Broken English. Heather McHugh
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loves this song's sense of necessary conviviality in the grips of sex and death. Its funniness and feel of fable arise from patterns of analogy, and there are, in the translation, wonderful ambiguities that arise because we don't know exactly where to attach the becauses. (Beier gives us one of each—placing a comma before the first and not the second.) Is the red tail the sign that warns off quarrel, or is the red tail (the blue coat) the content of the quarrel? In the latter case, the “taster of the world” (the lover of barking and butting and fucking) argues that his pleasures are his very fur and feather, his very nature and stripe; no one can quarrel with what is so much a matter of born identity. In either case, the coat and tail are flashed as signs: they serve as the poet's defense against those “old people.”
The oldsters have their own say about sartorial flourish. “A young man can have a robe like an elder's, but he can't have rags like an elder's,” so the elders tell us. Notice what dignities accrue to the old—not the fancy clothes, or big pension, or store-bought Winnebago; any money can buy those. But the way we age, the way we wear and weather, those are ours alone. You can't get store-bought rags. They take years to perfect. It is a wisdom that turns the meaning of wealth inside-out, and knows how nouveau the material senses of riche can be.
Patterns of repetition and variation account for much of the momentum and charge of “Quarrel.” The trail that leads to the shock of “fucks his mother” has proceeded by analogue, sidewindingly innocent (barks worsens into butts, but remains a feature of animal nature; butts worsens into fucks, and suddenly fucks appropriates an object from the realm of the human taboo). Imagine the encounter between missionary niceties and this lively forthrightness. To my mind, such a thought recalls the transcripts we do have of encounters between English officer/lawyers and the native Americans they were trying to convince to sign real estate contracts that would, ultimately, keep the tribes from hunting—even though the tribes were promised they'd retain such rights. At the end of the negotiations, in which any reader of English can see the arts of legal interest at work—arts of representation and persuasion that would later flower into advertising's industry on those same American valleys and plains—and during whose proceedings one sees clearly the respect the native American elders pay their visitors before agreeing to what they clearly understand would mean sharing the land—at the very end of all of these negotiations, a sign appears more telling than the legal signatures. The tribal elder remarks, as he makes his assenting mark on the documents, that the parties must concur on equal footing, being men who share the sense of a single God, men equal under the same God. Whereupon the English officer in attendance replies, in effect: “Very good. We'll send in missionaries to educate you.” It is a moment of pure hubris on the part of the English, a moment in which one can't help wincing at their self-absorption, their indelicacy.
Though one can imagine the ways a merely moralizing reader might dismiss the barks-butts-fucks propositions as crude, and never detect the poem's fundamental subdety and humanity, the last few lines of this Yoruba poem “Quarrel” are as acute, as refined and refining, as any I know. It's a young man's poem to the old, remember, and the address that was begun in lines 5 and 6, with “you old people of this world / don't be my enemies,” now reaches its culmination in “Forgive me, don't fight, / and let me taste the world.” This young man, though flashing his fighting form, is eschewing battle, and asking the elders’ blessing on those other energies of youth (barking, butting, fucking, in full fettle, finest feather—asking a blessing, that is, not on death-dealing but life-loving acts, acts of argument and sport and love). The last two lines (“and let me taste the world / like the fly that interprets the wine”) enact a powerful shift of scale. Like the trail in “Death” that led from tragedy of elephant to comedy of mouse, this poem's thrust includes a sudden turn: after waving red flags, brandishing blues, and generally making much young-male bravado, it comes down to a refinement all the more endearing for taking place on a fly's lip: the molecule of wine the sipper savors (and, in savoring, considers) is, though tiny, yet significant. And the word “interprets” is a gorgeous translatorial move; it takes on added elegance for referring to a feature of the poetic (and readerly) caretaking going on even as we read. The poem, like the world, keeps being remade, fresh and actual, in the senses of its interpreters.
The poem's claims on us are finally funnily disarming, for the speaker who had preened and charged and strutted through the poem turns both as refined as a wine-taster and as humble as a Musca Domestica. It is the wine of the world that is celebrated finally, and that emphasis establishes the true spirit of the poem. Consider the disinclination of so many contemporary American poems either to comedies of bravado or to the savor of a joyous carnality, and you realize why Yoruba poems can so much refresh us. To the extent that they are most interested in private emotion and personal nostalgia, our poets have forgotten how to move; and to the extent that they've lost that capacity to transport and to be transported, lost trans-generational contact, they've forgotten how to swing beyond the singular, and sing.
It is revealing to examine the kind of proverbs the Yoruba people tell. Some Yoruba proverbs have a lot in common with the sayings of European elders. (After all, there is a community of experience in the body of old age, and sometimes elders resemble their counterparts in other societies more than they do the young ones in their own.) It might as well be Yiddish, the Yoruba saying “He who shits on the way will find flies on the way back.” But there are characteristic Yoruba proverbs that seem, on the other hand, refreshingly unEuropean in their moral motions: “A person fetching water from a pool says he saw somebody wearing a mask. What will he say who fetches water from a stream?” The art of Yoruba masquerade has its own formulaic tradition, but the universal logic of this riddle already richly suggests the reflective comparison between still and running water, and asks the agile mind to consider, in the manner of the Zen koan, the reflection to be had when one draws one's image not from holdings, but from flowing and change.
Or consider this: “The thinking of a wolf is enough to kill a sheep.” It is one of those translations one loves the more for its double reading, for both the subjective genitive (the wolf's thought) and the objective genitive (the sheep's thought about the wolf) work to make the proverb's points: in the former case, the wolf's power goes beyond tooth and claw, and in the latter case, the point is about the victim's complicity in his own demise: for fear can cause its own heart attack. In either case, the proverb reminds us that the mind can be the sharpest weapon, whether you use it to attack another or to attack yourself.
The one I love best, I guess, because it has the signature Yoruba twists in it, from raucous outburst to wry insight, is this: “The worm is dancing, but that is only how he walks.” Yoruba poems as a genre seem forthright, going straight to the dance of the matter; skeptical about human nature, not so full of themselves they fool themselves.
Tricks
The star is trying to outshine the moon,
the frog is preparing a trick to get wings,
the one who wears a cotton dress pretends to wear velvet,
the one who is wearing velvet pretends to be a king.
We all try to do
what God never intends us to do.
Watch out: “We shall catch and kill”
is what we cry when we go to the battlefield.
We tend to forget that we shall meet another man there
uttering the same cry…
It is this capacity to see things from the other perspective suddenly that puts the best kind of nation in imagination; it is an integrating capacity one might call love, if love in English didn't seem first and foremost narrowly self-interested. Yoruba children's songs are full of this dance of ironies and empathies, right from the beginning. Keep in mind that what the cow is to the English, the yam is to the Yoruba, and lend an ear to the happy yammer (no cower) of this children's song:
Yam
Yam, yam, yam,
You are of pure white.
You have a gown