The History Librarian

Even though my wife insists that it is indecent for me to enjoy contemporary literature (which for her is just about everything that comes after Hardy, with the notable exception of certain forms of children’s literature), I want to draw your attention to Chris Lydon’s 3-part interview with Junot Diaz. Note also that Lydon will be interviewing Edwidge Danticat and Ha Jin in the near future.

The radio show Open Source will have an upcoming program on Camus’ The Plague:

Read The Plague this weekend, and help us milk Camus’s metaphor for our own pestilential times!

We will be guided on air by the historian Tony Judt of NYU, a Camus aficionado, and by the political scientist John Mearsheimer of Chicago, who remembers The Plague as a staple of his own West Point education.

But the reading assignment is for everybody.

This looks like it will be a great program. Be sure to check out the extra credit readings on the program’s webpage.

I’ve been reading about Louis MacNeice all week, but decided that it would be more fun to share Nuala’s work instead. It’s gotten quite warm here, the trees are in full bloom … MacNeice just didn’t seem right (maybe another week). First, a quick introduction: Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (b. 1952; prounced something like Newla Nee Honnall [or Gonnall, depending on whom you ask]) is a contemporary poet working in the Irish language; her poems in English are translated by herself or, more frequently, by other Irish poets. The following comes from the 1988 ed. of Anthony Bradley’s Contemporary Irish Poetry anthology (the very edition I used in my undergrad Irish lit class).

Labasheedy (The Silken Bed) [trans. from the Irish by Ni Dhomhnaill]

I’d make a bed for you
in Labasheedy
in the tall grass
under the wrestling trees
where your skin
would be silk upon silk
in the darkness
when the moths are coming down.

Skin which glistens
shining over your limbs
like milk being poured
from jugs at dinnertime;
your hair is a herd of goats
moving over rolling hills,
hills that have high cliffs
and two ravines.

And your damp lips
would be as sweet as sugar
at evening and we walking
by the riverside
with honeyed breezes
blowing over the Shannon
and the fuchsias bowing down to you
one by one.

The fuchsias bending low
their solemn heads
in obeisance to the beauty
in front of them
I would pick a pair of flowers
as pendant earrings
to adorn you
like a bride in shining clothes.

O I’d make a bed for you
in Labasheedy,
in the twilight hour
with evening falling slow
and what a pleasure it would be
to have our limbs entwine
wrestling
while the moths are coming down.

There is an old joke that there’s no word for sex in Irish. Whether that’s true or not (I don’t recall), what Nuala does so well is take traditional Irish idioms and show how terrifically erotic they can be; that is, even if there isn’t a word for sex in Irish, Irish is pretty damn sexy.

Want to read more? Here are a few English-language titles with links to Open WorldCat:

Selected Poems (Dublin, 1988)
The Astrakhan Cloak (Winston-Salem, NC, 1993)
Pharaoh’s Daughter (Winston-Salem, NC, 1993)

Since April is National Poetry Month, I’ve decided to do my part and post, every Friday in April, either a poem with accompanying essay or an essay about a poet. Since my knowledge of poetry is pretty limited, I’m going to stick to that which I know best: modern Irish poetry. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments. There will probably be a post about Seamus Heaney since I have a couple of idiotic anecdotes to share (ditto for Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill), but I might change my mind as I re-read things. I apologize if this doesn’t seem like a particularly history librarianish thing to do, but I was never a very good historian anyway.