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[Jun. 15th, 2023|09:35 pm] |
| [ | Fonā |
| | Michael Nyman - The Morrow | ] |
Our language may indeed be our world, but our writing...
"Almost thirty years ago, in a poem called 'Follower', I wrote about myself as a child dragging along behind my father when he was out ploughing. The poem began:
My father worked with a horse-plough,
and unremarkable as this may have been as a line of verse, it was still the result of some revision. In fact, I had deliberately suppressed the one touch of individuality that had appeared in the first version. Originally I had written:
My father wrought with a horse-plough,
because until relatively recently that verb was the common one in the speech of mid-Ulster. Country people used the word 'wrought' naturally and almost exclusively when they talked about a person labouring with certain tools or animals, and it always carried a sense of wholehearted commitment to the task. You wrought with horses or with scythe or with a plough; and you might also have wrought at hay or at flax or at bricklaying. So the word implied solidarity with speakers of the South Derry vernacular and a readiness to stand one's linguistic ground: why, then, did I end up going for the more pallid and expected alternative 'worked'?
The answer is, I suppose, because I thought twice. And once you think twice about local usage you have been displaced from it, and your right to it has been contested by the official linguistic censor with whom another part of you is secretly in league. You have been translated from the land of unselfconsciousness to the suburbs of the mot juste. This is, of course, a very distinguished neighbourhood and contains important citizens like Mr Joyce, persons who sound equally at home in their hearth speech and their acquired language, persons who seem to have obliterated altogether the line between self-conscious and unselfconscious usage, and to have established uncensored access to every coffer of the word-hoard. But this spontaneous multivocal proficiency is as far beyond most writers as unbroken residence within the first idiom of a hermetically sealed, univocal home place. Our language may indeed be our world, but our writing, unless we happen to belong with the multitudinous geniuses like Joyce or Shakespeare, or with those whom we might call the monoglot geniuses - like John Clare - our writing is unlikely ever to be entirely co-extensive with that world."
/ Seamus Heaney |
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