JACK HARTE
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Ah Moscow, Moscow With typical irony, Harte has written this story for the Internet. With the ongoing angst about the effect of the ebook on the printed book, Harte reminds us that the print medium supplanted the oral tradition for the vast majority of us only in the Nineteenth Century - as a result of universal literacy and the industrial revolution. The progression to the electronic medium is minor by comparison.
SENT ITEMS
Dear Nadezda
Dear Nadezda I am glad you like the stanzas and are intrigued by the development of the narrative. I am too. Don’t forget that I have no prior knowledge of the outcome – the story unfolds for me as it does for you. You really are delving into Irish mythology. No, you will not find a personage called Gamh anywhere in recorded mythology. He is a deity peculiar to the Shepherd community of Tireragh, and this may be the very first time he emerges in a manuscript record. Therefore we are witnessing a very significant discovery in folk scholarship here. For a parallel figure, look up Balor of the Evil Eye, who is no doubt the exemplar of Gamh – unless of course it is vice versa! Balor had an eye in his forehead which destroyed everything that came within his beam. His abode was in the north, and so he too appears a deification of winter. He is slain at the battle of Moytura, on the other side of the Ox Mountains, by Lugh, who then proceeds to become sun-god. The epic struggle between them represents the struggle between summer and winter, heat and cold, growth and destruction. It is my belief that culture began when storytellers cast an interpretation on natural phenomena, invented characters and narratives to explain what was otherwise inexplicable. But enough of our culture, tell me more of yours, Nadezda, tell me how Moscow reacts to the first chill of the autumn. Tell me if many of the scenes in The Master and Margarita can still be seen as they were in Bulgakov’s time. I believe the house where Satan’s ball took place, the then residence of the American Ambassador, is still there – and unchanged, I hope. Yes, you must tell me more of Moscow. Please. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda What a list of queries the Chairman of your Faculty Committee has given you! I mentioned at the start that I was a writer of modest acclaim. What that means in Ireland is that I do not have major publications to my name, do not have major studies by scholars on my work. In Ireland we have many writers but few critics, the inverse ratio of every other country. It is different here. He must be made to understand that. His other questions regarding the manuscript, where it came from, what institution is involved in the research, how I came to be engaged in the translation – these are all valid and reasonable. I did not mention such matters before because, as we say in Ireland, it is a long story. But now seems a good time to tell it. A few years ago, during the building boom in Ireland, a developer was demolishing an old house in my local village, Easkey – in order to build a big new house, maybe even a block of apartments. It was that time when building houses was seen as the path to riches. The driver of the bulldozer noticed in the rubble a strange object, which looked like an old book, with fragments of what looked like scraps of old paper scattered around it. He knocked off for his lunch break, and sent a boy to find me, figuring that I might be able to throw some light on his find. Of course I knew immediately the importance of the find, and I had a good idea why it was there. All such finds have to be reported to the National Museum by law, and I made the phone call. Before the driver could resume his demolition after his lunch break, the police had arrived and cordoned off the whole building. The following week the archaeologists arrived with their trowels and their sieves and their sifting boxes. But nothing else was found. Initial examination by the Museum confirmed that this manuscript dated from the Fifteenth Century or thereabouts. How it ended up secreted in the wall of a house in Easkey was obvious to all. It was a relic of the great MacFirbis family of hereditary scholars who ended their days in Easkey. I mentioned to you already the scholarly caste who were the custodians of Irish history, laws, storytelling, poetry, and every other branch of learning. One of the most important dynasties of hereditary scholars in Ireland was the MacFirbis’s, who operated a centre of learning at Lacken, a few miles from Easkey for five hundred years that are recorded, from the 12th to the 17th Century. Some of their manuscript compilations survived the turbulence of our history and preserved much of our oral culture. They are quite famous and you will be able to read about them if you look up: The Yellow Book of Lacken, The Great Book of Lacken, The Book of Genealogies. For example we can thank them for the earliest and most complete version of our great national epic, Táin Bó Cuailgne, as well as our trio of cherished romantic stories, collectively called the Three Sorrows of Storytelling - that includes the celebrated Children of Lir. The MacFirbis family lost their holding at Lacken as a result of the Cromwellian War of the 1640’s and the subsequent Plantation. The last and one of their greatest figures was Dubhaltach who was murdered in 1671. It would appear that after the confiscation of their castle and lands at Lacken the few remnants of the MacFirbis dynasty moved to Easkey. In 1663, when the English Government imposed a ‘Hearth Tax’, three of them are registered as having houses in Easkey, then called Imleach Iseal – Dubhaltach, his brother Patrick, and cousin Fearfeasa. This is the link to the register: http://www.failteromhat.com/sligohearth/easky.php Note the crude attempts at Anglicising of their names. It is not surprising that our manuscript was secreted in one of the houses for safety. Perhaps it was still in the possession of Dubhaltach when he was murdered. Maybe his brother or his cousin was minding it. It was valuable, and they knew it, because Dubhaltach took care to place some of his most valued manuscripts in the care of reputable scholars and antiquarians. So, in which of the houses was our manuscript secreted? Was one of them hiding it from the others? At this stage no one can tell. After the collapse of our economy, the Museum did not have the resources to research and restore the manuscript, so they engaged an expert, a German Professor, to undertake the work – the Germans had plenty of money after we spent all ours bailing out their bankers! The professor established a research project attached to his German university and engaged two expert restorers, with relays of post-graduate students, to work on the restoration. He rented a newly-built but unoccupied office suite in Easkey – so that the work could be done in situ, as it were – although the local cynics claimed it had more to do with the Professor’s having bought a holiday home at a knock-down price in nearby Enniscrone. Of course they needed someone with a knowledge of the language to decipher the text, and I was more than happy to offer my services. That is the story of the manuscript, Nadezda. I hope it satisfies your Chairman, because I am beginning to feel like Chekov’s Three Sisters, forever dreaming of going to Moscow, without any hope of ever getting there. I am attaching the latest batch of stanzas I have translated. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda No, I don’t have the name of the German university. My relationship with the Germans is fraught, to put it very meekly. For one thing, they resent having to pay me for my work. Max and Adolph, the two restorers, who are here on-going, question the value of my contribution, yes, question it to the point of contempt. They resent my assembling the fragments into a format that allows the reading of a continuous narrative. They claim that the reconstruction of the narrative gives an undesirable focus to the project. They argue that the fragments should be left and presented as individual objects, so that the public can see them as such and marvel at the information gathered from their scientific examination. And to be fair, they have amassed an enormous amount of scientific information while stabilising and restoring the fragments of vellum. They are able to say in what parts of the country the manuscript has been, and at what time of the year, by analysing minute specs of pollen on the vellum. And they can affirm that the book was handled by many people from their study of the grime on the cover. Such information, they claim, is more interesting and more important than my trite translation of a romantic love poem. Underneath all that, I think they are afraid that my translation will deflect attention from their serious work – they make their pronouncements with bass-baritone voices as if to emphasise their seriousness. Or do all German males have bass-baritone voices? Sometimes though, over a few pints in the village pub, we have more pleasant exchanges - about the formative influence of storytelling on history, on the perception of nature, such topics. Besides, if your Chairman had the name of my Professor, it is him he would invite to Moscow to talk about this project, not me. I have heard how these academics operate: you invite me to your university, and I will invite you to mine. What a pity I do not have a university in Easkey - I could engage in such reciprocation. Alas! But I could set up a hedge-school. I do have the resources for that: all I would need is a hut 'of clay and wattles made', as Yeats put it, a handful of books, some writing materials. I wonder would academics visit such an institution? Would they like to exchange? And yet such institutions kept learning alive among the poor of Ireland when university doors were firmly shut against them. Ah, Moscow, Moscow. I presume it is very cold there now. Have the streets filled up with snow yet? Does the sad statue of Gogol look even more downcast in the winter? Attached is my latest addition to the opus. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda You appear as interested in our remote corner of Europe as I am in Moscow. That is surprising, but reassuring. I feel I am not boring you with my meandering accounts of our culture. I enjoy answering your questions, and answering them is helping me to clarify some of the issues in my own head. How wonderful the computer is that I do not have to clarify who the Goban Saor was. If I had to add in as footnotes all that you can research on Google, my emails would be long-winded indeed. I am glad you enjoyed the turn in the narrative. But beware, we do not know yet whether there will be a tragic or a comic outcome. Your question as to the current state of the Shepherd community does not have a reassuring answer unfortunately. Like all rural communities they have suffered decline, and as with all poor communities the decline has been extreme. The boys and young men who tended their sheep on the mountains during my childhood all ended up in Manchester or Birmingham, and maybe some of them went as far as the US or Australia. Very few remained. The shepherds were replaced by barbed-wire fences, and the flocks that one time could almost find their own way to their traditional grazing ground were mixed indiscriminately, with ugly marks on their backs to indicate their owners. When the market price of mutton and wool fell, and the barrage of propaganda from Dublin and Brussels advised that smallholders were no longer wanted, the communities abandoned the struggle and sold their grazing rights to a tycoon – coincidently just before a generous grant was introduced by Brussels for every sheep on the mountains of Ireland. So the tycoon became a millionaire overnight and now visits occasionally, in his four-wheel drive, and gets a helicopter to check the number of his sheep on the mountain – occasionally. The rumour is that he is negotiating with the Americans to buy drones so that he can check the sheep from their chip implants without employing even a helicopter pilot. Do you think I might give a talk about the Shepherds instead of the poem? The title might be: ‘The impact of the barbed-wire fence on the traditional culture of the Ox Mountain Shepherd Community’! It is all so far removed from the passionate poetry of Mayakovsky, don't you think! Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda Sorry for the delay in sending more translations to you. I am having problems with my German colleagues. The restoration is almost complete, but they are withholding the last of the restored fragments from me. What they are muttering about is something to the effect that if I finish my translation and release it to the media, all the attention will be on what they call ‘the silly poem’, and not on the outcome of their scientific research. I have protested, but they are adamant. Now it appears that the matter will have to await the arbitration of the Professor – who is not expected until the Easter break from his university. Without doubt he will be over then, all expenses paid, to enjoy his three weeks in his holiday home. So I will have to wait. And waiting is what I have to do too in my long yearning to see Moscow. Yes indeed, there were times when I thought of signing up for one of those guided tours. But I did not find one that matched my needs. When I enquired, I was told that a participant could not depart from the group schedule to visit sites that were not specified. Even the momentous collapse of the Soviet Union did not alter the schedule of these tour operators. I wanted to connect with the spirit of Platonov not with the mummified body of Comrade Lenin. You understand that. Of course I could have attempted a private visit, but when I pictured myself on the streets of Moscow, unable to speak the language, unable to decipher the street signs, I thought better of it. Maybe eventually your university will issue the desired invitation, and I will be able to go there - as a writer. We live and hope. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda Yes, it would appear that both of us are in Limbo, you waiting for a decision from your Faculty committee, I waiting for my German friends to release the last fragments of the manuscript. Maybe Limbo does not describe our state, though. Do you have that concept in your Orthodox culture? It loomed as a great cloud over Irish Catholicism. The innocent children who died without baptism were assigned to this in-between place, but from it there was no hope of escape. So I think our condition is more akin to Purgatory, a place of on-going torture, but with the prospect of release into Paradise if we can endure. Perhaps now is the time - now that we have time - to address the questions you have raised several times about versification. I have been avoiding the subject for fear of boring you with too much technical detail. As you have rightly gleaned from your browsing, the poets of the Classical age employed syllabic verse: they adhered rigidly to the number of syllables in each line. Their unit of composition, though, was not the line but the four-line stanza – the term quatrain in English denotes four lines, but for these Irish poets the stanza was called a rann and a line was called a ceathrún which means a quarter of a stanza – an interesting inversion, don’t you think! But the emphasis was not semantic: their compositions were generally very long, so using the stanza as the unit was appropriate, totally practical. And they had to be practical. When we talk of poetry or verse today, the concept of lyric poetry springs to mind, perhaps some narrative thrown in, but always in small doses. However that was not what poetry involved for these people. Only in a small portion of their verse did they indulge in expressing personal emotion or sentiment. For them, poetry was a public art form, a public service. We have to cast our minds back in an imaginative way to appreciate why poetry was so important in primitive societies. And the reason is more mundane than our contemporary poets would care to admit. The invention of poetry, if we can conceptualise it for argument’s sake as a single invention, was a practical response to the problem of preserving the vast quantity of knowledge that the society had accumulated over generations. It is a very close parallel to the invention of the computer in our own time and for a similar purpose. It was not noble feelings and exalted thoughts that the society was anxious to preserve, but the history, the laws, the genealogy of the leading families, the very bedrock on which their society was constructed. All of this might be passed on by way of discourse, of course, but oral transmission was extremely unreliable. Such unreliability might be tolerable in storytelling, indeed might be desirable, as a good storyteller could embellish in the telling what he had received. However, accuracy was required in preserving and recounting the laws of the society, also genealogy which was significant in determining who might be eligible to be the next chieftain, history which gave the society its sense of identity. And, as we all know from childhood, the best aid to memory is a rhyme. Poetry makes language memorable, in the literal sense of that statement. Structuring information into verse made it easier to recall, and to recall accurately. So poets were employed because they could provide this service. They could shape verbal material, exalted or mundane, into verses that would lodge in the memory and could be recalled at any time for any particular purpose. This ability to immortalise any event gave them enormous power. In a pre-literate age, the chieftains depended on the poets, or learned class, for the records of their achievements and those of their ancestors, for clarification of their laws, for the delineation of their succession rights, their rights to tributes from their subjects, and the rights of their overlords to tributes from them. All this was recorded in verse. Today the casual reader is puzzled as to why poets would spend their time and talent writing such stuff. But that is the reason: they were employed to do it. In time their talent for immortalising acquired a numinous aura. They were also the chief entertainers of course. No feast would be contemplated without parading the compositions of the clan poets. Of course the poets themselves did not have to do the tedious stuff: they had their minions, the bards, to do that. But no doubt they made celebrity appearances. To enhance their power, they developed a terrible weapon which they could use against a stingy patron, a clan enemy, or a rival poet: the satire. A poet’s satire was feared more than an enemy’s weapon. The injury acquired in combat could be healed or avenged, but when a poet ridiculed you in verse, the damage was fatal and worse than fatal, because your shame, enshrined in verse, became immortal and outlived you for seven generations. This might seem like a long-winded digression, Nadezda, but no, it is a lead-in to my explanation of the versification of Classical Poetry and the structure of ‘The Shepherd and the Rose’. So do bear with me. So there was a hierarchy of poets, starting with the bards who were merely performers or interpreters, to apprentices and journeymen, to master poets called filí, to the chief poet of the clan who was called the ollamh and enjoyed the same privileges as his chieftain or king. For example the head of the MacFirbis family was the traditional Ollamh to the chieftains of our north-western region of Ireland. Similarly there was a hierarchy of versification, depending on the complexity of the stanza structure, starting with what was acceptable from an apprentice and rising to what was expected of a master poet, or file. The most sophisticated verse was extremely complex. Each type of verse had its own individual template for the four-line stanza, which as I said was their unit of composition. The number of syllables in each line was fixed, and there was end-rhyming usually between the first and third lines and the second and fourth, as in traditional English ballad verse. But there the comparison with English ballad verse ends. The template would include a pattern of internal rhyme also, and sometimes an end word would be required to rhyme with a word in the middle of the next line. Similarly a pattern of alliteration might be prescribed. The number of syllables in the end word of each line would be fixed too. In terms of rhythm they used accent rather than stress. When a poet decided to adopt a particular template, he had to abide by it, at the risk of ridicule, and he had to maintain that uniformity throughout, even if he had to compose a hundred stanzas. So the composition was extremely demanding, but, once achieved, the poem was cast in bronze. And a bard reciting it could not forget a line and improvise. Each word in each stanza was held in place by this intricate meshed structure of the verse, fitted there like a word in a cryptic crossword, and could not be replaced. Even if a word was forgotten, and the meaning did not suggest what it was, it could almost be constructed from the sound patterns it had to adhere to. So the stanza was indestructible, immortal. It could be recalled in its entirety or not at all. I smile when I hear people moaning about modern poetry, how it cannot be memorised and recited like the old poetry. Of course it can’t. The structures that were devised to make language memorable have been cast aside, so of course modern poetry is just as difficult to memorise as prose. I hope this gives you a picture of our great tradition, Nadezda. It was a great tradition, and we have the oldest literature in a vernacular language in Europe, or so we claim. I hope we soon have some development on your side or mine to release us from Purgatory. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda I am delighted that you found my last Epistle to the Muscovites interesting; I had feared it might have put the kybosh on your enthusiasm. (By the way, if you click on your dictionary for the meaning of i>kybosh, they will say its origin is unknown. But it is unknown only to them - they might admit their ignorance with grace! It comes from two Irish words, caip báis, the cap of death, a ceremonial cap we used to put on a corpse.) You have considerable intellectual stamina, Nadezda. And coming back with more questions certainly makes me look to my stamina. You want to know the challenges I experienced in translating ‘The Shepherd and the Rose’. Where do I start? The first decision I had to make was on the form of the translation. If I were to place prime importance on translating the text, the content, then I would have settled for a straightforward prose translation. But what sense of the original poem would that have given? Very little. Like it or not, I had to attempt a verse presentation. But how does one attempt to replicate such a complex stanza structure? The fili were extremely skilled professional poets who spent decades learning and honing their art. I imagine that when they recited their verses, accompanied by harp or pipes, the impact must have been akin to that of music. And here was I, who would not have rated even as one of their first-year apprentices, trying to emulate their composition in another language. I quickly decided that it was impossible, that it would be ludicrous to try. All I could do was give a sense, be it ever so vague, of the original. So I kept the quatrain as the unit of narration. Into each stanza I poured the same content as was in the corresponding original – as faithfully as I could. But then came the greater dilemmas. As we know, the filí structured their verse by the number of syllables in the line. Their rhythm was based on accent rather than stress. But I found that accent seemed more natural in Irish because of a better ratio between long syllables and short syllables. Even though I have attempted to deliver an accented rather than stressed verse, English seems to jump almost automatically into stressed metre. It was frustrating, and often I felt like taking a lump hammer to its anapaestic and iambic feet, not to maim - it has to walk after all - but just to break a few bones and stop its damned inclination to skip along. The trouble with the stressed pattern is that a perfectly self-effacing preposition, if it finds itself in the wrong place at the wrong time, can be hit with the full wallop of a stress, and be singled out from the line, mystified as why it has been chosen to carry an unwarranted burden of meaning. This should not happen with accented metre, but, in English, the challenge is in avoiding it. Yes, Nadezda, indeed the challenges were many. Fitting the meaning into the structure was akin to fitting a monkey into a cage that was too small for purpose. Its arms and legs were constantly protruding, despite attempts to make him pull himself together. I could have let him free to stretch and roam and gambol, but that would have been to choose prose. Instead I went for a bigger cage that contained the animal with a little more comfort and freedom of movement. I have now been informed by my dear friends, Adolph and Max, that Herr Professor will be over next week. I think that that conveniently coincides with the beginning of the Easter vacation. But I must not be cynical. I am sure he is a good man and an accomplished scholar. Perhaps we will have some decisions regarding the final folios of the manuscript. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda The Professor arrived yesterday for his review of progress - and his three-week holiday in Enniscrone! We had a meeting today. I put in my request to have the final two folios, which were now in a decipherable condition, released to me so that I could finish my translation. Max and Adolph objected on the grounds that the completion, and possible publication, of the text would give an impression of completion to the project, when they still had much scientific research to do on the fragments of vellum. They also maintained that presenting a narrative at all gave an erroneous emphasis to the purpose of the project. They waved their arms a lot and spoke in their deepest bass-baritone to underline how strongly they felt about this. Storytelling was the very antithesis of scientific thinking and threw a veil over knowledge that was difficult to disperse afterwards. They suggested that people would have a more appropriate concept of the stars if they were not seeing hunters and dogs and ploughs in the night sky. In defence of my profession, I played a hard game, Nadezda, even if I say so myself. I pointed out that storytellers created culture, created mythologies and religions, created the urge to explain and understand natural phenomena. Even if the explanations and interpretations were wide of the mark, they paved the way for the scientists to come afterwards with their own explanations, their own vision. The Professor sat back and listened. It was clear from his demeanour that he was adopting the role of arbitrator rather than participant. So I was hopeful that I had won the argument. When he eventually spoke, he did so at length, recounting the history of the project from the beginning, asserting the importance of the research and the findings, complimenting Max and Adolph on their meticulous research, and me on my literary contribution. His decision he saw as some kind of compromise. He agreed with Max and Adolph that it would take from the impact of the final report if the translation of the poem were completed, and no doubt published, in advance. There were two folios left to be translated. They would release one of them to me forthwith; the other would be locked away until the final report was ready. At that stage they would invite me back to complete my work. But since I had a warranted expectation of payment under my contract, they would now pay me in full, on my signing an undertaking that I would complete the translation at the appropriate time. And, he added, it might be some considerable time before the scientific work was complete, perhaps even years. So that is the outcome, Nadezda. It may have something to do with the Professor wanting to spin out his project for a few years to facilitate his holidays in the west of Ireland. Who knows? I had hoped that a complete translation of this manuscript might have improved my chance of being invited to Moscow to talk about it. But if the invitation comes, perhaps it might be a lever to spring the final folio from captivity. I should have the penultimate folio translated in two weeks – maybe even ten days - and will forward it to you. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda This is the translation. It leaves the story in mid-air. I hope you can live with suspense, or the open-end that has certain popularity in contemporary poetry and fiction. Of course I cannot be sure that the final folio of this manuscript will bring closure. Closure is often deferred where such a saga as this feeds into a larger narrative, as a stream flows into a river. Epic storytelling was like Celtic design – stories wove in and out of each other. For example, the story of Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach, preserved by the great MacFirbis scholars, was but a prefatory note to the epic, Táin Bó Cuailgne, to explain why some of the Ulster warriors were fighting for the enemy, the Queen of Connacht. Let me know what you think of it. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda I can understand your sense of anticlimax. Ending a narrative without an outcome is not satisfactory or satisfying. But perhaps if I get an invitation to Moscow I can squeeze the tail of the story out of its captors. No, I cannot speculate with any confidence what the outcome might be. Given the origins of the story and its setting in a pre-Christian world, it might be possible that the Shepherdess saw it as her responsibility to her community to appease the angry or offended deity. Christianity has always cast the concept of human sacrifice in its ugliest light when referring to pagan practices, while elevating it to the highest act of generosity in the case of Jesus Christ sacrificing himself to appease the offended Creator. If you push me to speculate on an outcome, I would imagine that, as with my German Professor, a compromise was reached, and she spent the winter with Gamh, returning for half the year to bring summer to the hills of Tireragh. Our local Persephone! How such a poem as this was presented at the festivals and feasts of the chieftains is impossible to say, since we have no indication as to whether it would have been accompanied, and if so what the accompanying music might have been. But the oldest form of Irish singing, called Sean Nós, might be the best indicator. In this style, the emphasis is not on repeated stress and music bars, but on the ornamentation of each note, each syllable. I can imagine that that would suit the syllabic accented poems of this era. Listen to an example of a song from the 14th Century – one which Handel heard and admired. If you click on to this link to Youtube you will hear a singer called Maureen Hegarty giving a Sean Nós version of Eibhlin a Rúin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ql61WIg-HE You can imagine the accomplished bards singing the poems in this totally leisurely way, their voices teasing out the music inherent in every verse, lingering sensuously on every syllable. You can imagine the intricate sound patterns of each stanza being elaborated and ornamented - and improvised upon uniquely perhaps at each performance. If the words were set rigidly, perhaps they allowed spontaneity in the music of each performance. Unfortunately we can never know for sure, Nadezda. One thing I should highlight: the pace of their verse was far more leisurely than I have presented in my version. I estimated that the modern reader would have little patience for an ambling leisurely narrative, so I created a momentum by shortening the fourth line of each stanza from three to two accents - in order to catapult the reader from one stanza into the next. The filí would never have done that; the fourth line completed their intricate tracery of sounds and had to be given its due attention. Yes, I think the Sean Nós style of singing would have been eminently suited to their verse. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda It is a great disappointment to hear that your university has ended the academic year without making a decision on my invitation. Yes, of course I can be optimistic that they did not make a negative decision. Of course, it leaves the door ajar. And yes, I can continue to live in hope. However, your proposal to come to Ireland yourself this summer fills me with alarm. This is not Moscow, Nadezda. How can you imagine that you will find anything in Ireland to match the lanes of Arbat? Yes, the street of Easkey – and there is only one street – has been hallowed by the feet of Dubhaltach MacFirbis and his clan, but the streets of Moscow have been imbued with the spirit of countless great writers. I fear such a trip will prove a total disappointment, that you will be disenchanted. Sincerely Jude Dear Nadezda No, you misunderstand me. I am not discouraging you from visiting Ireland, and especially Tireragh. I am utterly elated at the prospect of your being here for Midsummer. I am delighted that you want to see the sheep and lambs grazing on the Ox Mountains! What I fear is that I have painted too romantic a picture of our remote plain by the sea. There will be nothing to see, believe me, a few black-headed sheep maybe, a deserted village street, a crossroads where a writer in his cottage pounds out words where his father once shaped glowing steel on an anvil. A wind-swept, rain-soaked landscape. As in Levitan's painting of the Volga, Nadezda, events here take place only in the clouds and they disappear quickly back into the clouds. No, Nadezda, this is not Moscow. Sincerely Jude |