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Dialann

March was nice. April is the most beautiful month of the Irish year. We have cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, pear blossoms, budding ash and oak and beech, good cold crisp weather in the morning and evening, and a chance, at least, of some warm sunshine in between. I am growing again, I mean growing plants: sage, rosemary and garlic to start off with. The wet weather has been excellent for the rhubarb, I have frozen 8 bags of it and I still can't see that the orchard has noticably less of it growing.

Today we have a bank holiday in Ireland, so I'm preparing for class tomorrow, doing laundry, looking after my mother, and planning out my language targets for the next few months. I also need to investigate so much about like, what I'm going to do with my life, because I like what I'm doing now but it's not sustainable for ever - I really would like to move countries; logically I should go to France (or I guess Belgium is also a possibility).

Language:

Irish - I want to improve my dialectical knowledge of Irish. I don't necessarily like how people who only speak the standard dialect are seen among some groups of Native-Native speakers, which always made me reflexively proud of my very standardised Irish but I am also interested in the Kerry/Munster dialect for it's own merits, so I would like to learn some. I think reading some Maidhc Dainín O Sé will definitely help, but I'll also need to seek out some TG4 material for aural/oral work.

French - I'm relatively happy with my French, I think that if I had had the time to study properly for the C1 exam I did, then I may even have been able for the C2. I'm reading Mémoires d'Hadrien at the moment, and it's excellent for unusual and poetic vocabulary, as well as having a great sense of the Material ... I'm finding it easy but still learning something, which is a nice happy medium. I have also restarted a vocabulary notebook, although I didn't get to use it over the last week, and kept my notes in the annotations instead. I think I will have to find a good French news-source as well, to keep up with Affairs, and learn good little turns of phrase that I might have missed so far.

Danish - HMMM it's going well. I suppose I managed to get by alright with it in Copenhagen, and my reading is really really getting there. I visited a museum and found I could understand maybe 60% of what was written on the information plaques. I can even sort of write okay, if I do it slowly and simply. But my oral production SUCKS. I signed up for Duolingo again for Danish only, and the placement test put me 75% of the way through the course ... this is not true really. Oh well. It's really not a difficult language for a English-speaker, and I hope to keep learning it.

ITALIAN - over the past few months I have neglected my Italian, but I have bought a grammar workbook and a dictionary and I'm going to seriously seriously apply myself to it. My comprehension is already o-kayyy, I can usually understand what my mutuals write on t. for instance, but like ... these are short texts for which I have a lot of background knowledge. I can also understand most newspaper-type writing, reading very slowly, if only because the vocabulary is so similar to French. I'm not really sure why Italian is often perceived as a relatively easy language for English speakers though! Yes it's Indo-European and is broadly familiar in many ways etc. but it's not necessarily that quick to reveal its secrets ... I wonder if I need to think about dialect in this case as well (I certainly am not going to worry about that in Danish!). Anyway, ESC Turin 2022 is coming up in the next couple of weeks and I hope to get plenty of listening practice in. I already can sing along to (and understand) 98% of Brividi by Mahmood and Blanco. Progress progress dhdhdh

Russian - idk what the hell I am going to do with this language. I studied it! I took intensive grammar classes! And it's still so hard! There's so much of it - not only grammar but an abyss of vocabulary, with so many synonyms, so many word-variations! My knowledge of cases (via Irish and Latin) helps 33% of the way. Then there's aspect. Maybe Nabokov was right, most  students of Russian are just not going to be able to get beyond basic phrases. I really don't know. I hate to give up, I have never stopped learning a language, but Russian is an uphill struggle for real. Sometimes I just see a mile-long word that I don't understand and just think I should forget about all of it. It's not like I really want to move to Russia - I also considered picking up Belarusian (fell in love with Uladzimir Karatkievich's writing) but I mean, the grammar would have all the same challenges, wouldn't it? ... Russian is certainly is on pause.

Arabic - oh, I actually gave up on Arabic, not that I really started in earnest, but wow. It's like maths, you take one glance into the machinery and it you're not awed and terrified, you're missing something. It's very beautiful but basically I think it would be impossible to learn unless you dedicated a few years to it, and to Arabic exclusively, ideally in an immersive environment. That's what T. E. Lawrence and Ronald Storrs did. It's the only thing that seems to work. I just can't do that right now.

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If I got to the stage where I had fluent English, Irish, French, Italian and Danish I think I would be foolish to not be pretty happy. I don't know if there are any other languages I particularly interested in learning actually, except maybe Czech. A few touristic phrases in modern Hebrew to travel there to see my friend. Maybe when I get to around 50 and I want a pleasantly unfinishable project, I would look at Lithuanian, for fun. Of the ancient languages that I'm a bit familiar with, I prefer Latin to Greek ... would love to pick some up again. But that's 7 tops, for my whole life; I think it's achievable.


Sorry I need to work through this kind of thing in my head occasionally. Wish I had the same amount of thoughts about my career lol

Happy New Year!

All is relatively well in Ireland. I am writing fiction again after a long and reluctant break away from it. Currently, I'm actually writing what would unavoidably be categorised as fanfiction, just to stretch my muscles a little bit. I also signed up for a short online course in fiction writing, which seems low-maintenance enough to cope with my irregular schedule, and full of interesting people. It's also free, which was my priority if I'm being fully honest. I'm hoping that doing some very short writing exercises will provide a sort of relapse-gateway-drug effect in order to get used to writing (fiction) again.

The short project I mentioned is an epilogue for a Mads Mikkelsen Nicolas Winding Refn film called Valhalla Rising, and isn't ambitious but I'm just enjoying the process - no pressure regarding word count or anything else. It's at about 3000 words at the moment, or just under that. The adjustable target is about 5000-6000 but it all depends on how closely it keeps my interest.

In fact, as I mentioned a film above, I thought I'd say that I'm watching much fewer films these days. I took it as an assignment to give myself an intensive course in film over the last few years. I had seen about 5 or 6 films in total when I entered university, and only began to slowly appreciate the medium under the kind and willing tutelage of a friend of mine. (We still watch movies together, by the way, even though our tastes differ wildly). The last film I watch ed was And Then We Danced. Truly fucking life-changing film. I loved it. Will anything else measure up, ever, I wonder? In any case, most of the remaining films that I want to watch aren't yet released, or else I can't find them (and I'm good at finding films, believe me).

Before I start to bore myself and you, moving on.

Language targets:

• I really dislike how much I've jumped around over the last six months as regards what language I'm aiming to learn. I was very used to having the structure of formal language education (re. Irish and French) and/or the presence of a native speaker that I wanted to impress (re. Russian). Since August, I've mentioned Italian, Arabic, German, Danish and Belrusian all as languages I'm learning, and obviously I have been learning little bits of them, but it's time (January) to pick like, maximum three.
• These three, in order of priority, are: Italian, Danish, and Scots Gaelic. I'm leaving Arabic rest for the moment entirely, having learnt the alphabet to a decent standard, and will come back to it later. As regards Russian and Belarusian, both are beautiful, and I have maybe an A2.2 / B1.1 standard in the former. Having lost 80% of my fascination with certain Russian authors (ahem. Tolstoy.), on which most of my motivation to learn the language was based, I think I can be happy with a decent-ish conversational standard which might help me through a holiday in Saint Petersburg or something. As for Belarusian, which I just started being interested in lately, I maintain that I sincerely want to learn it and become fluent, out of pure cultural and linguistic curiosity, but that my Italian must come first.
• As such, I am going to commit to doing a half an hour of Italian every day, a quarter of an hour of Danish every day, and a little bit of Scots Gaelic, even if only five minutes, every couple of days. It's not so much the scheduling that I needed, however, as the discipline to say that everything else is stricted verboten, barring some maintenance work in French, which mostly takes the form of occasional new vocabulary I come across while reading.

Other news: January in the west of Ireland is wet and cold. I am doing a lot of translation work recently, mostly French, and actually I'm hoping to get my first project in Italian underway soon. Am busy. My dog, Holly, is very well.

I am actually going to leave this here at the moment, but I intend to also make a dedicated post with some reflections on what I want to read this year, both in terms of fiction and non-fiction. I have been working on trying to cut down my overly-intimidating to-be-read list.


Thanks,

Michelle

I have finished my MLitt in Early Modern History and moved back to Ireland. I have already done a few job applications and interviews, and I have a small translation contract to follow up on but I have no actual job at the moment, which is so weird to me. I've been working and volunteering on-and-off since I was 15 or 16, and I've always been too busy. I only got back last night, so today is just laundry and car-washing and bookshelf-organisation. I felt like full-time study (especially with completely unstructured time) was bad for me honestly, but I think and hope that I'll get a good result on my final dissertation. I had a good time last week. I saw Edinburgh again (my beloved), Perth, Dundee, Stirling, and visited my cousins in Northumberland. They have such a lovely household and lifestyle, I felt a bit jealous (not in a mean way) of how nice their parents are to them. I think we all really liked each other, I wish we met more frequently - it had been ten or eleven years since we met last. I don't plan to have children but I really admire and treasure those households where they have children and raise them right, it's like knowing there's a solid foothold in the world even if you can't or wouldn't want to stand there. I have more to say, but no time xxx

I was looking back on some of the notes I took in a Celtic Civilisation class that I did in undergraduate, and I was thinking about how Tara in particular is such an interesting site, not because there's a single coherent vision behind it as a sacred landscape, but because it was sacralised over a vast swathe of time, by many different generations and cultures. I think it's positive, as well, that Irish people are generally very aware of how it isn't a "Celtic" place but simply Irish, with monuments testfying to continuous activity stretching from the Neolithic to the Iron Age - as such, anything Celtic at Tara is a late element - ancient but comparatively recent. 

The oldest visible archaeological feature is Dumha na nGiall; I always see it translated as the Mound of the Hostages, but dumha is essentially a barrow tomb; the people who lived in Ireland during Middle Neolithic wouldn't have used a Gaelic term, of course (we don't know what language they spoke, not even which family it belonged to - these structures pre-date our estimates for when Proto-Celtic began to develop on the continent), but that's the name that the later groups who lived around Tara gave to it, and the superstructure definitely looks like a barrow / cairn. 

Incidentally ... growing up, we always called them giant's graves, and I notice that in Icelandic they use the word Jötundys, while in Danish it's Jættestue: all with that same meaning. I do like that a lot.

I'd quite like to see the illumination of the chamber, which occurs at Samhain and Imbolc (Hallowe'en and Saint Brigid's Day, the 1st of February), I think it would be just as interesting as the more famous Newgrange illumination at the Brú na Boinne complex.* I haven't been around Tara since I was a kid, and if I got to go now, independently, after having studied the area, I'd love to have a proper wander and see Ráth Medb (Maeve's Henge?) too, which is just as ancient, but on currently private farmland. 

Obviously I'd like to revisit the Boyne valley too, my trip there a few years ago was one of the best days of my life. I'm not into the mystic side, but the sensation of such deep time is always really refreshing, and sort of spiritual whether you like it or not! I guess I'm just thinking about ancient Ireland because it's Lúnasa today, and I'm in - lowland! - Scotland, well away from all that environment. Although the Christian sites here are interesting too, of course.

* How funny is it that we call a site from 3200 BC 'New'grange?

I've been thinking about how films set in antiquity use language, and how the decision about which language to choose is made.

There are three films which I think take a good approach:

• Nostos, Il ritorno, dir. Franco Piavoli (1989)
• The Eloquent Peasant, dir. Shadi Abdel Salam (1970)
• Barbaren / Barbarians, from Netflix (2020)

Barbaren's choice to use modern German for the Cherusci (and the other Germanic tribes), and Latin for the Romans would already have been interesting and pleasant to watch, but I especially liked the interplay between Latin and German used by Arminius - his Latin is perfect, and yet careful, slightly formal; it invades his German subtly. If you really listen, rather than just reading the subtitles, you'll notice that as the series goes on, his code-switching collapses a little, producing heart-breaking little sentences like "Hast du familiam?" (spoken to a Germanic soldier) - changing to Latin for the word family. They dealt with language in a relatively simple way, but the inclusion of these kind of details were very nice, in that they contributed, not to the plot, but to the characterisation. 

The Eloquent Peasant, on the surface, takes a similar approach. In 1977, Qussai Samak noted that Egyptian cinema of the time was still beholden to a particular 'literary approach', dominated by the Western tradition, while mentioning Abdel Salam's work as a promising exception [x]. This makes the director's adaption of a poem from the Middle Kingdom, written in about 1850 BC, compelling - it shows a desire to achieve something new with deeply old material. Abdel Salam uses a translation of the Ancient Egyptian into Arabic for the story; this transposition of the language is probably the necessary choice. Just one year before, Abdel Salam had made The Night of Counting the Years, about the tension between Ancient Egyptian culture and the British colonial presence, and this next film of his can be seen as addressing many of the same issues. In Egypt's post-colonial context, the decision to revisit his country's ancient history, and to choose such a socially-aware text as the medium of this exploration, works so well partly because of the use of modern Egyptian Arabic / Masri. Although this is partly obscured for me by my dependence on my English subtitles, I have to imagine that this would have made the film radically immediate to the contemporary audience. The adept and confident use of language by a peasant like Khun-Anup culminates in a cultural and (!) economic victory - he is awarded the property of those who have wronged him. Some western scholars argued against repatriation of artefacts on the basis that ancient and modern Egyptian culture were too far removed for their return to be meaningful - Abdel Salam refutes this succintly by the sheer power of this film to suggest a clear relation between the socio-economic injustices of the Middle Kingdom and the injustices of twentieth-century colonialism. His use of Arabic is intergral to the political message, as it alters the original material in order to clearly address his contemporary situation.  

My favourite treatment of the 'problem' posed by setting modern films in antiquity, however, is Nostos. For the sparingly-written dialogue, Piavoli uses a 'fictional Mediterraean language' - actually a mixture of Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.* He could reasonably expect the (Italian) audience to understand much of what is said, through a combination of prior familiarity with the story, an instinct for Latin, some shared vocabulary with Greek, and the carefully presented contextual evidence, but the most interesting part is what is not immediately understood. The complex nature of the language suits Odysseus / Ulisse, and further, obliges you to listen to the rhythmic, intonational and emotional content of what is said, rather than being satisfied with the more every-day communication of information. The director explained (presented with apologies for any mistakes in the translation):
The human voice is also frequently overwhelmed by environmental sounds, those of the wind or the waves. Only the most important words are allowed to stand out - Odysseus repeating the word mater, or oikos, for example. Oscar Lapeña Marchena writes that there is "a sense of merging with nature: a primitive, basic, nature where man is just one part of a whole, along with the sea, the earth, the flowers, or the moon," and that the film is "pre-Homeric," taking place in an "atemporal world", beyond historicity [x]. There is a lot that we don't understand about the Homeric poems, which have lists of names belonging to men and tribes we have no other record of, and hints at deeper and older mythology than we find in other sources, and which sometimes feature words from a pre-Greek, 'divine', langauge, whose translation we will probably never find out - Piavoli re-introduces a language barrier to remind of us this, but also to make us focus on the orality of the poetry. The words themselves are absorbed by the background sounds, as the human body is often isolated and obscured onscreen. Piavoli privileges the image (rather than dialogue) throughout, though a poet himself, suggesting an effacement of language - with only the return of Odysseus to Ithaka and his reunion with Penelope promising an end to the sense that speech is an insufficient or inferior part of reality.

Incidentally, one film which is crying out for some fun use of old(er) languages is Valhalla Rising, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (2009). It's one of my very subjective favourites, and I think they could have done some very interesting things with the languages of their setting. It's a film which makes a point of creating silence, and even when the characters do speak, there's very little exposition or truly vital information in the dialogue - perfect for a little experimentation. What with it being set in Cataibh / Súðrland in 1000 AD, the possibility of including speech in Norn, Old Gaelic, and Latin feels like a missed opportunity to confuse the majority of the audience and make me personally very happy.

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* Piavoli, F. (2011), 'Nostos, il ritorno e il mito di Ulisse', in G. P. Brunetta (ed.), Metamorfosi del mito classico nel cinema, pp. 131-137, cit. Oscar Lapeña Marchena 'Ulysses in the Cinema: The Example of Nostos, il ritorno' in Rosario Rovira Guardiola (ed.), The Ancient Mediterranean Sea in Modern Visual and Performing Arts: Sailing in Troubled Waters, (London, 2018). [x]