Bho Leabhar-Latha Maria Malibran: Maria on singing: see also lower down page: please scroll down.
If it had been the celebrated minstrel
ensnared in hell, and it were up to me
to rescue him, my step would not have crossed
that last dark threshold. You'd have heard my voice
reach out, a bridge to guide my lover home.
I would never have been obliged to sway
the king of ghosts with pleading, nor to kneel
before his sullen paramour. I feel
my voice is like a tree, that has its roots
held tight within my belly, while the core
grows firmly in my breast. And when I breathe
the tree saps all my power and develops
out of my lungs, and I am Daphne,
my branches quivering with leaves, my song
the airy breeze, having escaped unhurt
the stifling adulation heaped on me.
Also this year a new book from Firewater Press, Bristol, published by Tony Lewis Jones in association with Poetry Monthly Press, and available from the Poetry Monthly Press online bookshop. (or contact Sally, see foot of home page)
This is something I havent tried before: home-grown Search Inside. Here are the contents pages and the back cover. If they come out well enough, I might think about adding a sample poem. But then again...
And here are the back and front covers:
Bho Leabhar-Latha Maria Malibran. Christopher Whyte's book of poems in Gaelic, with translations by several writers, to which I contributed 33 pages of the 65 pages of translations, including the title poem From the Diary of Maria Malibran,
Malibran was an opera singer in the early half of the nineteenth century.
The collection contains poems on a number of themes, several about gay relationships, so I dont suppose Christopher would have wanted a portrait of Maria Malibran on the book, which has a blue cover (see below). However I found this one of the great opera singer. Other poems are translated by Niall O'Gallacher with one or two translated by the author, one by W N Herbert and one by Michel Byrne. But my translations amount to those of just over half the book. Here's the rhymed version of Christopher's epilogue to Maria Malibran, dealing strongly with the subjects to which Gaelic poetry had generally addressed itself. The speaker in this poem is the poet himself. The other longer poem I translated is an elegy to Maria Merce Marcal, a gay woman friend of the author who died in Barcelona.
Read the rest of the stuff in the book.
Why should I lie to you? Why should't I
state the truth openly? Kind readers, shall you
look in my book for topics that you value?
If keeping you happy was my design
a very different sermon would be mine.
Such as the various objects in the barn
of my dead grandfather, giving each name
and how to use them all, and what a shame
it is that all these implements are rusty
and how tradition dies, neglected, rusty.
Or else I'd talk about my sorry plight,
having to take the ferry and depart
from my own homeland with a heavy heart,
until the croft that held me as I grew
shrinks to a mere smudge in the distant blue,
its television ariel out of sight.
By now you're waiting to be told of how
homesickness and guilt shadow my brow
as I sit at my desk, stuck in a job
above the city traffic and hubbub,
and how my eyes still see the row of houses,
my ears still hear the language of my kin,
the rich language our children can't join in,
the language in which you and I delight
but cannot be prevailed upon to write.
Instead, I chose a woman for my subject,
someone who didnt have a single word
of Gaelic - very likely never heard
of such a language. Possibly my power
to give my Gaelic poetry full floweris limited because I'm not a Gael,
if that's what you suggest. For you who read
I cast these words, I scatter them like seed
upon this dull and dry, unfriendly dust
and ask you to believe me, as you must:
though these are words - not teeth or pebbles - words,
when they are ready they will start to grow,
springing in flesh and bone from top to toe,
and their new eyes will study what I've done -
my new book on Maria Malibran.
Christopher Whyte, translated by Sally Evans
