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Dún – Stronghold

Dún

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Id ghéaga daingne
ní bhfaighfidh mé bás choiche
ní thiocfaidh orm aon sceimhle,
ní líonfaidh orm anbhá.
Ní chloisfidh mé
ag gíoscán ins an oíche
fearsad na cairte fuafaire
a ghluaiseann trí pháirc an áir.

Is dún nó daingean iad
do ghéaga i mo thimpeall
do ghuailne leathana
am chosaint ar a lán.
Ag cuardach fothaine dom
ó gharbhshíon na cinniúna
tá gairdín foscaidh le fáilt
idir do dhá shlinneán.

Is sa ghairdín sin
tá beacha is ológa
ta mil ar luachair ann
is na crainn go léir faoi bhláth
i dtús an fhomhair
mar ní thagann aon gheimhridh
is gaoth an tseaca
ní luíonn air anáil.

Is lasmuigh dínn
tá críocha is ciníocha
ag bruíon is ag bunú sibhialtachta
ag puililiú ar an gclár.
Dá mbeadh ceithre creasa
na cruinne in aon chaor lasrach
dá n-imeodih an cosmos
in aon mheall craorag amháin.

Ba chuma liom, do ghéaga
a bheith im thimpeall
níorbh ann do scáth nó eagla
níorbh ann don ocras riamh.
Nuair a fhilleann tú mé
go cneasta isteach id bhaclainn
táim chomh slán sábháilte
leis an gcathair ard úd ar shliabh.

Coinnigh go daingean mé
laistigh den gciorcal draíochta
le teas do cholainne
le teasargan do chabhaile.
Do chneas lem chneas
do bhéal go dlúth lem béalaibh
ní chluinfead na madraí allta
ag uallfairt ar an má.

Ach níl in aon ní ach seal:
i gcionn leathuaire
pógfaidhh tú mé ar bharr m’éadain
is casfaidh tú orm do dhrom
is fágfar mé ar mo thaobh féin
don leaba dhúbailte
ag cuimhneamh faoi scáth do ghuailne
ná tiocfaidh orm bás riamh roimh am.


Stronghold

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

In your arms’ fortress
I will face neither eternal death
nor terror,
panic will not fill me.
I will not hear
the grinding in the night
of the war carriages’ axles
rolling through the battlefields.

You arms are a fortress
around me,
your broad shoulders
completely protecting me.
I seek my shelter
from fate’s storm
in the shaded garden ring
between your shoulder blades.

And in that garden
are bees and olives
with honey on the rushes there,
the trees in full bloom
even at the start of Autumn;
winter never comes there,
the frosty winds
never blow there.

Beyond the fortress
walls are people
struggling and building civilizations,
a mad hullabaloo.
If the four corners of the globe
were one flaming berry
if the cosmos were rolled
into one crimson ball

It wouldn’t matter to me, your limbs
still around me;
no room for shadow or fear,
no room there for hunger.
When you fold me
gently inside the bend of your arm
I am safer than
the city high on a mountain.

The fortress keeps me
within the magic circle
with the body’s heat
with the body’s deliverance
skin on skin
mouth on mouth
I will not hear the wild beasts
howling on the plain.

But nothing outlasts its time:
in a half an hour
you will kiss the top of my forehead
and turn from me on your back
in the double bed
and I will think about your shoulders’ shadow
and not that death is always approaching me.


Last month, a reader wrote to request some help with this poem; they were dissatisfied with the translation by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, which appears in Pharaoh's Daughter, and had some questions about a few of the trickier lines.

I’ve noted before that I consider Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill far beyond my translation skills, in either Irish or English, but I decided to give it a shot. I don’t think my translation is as good as Ní Chuilleanáin’s (an accomplished poet in her own right; here’s an example); it’s a bit more literal, though, which is what I think my reader was looking for in the kinds of questions in the e-mail.

Any translation is an interpretation; some things are harder to write in English than in Irish, and vice versa, and some things that make perfect sense in one language are pure nonsense in another. Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation of this poem is certainly more interpretive than mine, and takes some liberties that I, surely far less familiar than Ní Chuilleanáin with Irish idiom, dare not take.

This poem is a good companion piece to the other Ní Dhomhnaill poem, “Oileán”, that I’ve tried to translate. Like “Oileán,” “Dún” is a sensuous poem, but the sensuousness is undercut by some of its recurring images. “Oileán” posits love in the midst of loneliness; “Dún” places love in a bleak landscape of destruction. Safety, protection, and certainty are contrasted with images of war and tumult and wild beasts; but at the same time, the safety is represented by a fortress, a martial image that echoes the war carriages and battlefield of the first stanza.

My favorite word in this poem is “puililiú”; my dictionary sent me to “fuilibiliú”, which gave me “hullabaloo; halloo, yell.” Ní Chuilleanáin doesn’t translate this line directly–she gives “multiplying on the globe” for what the people beyond the stronghold’s charmed circle are up to–but I simply had to use it, even if it clashes a bit with the rest of the poem.

I also love the internal echoes of “le teas do cholainne / le teasargan do chabhaile.” I can’t render it very well in English. “Teas” is “heat”; “teasargan” is “deliverance” or “rescue”. Both “colainn” and “cabhail” are words for “body”; I’m sure there are subtle distinctions between them of which I’m not aware, and that further enhance that lovely balance between “teas” and “teasargan.”

“Dún” should probably be translated as “Fortress”–it appears in many Irish place names associated with ancient forts–but I like the title Ní Chuilleanáin chose because it echoes the holding arms and strong back that are the poem’s central images.

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Home Delivery

My last Sunday Star Tribune newspaper landed on my doorstep early yesterday morning; by the time I’d ventured out to collect it, I’d already read the New York Times headlines, the Washington Post book pages, and my favorite funnies (including Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County, blessedly rebroadcast in this digital age). I’ve let my newspaper subscription lapse because most weeks I find myself hauling unread paper to the recycling bin, and tend to use the newspaper more as a firebuilding tool on camping trips than as a news source.

It will be a little odd not to have the newspaper around, because I’ve been an avid newspaper reader for about thirty years. I first started reading a newspaper regularly in 5th grade; we were living in West Germany, and had the Stars & Stripes (the military’s paper–surprisingly good and independent) delivered, along with a week-old Lewiston Sun-Journal, my father’s hometown paper. Once I was out on my own in college, subscribing to the local newspaper was one of the things that fell into the category of getting the electricity and telephone turned on when setting up a home. In addition to my subscription, I also made a habit on the weekends of venturing out for a regional or national paper, usually the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune.

Not take the newspaper? Unthinkable!

Two big changes have converged, though, to make taking the paper less important to me. The first is parenthood: I don’t have the time to sit down with a cup of coffee and the newspaper now that I’m also making breakfasts, distributing laundry, encouraging kids to get their coats and shoes, and making sure everyone gets out the door to school, swimming lessons, or Cub Scouts. The daily paper subscription was the first casualty to the compression of time; I’ve finally admitted that the weekend paper was a casualty, too, a long time ago.

The other big change is the Internet, which has made global news sources abundantly and ubiquitously available. Using Google Reader and Feedly (technical details here), I can assemble my own newspaper with headlines from not only the Star Tribune but also the New York Times, Manchester Guardian, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Lebanon Star. I can beef up my comics page with classics like Bloom County, new favorites like Cul de Sac, and web-only strips like xkcd, and leave Family Circus and Garfield out. I don’t read the sports pages, so I don’t need a sports section: I’ve got a section in my paper for bicycle commuting, though, and a great science page. My books pages draw from not only the New York Times, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor review pages, but from a wide range of book bloggers, writers, and poets. And since all of this content is stored “in the cloud,” I can read the funnies on my netbook while I’m making my coffee in the kitchen, read the headlines upstairs while checking my e-mail and bank balances, and even peruse the latest in books and poetry during the five-minute inter-pomodoro breaks at work. In the evening I catch up on the news from around the world and the neighborhood, read a little science and sociology, and exercise my righteous indignation on my opinion pages, which draw widely from a range that includes Andrew Sullivan and the Socialist Worker. I probably consume more news now, albeit in smaller chunks, than when I used to head back to my grad school apartment with an armload of papers and the Village Voice.

Newspaper home delivery, like so many other things we take for granted (highways, shopping malls, parking lots), is a product of post-war suburbanization, and its historical moment is probably coming to a close. Before the middle class fled the cities for the suburbs, newspapers were bought at the corner store, or the newspaper stand, or from a newsboy. Home delivery was the newspapers’ solution to maintaining readership in the less dense suburbs; that it coincided with a bicycle-riding baby boom of pre-teen surplus labor gave rise to the paperboy, one of the icons of mid-century Middle America. Paperboys have long since been replaced by adults in cars or vans, covering much larger routes than would have been possible for a kid on a bike.

Home delivery will likely become a premium service in coming years; subscriptions are falling, and it no longer makes sense to subsidize delivery (the logistical infrastructure of distributing newspapers is enormous and complex, and unlikely to survive the falling fortunes of many local and regional papers). I’m at the tail end of the home delivery demographic; the “digital natives” coming of age now have had their online news sources set up much longer than I have, and won’t see physical home delivery of one newspaper as much of a service when they already have virtual home delivery of hundreds.

The fly in the ointment of this brave new world is, of course, the free rider problem. Good journalism is expensive; advertising is a less and less reliable source of revenue (indeed, I see almost no ads at all when I look at my news through Feedly); as an online “subscriber,” I’m not shouldering my financial share of the burden. And I do feel a little guilty about that.

Newspapers need (as the jingle at On the Media goes) a “present and future business model for monetizing the newspaper industry.” Advertising isn’t working; subscriptions are dropping off; and news room jobs are being slashed, which only threatens to make newspapers even less valuable to their readers.

I’m a member of my local public radio and public television services: I get a lot of value from the public broadcast programming, and I’m glad to pay my share. If other news sources that I use had a similar model, I’d be happy to contribute.

Of course, public broadcasting can’t rely entirely on the good will of its users; there are also public funds and foundation grants involved in paying for their services. Surely other news sources, if operated as non-profits, could attract similar foundation support. The challenge would be converting papers to non-profit (rather than money-losing) operations after a decade of debt and unrealistic profit expectations fueled by speculative investors.

If my Internet subscription included a news fee (much like telephone service has those various “access fee” additions), and that fee were distributed either directly to the sources to which I subscribe, or to a foundation that would distribute the money to news gathering services, I’d be perfectly happy. I’d even be happy to participate in something like Kachingle proposes, letting me split a monthly subscription fee amongst the services I find most valuable. Some months might see more of my money going to the Star Tribune, other months to Bookslut, depending on who provides me with the information I use and enjoy most.

But putting all of my media money into one (relatively leaky) bucket? That no longer makes sense.

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Of course, Quangel, it would have been a hundred times better if we’d had someone who could have told us. Such and such is what you have to do; our plan is this and this. But if there had been such a man in Germany, then Hitler would never have come to power in 1933. As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann

More than 70 years on, there are still great gaps in our collective understanding of the Second World War, at least in the United States: we can easily conjure up D-Day, the Battle of Britain, and the liberation of the Nazi death camps; we can imagine the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, and the mushroom clouds over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But there are huge gaps: the Eastern Front is a mystery to most in the West, not just Americans, as are Manchuria, the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia, even the war in the Balkans.

Even more so than the military events of the war, our knowledge of life and death on the home front is spotty at best. Through The Diary of a Young Girl and The Moon Is Down, we’ve learned a little about life in occupied Europe, but we generally know almost nothing about life in Nazi Germany itself. Every Man Dies Alone is, if nothing else, a valuable contribution to our understanding of history, with its densely drawn scenes of a working class neighborhood in Berlin during the Second World War and its sharp but humane view of daily life under the Nazis.

While reading Every Man Dies Alone, I was frequently reminded of George Orwell’s 1984. The Nazis maintain their power not only through brutality (and there is shocking brutality in this novel), but through paranoia: people are systematically divided from each other, made to fear that anyone–not only strangers and neighbors, but lovers and family members–could be a secret informer. Organized resistance to the regime seems almost impossible, and individual resistance both ineffectual and foolhardy. An atomized society, where people don’t dare reach out to each other or speak their minds, is both the ends and the means of the Nazi Party. There are also echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, where Nazi “justice” is presented as capricious and cruel, and the Gestapo as psychological manipulators who can twist the most innocent person into confessing impossible crimes.

What makes Every Man Dies Alone more terrible than Orwell and Kafka, though, is that it isn’t wholly a work of fiction. The novel is based on the case of a German couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who dropped anti-Nazi postcards around Berlin for two years and were executed in 1943. Hans Fallada survived internment in a Nazi asylum, and the novel demonstrates his intimate knowledge of Nazi police and prisons, as well as the network of petty informants and tattlers who helped keep the regime in power. It’s a surprisingly non-ideological novel: the Quangels, who lost their son in the war and are driven to their desperate act of resistance by grief, are not motivated by political or social goals loftier than common decency. And few of the Nazis they encounter and evade are true believers, either: they tend to be thugs or petty potentates driven by power, or decent men who have made painful compromises from which they cannot now escape. Fallada brings the broad sweep of history down to an intimate scale, and offers complex characters who are making their way in brutal circumstances.

As a novel, Every Man Dies Alone suffers a few flaws. It relies on some Dickensian coincidences that stretch the suspension of disbelief, and drops a few story threads just as they’re getting interesting. But these flaws are more than balanced by the richness of the characters. Fallada manages to make even the would-be informant Enno Kluge, and the Gestapo Inspector Escherich (who, in a different time and place, would have made a fine police-procedural hero), into sympathetic characters. The heroes themselves are not perfect–Otto Quangel is emotionally cold and domineering, retired judge Fromm is in retreat from the world–which makes their ability to stand up to the Nazis, however fruitlessly, that much more admirable. It’s also a fast-moving novel, paced like a thriller even when the end is a foregone conclusion (hinted at from the start), told mostly in the present tense with the focus moving nimbly from character to character.

Fallada died in 1947, before Every Man Dies Alone was published. It would be interesting to have had Fallada’s views on the next chapter of Berlin’s history: the Quangels’ apartment block on Jablonskistrasse ended up on the east side of Wall, and the neighborhood had a respite of only a few years before paranoia, fear, and suspicion flooded back, with the Stasi replacing the Gestapo. Knowing how the next forty years would go makes reading Fallada’s novel especially poignant.

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I didn’t do a lot of new-release reading this year: the budget didn’t allow for splurging on books, and the library hold queue for the season’s hot titles was often quite long. But the world of good books is timeless, and there’s no reason that an annual “best of” list should be confined to an arbitrary calendar year. Here are five books I read and loved in 2009.

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada


The best book I read this year was also the last one I read (indeed, it carried over a few days into the new year). Every Man Dies Alone was originally published in Germany in 1947, but only appeared in a U.S. edition, from Melville House Press, this year. It tells the story of a working-class Berlin couple who quietly risk their lives to resist the Third Reich by dropping anti-Nazi postcards around the city. It’s a grim and gritty book, full of brutal and nasty characters, but it’s also a story of great courage and decency, and highlights a chapter of World War II–life within the Nazi regime itself–about which precious little is told in the West.

Stoner by John Williams


Like Every Man Dies Alone, Stoner is a novel of resistance, decency, and dignity, but in a much quieter setting. It tells the story of a farm boy who becomes an English professor at a midwestern university; inspired by the love of language, he struggles with love, politics, and family, apparently accomplishing little of value to the world but much of value to the life of the mind.

The Music of Failure by Bill Holm


The Music of FailureWe lost Bill Holm, essayist, poet, and Prairie philosopher, in February, precisely at the time that we needed his particular perspective the most. His first collection of essays, The Music of Failure, sets the theme for much of his work; it approaches the American Dream from the experiences of Icelandic immigrants on the Minnesota prairie who have apparently failed in so many ways–they die poor, unsung, and forgotten–but turns the Dream on its head in celebrating their quiet strength. There’s a rootedness to Holm’s work, a there-ness and place-ness, that is a powerful antidote to blind ambition; if more people were strong and quiet failures, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

Four Stories by Sigrid Undset


These stories, published in Norwegian at the turn of the 20th century, are like a cool drink of water: graceful, clear, and spare. The subject matter is reminiscent of Henrik Ibsen, but is handled with a wit, tenderness, and generosity that is uniquely Undset’s.

The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno


The Great PerhapsJoe Meno deftly blends satire, fantasy, and realism in this story of clouds, squids, and an unraveling family; this was one of the most inventive novels I’ve read in a long time, peopled with believable, flawed, and compelling characters.

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