“Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.”

John Donne

***

First ever Greek holiday....always remember to lock the door. The goat was the ringleader who butted into our private space and of course the others followed...guess they must have read ANIMAL FARM.

https://youtu.be/swMpihgFDA4

The title "Anois teacht an Earraigh" is from an Irish poem Cill Aodáin by the blind poet Antaine Ó Raifteirí (1784-1835). ;One of 9 children who caught the smallpox...it blinded him and killed the others. One of the last things he ever saw was the other children laid out dead.

He lived by playing his fiddle and performing his songs and poems in the mansions of the Anglo-Irish gentry.

His work draws on the forms and idiom of Irish poetry, and although it is regarded as marking the end of the old literary tradition, Ó Raifteirí and his fellow poets did not see themselves in this way.Raftery was lithe and spare in build and not very tall but he was very strong and considered a good wrestler. He always wore a long frieze coat and corduroy breeches.

All the Irish of my generation would have learnt this at school. The rousing Óró, sé do bheatha 'bhaile has almost the same line but it is the coming of summer and I often conflated them...whether it was the coming of spring or summer!  Ah well sure ya can have everything.

Such are the wee little things knocking about inside the head of an Irishman like myself...can't be helped!

I remember passing a little school one day and this wafted out in a myriad of little off-key voices and it was as if little flowers of sound flourished there in mid-air. It was a thing of fragile beauty and I plucked it from the Spring breeze and tucked it behind my mind. 40 years later it resurfaced and made itself known to the old man I had become.

But my now the world had gone on and it was a different Spring that wanted me to put it into words.

.But as we Irish have it: " Bíonn dhá insint ar scéal agus dhá leagan déag ar amhrán!"

Or to English it for you: " There are two tellings to every story, and twelve versions of every song!"

This is my version with its pale and almost see-through hope with only the Irish title hanging on in there.

This is the great Frank O'Connor's translation.

Now with the springtime
The days will grow longer
And after St. Bride's day'
My sail I'll let go
I put my mind to it,
And I never will linger
Till I find myself back
In the County Mayo.

"Anois teacht an Earraigh
beidh an lá dúl chun shíneadh,
Is tar eis na féil Bríde
ardóigh mé mo sheol.
Go Coillte Mach rachad
ní stopfaidh me choíche
Go seasfaidh mé síos
i lár Chondae Mhaigh Eo."

His most famous poem is his Is Mise Raifteirí ...again a beloved staple of a 60's Irish school day.

Is Mise Raifteirí an file,
Lán dúchais is grádh,
Le súile gan solas,
Le ciúnas gan crá.
Ag dul síar ar m'aistear
Le solas mo chroí
Fann agus tuirseach
Go deireadh mo shlí

Féach anois mé
Is mo chúl le bhfalla
Ag seinm ceoil
Do phócaí folamh

I'm Raftery the poet,
Full of hope and love,
With eyes without sight,
My mind without torment.
Going west on my journey
By the light of my heart.
Weary and tired
To the end of my road

Behold me now
With my back to the wall
Playing music
To empty pockets.

And here is the first verse and chorus of  Óró sé do bheatha abhaile!

’Sé do bheatha, a bhean ba léanmhar
do bé ár gcreach tú bheith i ngéibhinn
do dhúiche bhreá i seilbh meirleach
's tú díolta leis na Gallaibh.

Chorus:

Óró, sé do bheatha bhaile
óró, sé do bheatha bhaile
óró, sé do bheatha bhaile
anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh.

Hail, oh woman, who was so afflicted,
It was our ruin that you were in chains,
Our fine land in the possession of thieves...
While you were sold to the foreigners!

Chorus:

Oh-ro, welcome home
Oh-ro, welcome home
Oh-ro, welcome home
Now that summer's coming!

The great R.D(Rahul Dev)Burman lovingly known as Pancham. This is his  song from the film Hare Rama Hare Krishna( 1971 ) sung by his wife Asha Bhosle along with Usha Iyer and chorus. We had no idea what we were singing! We just loved the sounds and music! The hit for us was the joy and delight it brought to our little English kitchen ....making the salad exciting! Pancham and Ashe loved cooking and would have cooking competitions between them. Oh those evergreen Hindi songs!
"Piya tu ab to aa jaa, hey hey hey hey!"( wot great crazy panting and the cry of "Monica darling!") was another great favourite as was Nahin Nahin Abhi and Sun Sun Didi Didi. Then there was one in which a drummer scatted his tik takka tick to her and another with I LIKE YOU kept breaking in in English only to change to I LOVE YOU by the end! And her high pitched voice contrasted with a deep gravelly growly male voice was just so much fun! It's only with the Internet that I can see what we were singing and get translations! Oh our world was so....innocent back then as Hindi and its swirl of music hath us enthralled.


Dum maaro dum
Mit jaaye gham
Bolo subaha shaam
Hare Krishna hare Krishna hare Krishna Hare Ram
Dum maaro dum
Mit jaaye gham
Bolo subaha shaam
Hare Krishna hare Krishna hare Krishna Hare Ram


Take another hit

Take another hit*, all your worries will disappear
From morning to night sing, “Hare Krishna Hare Ram!”*

What has the world given us?
What have we taken from the world?
Why should we worry about anyone?
What has anyone done for us?

Take another hit, all your worries will disappear
From morning to night sing, “Hare Krishna Hare Ram!”

Whether we want to live or die
We won’t be afraid of anyone
The world won’t be able to stop us
For we will do what we want

Me and my big sister Junie entertaining ourselves before the advent of telly back in '63. We made replicas of all ten prints and swapped...she wearing me...I wearing her....become someone else even with this one little gesture. And indeed she would walk into my mind as easy as a lift the latch and walk right in. I too was free to walk into her thoughts and visit how she saw the world. Wrote this for Women's Day because this gentle 18 year old woman meant the world to me. Still does....always will.

My da's da died before I was born so I never knew him...only shards of stories...fragments of who he might have been. I used to walk around the farm imagining him doing the exact same back in the day of say 1922.  When I was as small as stupid and as impressionable as hell my uncle would answer a normal question about my granda with a tall tale such as this. He'd tell me the most surreal things with a straight poker face and I love him so much I believed anything and everything he'd make up. If my father gave me his love of poetry...it was Uncle Mikey who made me one with all his glorious making up! Nellie used to scold him about this but it didn't stop him as the words coming out of his mouth grew into an enchanted entangled forest. He was the treasure trove of my childhood and I was rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Hiraeth, pronounced "here eyeth" is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. It is defined it as homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire...a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that never was.

Hiraeth is best buddies with the Portuguese concept of saudade (a key theme in Fado music), Brazilian Portuguese banzo (more related to homesickness), Turkish gurbet, Galician morriña, Romanian dor.

*******

For 3 wonderful nights over Christmas in the Chiesa San Vidal in Venice we watched with delight the cello playing of Nazzareno Balduin of the Interpreti Veneziani. His body transformed itself into the music as he played with such gusto and grace.  This poem was written in praise of him in the still moment before he entered a piece...his hand floating in the air...stroking the music and taming it. Even when not playing he was playing! And doing so...so beautifully! So...beautifully!

Tilly's stammer vanished when she sang so I sang to her and got her to sing back to me...the call and response of the sea shanty was an excellent device to utilise. So I would sing to her: "PASS THE BUTTER TILLY...DON'T PET THE BUTTER SILLY!"

The stammer would also be no more if she mimicked voices so we often stepped into the borrowing of W.C. Fields' voice. She would also "N" words so that "porridge! would become "Norrige!"  She would also leave the first letter of the word off so that "dog" would become an "OG!" However she would also make up her own words like a little Adam so that a 'cat" was always an. . .  
"ANA BOOBOO!"  She would also slur a sentence into its component sounds and tones and inflections ending in one clear word at the end as in "Wouldyoulikeanicecupof...TEA!"  Such are the learning curves when one engages with the delights of the language.

Sung to the tune of BLOW BOYS BLOW!

"O Congo she's a mighty river,
( blow boys blow )
Where fever makes the white man shiver.
Blow my bully boys blow!"

The News of the Screws or The Screws of the World as it was called even back in Shakey's day probably had their own Clive Good-man who probably had a terrible hack hacking...cough. Shakespeare wrote the now alas lost play KING MURDOCK or as it was subtitled ALL'S UNWELL THAT ENDS ILL.

Frederick Greenwood, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, met in his club one day Lord Riddell and in the course of conversation Riddell said to him, "You know, I own a paper."

"Oh, do you?" said Greenwood, "what is it?"

"It's called the News of the World—I'll send you a copy", replied Riddell, and in due course did so. Next time they met Riddell said, "Well Greenwood, what do you think of my paper?"

"I looked at it", replied Greenwood, "and then I put it in the waste-paper basket. And then I thought, 'If I leave it there the cook may read it'—so I burned it!"

The last edition was published on the 10 of July back in 2011..I am celebrating it's GONE-NESS!

Breakdown during a funeral...