An Irishman's Diary by Pol O Muiri
Irish Times 6 October 1998
What fascinates most is that this cultural exchange occurred almost unnoticed. The gaudy to-ing and fro-ing of contemporary literature has none of the lyrical honesty and heartbreaking poetry of O'Grianna's encounter.
Here was a man, like many of his generation, with pride in himself and his people, with ear for the music of the spoken word, learning from a neglected tradition. This cross-pollination and whispered discourse was to last well into this century. The Donegal poet Cathal O'Searcaigh, a man only in his 40s, remembers his own father returning from work in Scotland and reciting Burns.
Burns spoke to the native speakers of Donegal in a way, which was often magical. It is difficult to see Burns or the language he spoke as being "ours" or "theirs". It lived among the predominately Catholic, predominately monoglot Irish speakers on Ulster's western seaboard long before unionism decided it needed a counterbalance to a republican cultural agenda.
Michael Longley
An added twist is provided by the poem Phemios and Medon by Michael Longley. Longley takes the story from the Odyssey and rewrites the Greek into as near a living Ulster-Scots vernacular as you're likely to get:
Still looking for a scoot-hole,
Phemios the poet
In swithers, fiddling with his harp, jukes to the hatch,
Lays the bruckly yoke between porringer and armchair,
Makes a ram-stam for Odysseus, grammels his knees.
Then bannies and bams we this highfalutin blether....
{Still looking for a rat-hole, Phemios the poet
In hesitation, fiddling with his hard, ducks to the hatch,
Lays the brittle implement between porringer and armchair,
Makes recklessly for Odysseus, grabs his knees,
The cajoles and bums with this high-falutin' blether.....J
No navvy, Longley - educated in the classics at Trinity, born and raised in Belfast, on Ulster's eastern seaboard. His poem is further proof of the power of the Scots on the imagination. It is the words that matter: the imaged they evoke in the mind that count. The use that "them" and "us" make out language seems petty in the light and O'Grianna's and O Searcaigh's and Longley's epiphanies.
That, I believe , is how it should be and that is the challenge faced by all artists in the North, more so now then ever to send the needle on the cultural compass spinning between east and west while all the time searching for true North.
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