March Book of the Month: Northern Alchemy
NORTHERN ALCHEMY
by Christine De Luca
(Patrician Press)
Raised wi twa languages
is unconscious faestin: twa wyes o tinkin.
Een extends da tidder; can shaa wis anidder wirld
yet foo aa wirlds is jöst da sam, but different.
Sam but different, Christine De Luca
Walter Sutherland died in August 1850 in the town of Skaw on the island of Unst, the most northerly settlement of the United Kingdom, where he had been born nearly seventy years earlier. This extremity of the British Isles is popularly believed to be the site of the death of Norn, the Scandinavian language spoken in the Shetlands, Orkney and even in the very far north of the British mainland; Sutherland, a fisherman, was apparently the last native speaker.
Norn had been on the wane for many years by the time Sutherland passed away. In the early 18th century, it was already the language of the elder generation. By 1773, it was declared ‘extinct’ in Orkney and its use in Shetland was extremely rare. Contemporary descriptions of the language describe it as ‘corrupt’ or ‘rude’ Danish, and its name implies a relationship to Norwegian or Norse. Orkney and Shetland were settled by Vikings in the 800s, and within 150 years, a form of Norse language peculiar to these islands had developed. It was the primary language of Orkney and Shetland for nearly half a millennium, and hung on as the islands were Christianised; here is the Lord’s Prayer in Shetland Norn:
Fy vor or er i Chimeri. / Halaght vara nam dit.
La Konungdum din cumma. / La vill din vera guerde
i vrildin sindaeri chimeri. / Gav vus dagh u dagloght brau.
Forgive sindorwara / sin vi forgiva gem ao sinda gainst wus.
Lia wus ikè o vera tempa, / but delivra wus fro adlu idlu.
[For do i ir Kongungdum, u puri, u glori.] Amen.
However in the 15th century Scottish influence over the islands grew, and by the time they were gifted to the Scottish King James III in 1468-9, Norn was inexorably being supplanted by Scots English. In an article on the British Council website, Christine de Luca describes the state of Shetlandic or Shetland dialect (she uses the terms interchangeably) when she was a child:
I grew up in rural 1950s Shetland and, at that time, it was widely spoken by all sections of society. English was the language of the classroom and of formal occasions, but most people were comfortable speaking their mother tongue in the community. It was, in terms of the spoken word at least, a largely bilingual environment. However, there were few fluent readers and writers.
This is reminiscent of descriptions of Norn’s demise in the 16th century, which was hastened by the English schools built by Christian settlers, and may well have been the fate of the Pictish language probably spoken by the pre-Viking inhabitants of Shetland Isles a thousand years ago. These patterns repeat themselves. There is a difference between the language of officialdom, and the language of the hearth, of dinner-parties, of lullabies and jokes, and of poetry. Northern Alchemy, published by Patrician Press, is De Luca’s full-blooded and embodied poetry in Shetlandic, with English translations next to them. It is a bringing together of the official language and the real language of Shetland, and saying that we can have both, rather than having to choose. The Shetlandic poems are in bold, while the English translations are in grey: still clearly readable but definitely secondary.
The poems are various, and are not thematically linked per se: this is a collection of work previously published elsewhere, alongside never-before-seen poems. However certain images and themes predominate and recur: birds, the sky, the sea, journeys and language.
De Luca’s book is my latest foray into that most seductive subset of poetry: island verse. One of the great twentieth century poets, Kamau Brathwaite, used the term ‘tidalectics’ to describe his specifically Caribbean poetics, as opposed to the Western ‘dialectic’ method. ‘Tidalectic’ poetry is built on a system of repetitive rhythm which reflects the cyclical and reciprocal relationship between the land and sea. From a very different context, de Luca’s poetry has rhythms also deeply affected by the terrestrial/oceanic relationship, from the very initial image from the first poem ‘Gyaain ta de eela (Going evening sea-fishing)’ as a number of cycles are invoked: the setting sun, the easing wind, the seasonal shifts. The fishers are pulled back home ‘on a flowin tide’, where they eat their catch ‘tae tales o uncan Odysseys/ in idder voes’ (English: to tales of strange Odysseys/ in other voes). The Odyssean reference reminds us of the double-symbol of the island: it can be both Ithaca, the home, and Ogygia, Thrinacia, Aeaea – the site of wanderings.
‘Bio-rhythms’ laps against the edge of the page as it describes the sea ‘quarrelling’ or ‘tölli-ing’ with the land, whilst also summoning the image of a pair of fulmers looking after their young: ‘[w]an at sea, wan on da nest/ een spellin tidder’ (One at sea, one at the nest/ each spelling the other). The symbiotic relationship between the land and the sea is encompassed in these two birds, and the poem uses these comings and goings to frame the crofters that fill a middle stanza, before returning to the birds in the end. What’s really interesting, however, is how the Shetlandic version embodies this coming-going relationship with repeated sounds in the first and final stanza, whilst the English-language translation can’t quite do it. De Luca’s embodied ‘mother tongue’ poetry does seem to fundamentally capture the sound she is angling for in a way that the English can’t.
‘Sam but different’ is De Luca’s most obvious comment on the question of language, and her bilingual state. Here is the Shetlandic and English, next to one another:
I reproduce both in full here to show the interesting way in which the reading of this book changes. To begin with, I would try and read the Shetlandic and give up early on, read the English in full, and then go back to the Shetlandic and work through it with the English in mind. However, as I progressed through the book, I slowly found myself understanding more and more, ‘makkin sense o things’, referring to the English only when I couldn’t at all get the sense. But sense had become stretched for me at this point. The ‘sense’ of the poem only partially lies in what it literally describes. It also lies in the way a poem sounds and the way it works on the breath; the way it is embodied. I began to be content with not knowing exactly what the words meant, and instead allowing myself to not immediately understand (to be fair, most of the time when I’m reading English-language poetry I don’t understand what I’m encountering on the first read anyway; why should I expect to understand Shetlandic straight off?)
The translations next to each represent exactly what De Luca raises in ‘Sam but Different’. Two different ways of thinking about a subject, with one extending the other. A Japanese translation would offer a further extension, and a Polish translation a new view. With Shetlandic however, it is close enough to English to allow a monoglot a new perspective on old images.
I started this piece by saying that Norn died when William Sutherland did, in the summer of 1850. In fact, that’s probably not quite true. According to the Shetland Heritage website, the Lord’s Prayer was still said in Norn on the island of Foula until the end of the 19th century; and there is a report of someone singing a verse from the poem The Eagle Song on the same island in the 1950s. There is also a mysterious website which claims that older people in Caithness parlay in Norn to this day. Whether or not this is true, it does go to show that languages echo into one another. Just as the Lord’s Prayer in Norn can nearly be read by an English speaker, with a little imagination and willing, De Luca’s Shetlandic poetry revealed itself to me slowly and cunningly, shedding its guard as I recognised patterns and sounds, while maintaining its mystery, in the unfamiliar words.
by James Tookey
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Northern Alchemy by Christine De Luca is published by Patrician Press, and can be bought here. It is the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month for March 2020.
Notes:
For a good history of Norn, see Michael Barnes’ article ‘The Study of Norn’ – very findable online. This website is also good: http://nornlanguage.x10.mx/
Good island poets: Sappho, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop (sort of), Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Kathleen Jamie (sort of), G.B. Edwards, Niall Campbell…