, each one more alien and incomprehensible than the last.
So if we can’t rely on a digital messiah, we might be forced to resolve our current issues the old-fashioned way.
No, not war. The OTHER old-fashioned way.
I’ll be giving a talk on all this next month. More info shortly.
A lot of drugs come with what you might call rudimentary samizdat branding. Ecstasy pills regularly get imprinted with pop culture references for batch designation, for example.
But mostly, illicit drug names are a part of criminal anti-language, or at least they begin as such. If you don’t want the police or the normies knowing you’re doing a drug deal, you switch terms for things they won’t understand. Language becomes a club for members only and you need the passwords for entry. Cocaine becomes Charlie and so on. Even after the mask of anti-language slips and the terms become commonplace, they tend to stick around, because what’s criminal and taboo is also often cool.
In some refreshing instances, a kind of anti-branding occurs. Cannabinoids are dope because they make one stupid and sleepy, for example. Amphetamines are speed or whizz because they accelerate perception and energy levels, famously burning up tomorrow’s energy today.
The powerful drug scopolamine is known as Devil’s Breath, because once inhaled or ingested it renders the victim entirely suggestible. Usually, it is administered during a honey trap (often via lipstick) prior to robbery. I always liked the name Philip K Dick gave his fatally addictive substance in ‘A Scanner Darkly’ – Slow Death, the perfect combination of taboo sales pitch and truth in advertising.
But if ever I felt like viscerally objecting to drug nomenclature, it wasn’t when someone impressed cartoon figures like Donald Duck on a tab of E. Rather it was today, when I read about the drug WY which is wreaking havoc in India. WY stands for ‘The World is Yours’, a complete reversal of what drugs of abuse actually do, which is steal the world from those addicted.
This amphetamine/caffeine combo is disproportionately harming the already marginalised queer community in India, according to Vice magazine. A more insidious untruth I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered than this empty promise from drug dealers to fragile youth.
Early Irish writings, including the ‘Imramma’ poems, identify Irish monks sailing to North America. Later writings, including the Brendan Voyage do likewise.
The Norse annals, which were intended as historical records, do likewise, in the Landnámabók and the Annals of Greenland, which itself is written evidence supporting the now-accepted fact that the Vikings had reached North America in the 11th century.
A number of Norse sagas, including that of Erik the Red, also cite Irish sailing and colonising North America prior to the Norse arrivals.
Throughout these texts, this land is referred to as Írland hit mikla (Greater Ireland) or Hvítramannaland (White Man Land) due to the perception of those who were resident there.
Even in 12th century Sicily, the Arab historian Al-Idrisi wrote of the existence of Irlandah-al-Kabirah, or Greater Ireland, located to the west of Iceland.
And the Shawnee legends of the Amerindian peoples near Chesapeake Bay refer to the existence in their history of white men carrying poles and using iron instruments.
And artifacts have been found in locations including West Virginia which bear marks cognate with the Ogham script of ancient Ireland, though this is disputed.
This is all generally hand-waved away by contemporary historians as mere mythology, as they quite reasonably insist on incontrovertible archeological evidence.
Mind you, they used to do the same thing in relation to the Vikings until Anse-aux-Meadows was discovered. Even then, they still attempted to argue away the Helluland site on Baffin Island, even sacking the archeologist and her husband and sequestering her evidence.
I’m always intrigued by such historical disputation, and often wonder cui bono? Could a narrative which supported earlier European engagement with North America in anyway undermine Canadian claims to the wealth in and under the Arctic, for example? Such has been alleged in the past.
In any case, I hope they do find Greater Ireland one day, just as they appear to have already found Vinland and Helluland.
