(Superintendent Larsson, with a quick glance, threw the ball over to Ahlberg, sat down, and demonstratively took a cigar out of his breast pocket.)
ANSWER: No.
QUESTION: Is it possible that she is from this city or somewhere around here?
ANSWER: It doesn’t seem likely.
QUESTION: Why not?
ANSWER: If that were the case we would have been able to identify her.
QUESTION: Is that your only reason for suspecting that she comes from another part of the country?
(Ahlberg looked dismally at the Chief of Police who was devoting all his attention to his
cigar.)
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: Has the search of the bottom near the breakwater produced any results?
ANSWER: We have found a number of things.
QUESTION: Do these things have anything to do with the crime?
ANSWER: That is not easy to answer.
QUESTION: How old was she?
ANSWER: Presumably between twenty-five and thirty.
QUESTION: Exactly how long had she been dead when she was found?
ANSWER: That isn’t easy to answer, either. Between three and four days.
QUESTION: The information that has been given to the public is very vague. Isn’t it possible to tell us something more exact, information which really says something?
ANSWER: That’s what we are trying to do here. We have also retouched a picture of her face which you are welcome to, if you want to have it.
(Ahlberg reached for a group of papers on the desk and started to hand them out. The air in the room was heavy and humid.)
QUESTION: Did she have any particular marks on her body?
ANSWER: Not as far as we know.
QUESTION: What does that mean?
ANSWER: Simply, that she had no marks at all.
QUESTION: Has a dental examination given any special clues?
ANSWER: She had good teeth.
(A long and pressing pause followed. Martin Beck noted that the reporter in front of him was still doodling with the star he had drawn.)
QUESTION: Is it possible that the body was thrown into the water at some other place and that it was brought to the breakwater by the current?
ANSWER: It doesn’t seem likely.
QUESTION: Have you learned anything by knocking on doors?
ANSWER: We are still working on that.
QUESTION: To sum up, isn’t it true that the police have a complete mystery on their hands?
It was the Public Prosecutor that answered:
‘Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning.’
With that, the press conference ended.
On the way out, one of the older reporters stopped Martin Beck, laid his hand on his arm and said: ‘Don’t you know anything at all?’ Martin Beck shook his head.
(from Roseanna, Ch 5)
"city": In Swedish there is only one term, "stad", for anything bigger than a village. Motala in the novel has a population of 27,000 (and it isn't much more populous today), much smaller than Linköping or Norrköping. Nevertheless it's regarded as an important regional centre, so perhaps "city" is defensible.
Ten novels of thirty chapters each, centred on detective Martin Beck ... Sjöwall and Wahlöö, already experienced writers, needed money to support their growing family, but they had higher ambitions too, a radical critique of modern Swedish society from a Marxist perspective. (They didn't make a lot of money, but they sold a lot of books; Martin Beck has become a regular TV and movie detective in Sweden, played by various actors over the years.)
The thirty-chapter format, the authors writing alternate chapters, was both realist (the toil of police procedurals, not the dazzling logic of a Christie sleuth) and modernist, something cubist about it, a refracted and many-angled portrait of society. It tends to brilliant set-pieces, for instance in Roseanna the press conference in which there's nothing to say (Ch 5), the interview transcripts with e.g. Mulvaney (Ch 12), the conversation with the deaf retired colonel and the blaring TV (Ch 17), the stop-start film-show of the trip (Ch 19). Sometimes lucid, more often deflating, sometimes hilarious and usually sad, these set-pieces inch the case forward while constantly enlarging and challenging our understanding of what's real, who someone is, what life consists of...
*
Quotations from Lois Roth's English translation of Roseanna. (1968, I think.)
Ch 1 (p. 2) "The vessel was called The Pig ..." This is the bucket dredger that pulls up the body of a woman from the bottom of the lock. Lois Roth evidently didn't want to bog down the English version of Roseanna, and her text is actually even tauter than the original Swedish text. There, for instance, it's explained that the vessel's real name is Gripen (The Griffin) but is inevitably nicknamed Grisen (The Pig). We're also told that the useful engineer who knows about such things is known as Slamsnuskaren ("the sludge nutter", roughly speaking) by his mates.
Ch 2 , p. 6. A tiny bit of missing dialogue in the car: "Ugly bruises." "Yes." "You'll keep me informed" etc.
Ch 3, p. 11 . "'Yes, no. Yes, no. What's the difference?' Martin Beck thought to himself."
(His wife has asked him if he's taking his pistol.) Actually, what Martin Beck is internally reciting is a Swedish equivalent of "eeny meeny miney mo": "Essike, dessike, lonton, tonton, semelimaka, kuckelikaka, ärtan, pärtan.. " That's what gives him the faint amusement that his wife picks up on.
Ch 8. The telephone conversation between Kafka and Martin Beck is in English in the original text. (Hence Martin Beck is immediately shown reporting the key information to Kollberg, in Swedish: in the English translation it might strike a very attentive reader as a bit repetitious.)
Ch 14 (p. 98) "Sundyberg" is an error for Sundbyberg, which like Hagalund is a northern suburb of Stockholm.
Ch 14.(p. 99) "That boat, the Kalajoki. It's just leaving Holmsund. It's tied up at Söderhamn for the night ...." This ought to say something like "It is going to be tying up at Söderhamn for the night...." The distance from Holmsund to Söderhamn is no less than 400km. Given that it's already early afternoon when this conversation takes place, I should think the boat wouldn't reach Söderhamn until pretty late at night. Meanwhile Ahlberg and one of his men drive all the way from Motala to Söderhamn (also about 400km), arrest the seaman Eriksson, and then immediately drive all the way back to Motala. By 7 am the next day Ahlberg has already interviewed the suspect. You might wonder why Ahlberg needs to go all the way to Söderhamn himself. Or why they don't send someone from Stockholm, which would be a significantly shorter journey? The upshot is that the next morning Martin Beck has to travel to Motala to interview Eriksson, and he spends three days there. Why arrange it that way -- I mean, from the authors' point of view? I think, simply to bring Martin Beck (and consequently, us), back to Motala for a third time, and perhaps particularly because the visit is disappointing; nothing happens in Motala, and the interview is a washout. The novel is telling us that location isn't important, that holidaymakers travel right across Sweden (and in fact the whole novel turns on this) but we the readers aren't being invited to take a holiday. Remember that brief anomalous moment, in Ch 5, when Martin Beck is beside the canal and "He drank in the cool, clear odour of wild flowers and wet grass. It reminded him of his childhood, but that was before tobacco smoke, petrol odours and mucus had robbed his sense of their sharpness. Nowadays it wasn't often he had this pleasure." Nor will we: as the novel takes us through seven months of investigation, seven months of autumn and winter.
Ch 29, p. 233.
'In August was the jackal born,
The rains fell in September.
"Now such a fearful flood as this,"
Says he, "I can't remember!"
Kollberg's quotation comes from Rudyard Kipling's remarkable story "The Undertakers" in The Second Jungle Book. He quotes it in Swedish:
Augustifödd schakalen såg
septemberregn i dalen.
Nej, maken till sån syndaflod
knappt jag minnes, skrek schakalen.
In Swedish, as in English, Kipling's epigram gained a certain currency as a comment on people who make strong assertions based on minimal experience. Presumably, in this case, Stenström's assertion that "You can take anyone with that" (Kollberg's paratrooper move).
*
The voyage of the Diana
Swedish readers would have taken it all for granted. The route is a longstanding popular tourist experience, crossing Sweden between Stockholm and Gothenburg along the “blå band” waterway that includes the Göta and Trollhätte canals as well as areas of open water. The Diana is a real boat and is still plying the same route today.
The trip takes six days (with numerous sightseeing stops). From Stockholm the boat goes west into Mälaren, then south to Södertälje and out into the Baltic around Trosa, going south past Oxelösund (this is when they ran into fog), threading through lots of islands, then turning into a narrow inlet past Stegeborg (where the engine broke), reaching the start of the canal at Mem, then Söderköping (where the engine was repaired), then the lakes of Asplången, Roxen, Boren and so to Borenshult (Motala) where, four days later, the body is found. The route continues into the massive lakes Vättern and (via Hajstorp) Vänern, exiting the latter at Trollhättan and so down to Gothenburg and the west coast on the Trollhätte canal / Göta river.
Roseanna
At the deepest level, the novel is about judgment of its title character. For the first seven chapters she has no name, is only a corpse. An individual body, young, vigorous, not classically shapely, strangled and brutally violated. This extended prelude makes us think about her in depth, with nothing to go on but her body. A human being, a bare forked animal.
Then we finally receive a relative flood of information about the librarian from Lincoln, Nebraska ("I would even venture to say that we know all the important factors about her," says Kollberg.) She's sexually active and takes the initiative; she wants regular sex but doesn't want a relationship. It stirs potential judgments, for example from the girl friend ("friend"?) who calls her "cheap trash ... a bitch on heat" (Ch 13) and isn't surprised she came to a bad end. And of course from the man who feels called upon to punish girls who are "disgusting" (Ch 30). Even her ex-boyfriend, the engineer Edgar M. Mulvaney, confesses "[F]irst I thought that she was just an ordinary, cheap tramp although she had not given that impression at all in the beginning. Then I thought that she was a nymphomaniac. One idea was crazier than the other. Now, here, especially since she is dead, it seems absurd that I ever could have thought either of those things" (Ch 12).
Then Mulvaney fell in love with her.
M. You have to understand that Roseanna was the most upright person I have ever met. She liked me a lot and above all, she liked to sleep with me. But she didn't want to live with me. She never made any secret of that. Both she and I knew precisely why we would meet. (Ch 12)
Kollberg only means that we know everything about her salient to the investigation. We don't really know so very much about her: what, for example, was she writing during her solitary evenings?
She is certainly unusual in her solitariness. As early as Ch 4, Martin Beck theorizes about the unknown victim:
She was young and he was sure that she had been pretty. She must have had someone who loved her. Someone close to her who was wondering what had happened to her. She must have had friends, colleagues, parents, maybe sisters and brothers. No human being, particularly a young, attractive woman, is so alone that there is no-one to miss her when she disappears.
Even in those days, when people travelling abroad would not be expected to make regular contact with loved ones at home, it's unexpected that Roseanna is so little missed for so long; it will be three months before Martin Beck learns her name. In fact both her parents were dead, she had moved from Colorado to Nebraska, she had apparently no really close friends, or at any rate her independent spirit resisted being watched over.
The novel never glances at the reader, the police themselves never discuss the case from this point of view, but the question is insistent: do you, the reader, also have some prejudices? Do you really accept the range of variety in human beings, especially women? Is it OK with you, her being Roseanna?
Interesting article (in Swedish) about the novel's cultural context, and about Tore Sjöberg's 1967 movie Roseanna, a glamorous romp that utterly traduced the spirit of the novel, though Sjöwall and Wahlöö themselves contributed to the screenplay: they really needed the money.
Watch the trailer, though, it's great.
*
In 2014 there was a BBC radio dramatisation of Roseanna and several other books in the series. To me it seems to lose much of the subtlety of the original (for instance, the police are made to voice conventional social judgments of the murder victim in exactly the way that the novel avoids). I dare say I'd be just as disappointed with the Swedish TV adaptations.
"Someone once said that our country is a small but hungry capitalist state. This judgement is correct ..." (The defence lawyer Braxén in The Terrorists, Ch 24).
So I've also read the final novel in the series, Terroristerna (The Terrorists) (1975). I was in Spain, not far from where they wrote it, which was in a rented bungalow in Malaga. Per Wahlöö did most of the writing, and Sjöwall tidied it up. He was terribly ill (he died of a morphine overdose soon afterwards). I think this background shows through. The social critiques are fierce, sometimes with the lucid encapsulation of a last testament; some of the writing, for instance about the ways of the murdered porn king Walter Petrus, couldn't be more concise and conclusive. But there are shortcomings too. ULAG, the novel's terrorist organisation, doesn't make much sense; and maybe that's why its agents aren't credible characters, they're just instruments (of the organisation, sure, but also of the novel). Some of the assaults on everything Swedish, no matter how trivial (the weather, the airport, Malmö), feel like reheated patter from other and lesser writers. A killer who quotes Elmer Diktonius ... ; that's a weary mainstream recipe for spicing things up with a bit of second-hand culture. The Terrorists is maybe a good place too to reflect on the limitations of this social analysis, for instance when it came to media and technology, never mind postcolonial exploitation or environmental ruin. Easy to say from half a century later, maybe.
25 April 2023, early morning sunshine. I pulled over by the row of cherry trees outside the hotel at Beanacre (near Melksham, Wiltshire) and took some messy pics while the rush hour traffic thundered past me. Later, in work, I inadvertently walked cherry petals all over the carpet near my desk.
Here, just starting to blossom, is the fabulous late variety Prunus 'Shirofugen', also known as 'Fugenzo' or 'Fugenzō'. It used to be a fantastic sight here, (https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2010/05/prunus-shirofugen.html) but two of the trees have now died and this one, the last, is heading the same way.
Prunus 'Shirofugen'. Beanacre, 25 April 2023.
Prunus 'Tae-haku'. Beanacre, 25 April 2023.
Blossom on epicormic shoots on one of the big specimens of Prunus 'Tae-haku': not a good sign. Below, after shedding petals.
A sapling: a Sargent Cherry (Prunus sargentii), I'm guessing. Nice too see some youth among all the moribundity. Ornamental cherry trees, unfortunately, are not very long lived. Fifty years is about the norm, I believe (without checking).
Prunus 'Kanzan'. Beanacre, 25 April 2023.
The blossom on the other varieties was either nearly over or barely started, but Prunus 'Kanzan' was right at its peak.
Cherry-blossom aficionados are often a bit sniffy about 'Kanzan' -- Collingwood Ingram loathed it -- but today I thought about what a remarkable variety it is. It arose in the Edo period (1603 - 1867) and is thought to derive in a complex way from the Oshima Cherry (Prunus speciosa) among others, somehow acquiring deep pink petals along the way.
I'm not sure when it was introduced in the UK. Some sources say 1913 or "the 1900s", but Naoko Abe says "late nineteenth century". So take your pick. I've also read that it reached the USA in 1903.
Despite its very double flowers, 'Kanzan' evidently retains some fertility as it is a parent species of both 'Pink Perfection' and 'Royal Burgundy'.
Prunus 'Kanzan'. Beanacre, 25 April 2023.
Prunus 'Shirotae'. Beanacre, 25 April 2023.
Prunus "Shirotae", overhead. An early variety, but still looking good if you don't peer too closely.
Young leaves of Broad-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos). Frome, 21 April 2023.
I'm rather pleased with yesterday's photo, which is intended to be educational, though I'm sure it's far more for my own education than anyone else's. Anyway, the tree in the background is a Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata), showing no sign whatever of coming into leaf. But in the foreground you can see the young leaves of Broad-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos), now fully out, though still quite small.
So based on a sample of not much, I infer that T. platyphyllos comes into leaf about three or four weeks before T. cordata. I noticed the buds of this Broad-leaved Lime starting to enlarge as far back as 4 April, as shown in the photo below.
(And based on an equally paltry sample, the hybrid Common Lime comes into leaf midway between its parent species, as you might expect.)
Opening leaf-buds of Broad-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos). Frome, 4 April 2023.
Last year I wrote a longer post about lime trees. That was at midsummer, the time of year when we usually notice them, sweetly fragrant and humming with bees.
Yet the image of lime trees coming into leaf has its own cultural history, specifically in early German poetry.
Ir sunt iuch erlouben
ringens uf der louben.
lant die linden louben.
ir sunt mir gelouben,
hant ir den gelouben,
ir brechent Botenlouben
lihter die steinwant.
(Gottfried von Neifen, fl. 1234-55)
A.T. Hatto paraphrases:
'What if the limes are putting on leaf,' says the girl to Gottfried, 'you will sooner break down the castle-wall of Botenlauben than my defences'.
Hatto points out that the association of leafing limes with the stirrings of love comes into Medieval English poetry too, for example "light as leef on linde" in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. But the English poets, he thinks, were probably using "linde" as a general term for no particular tree, happily alliterative with both "leaf" and "love".
In Germany, on the other hand, the lime tree was the definitive tree of love. Specifically, the Broad-leaved Lime, which in Germany (unlike the British Isles) is a common native tree. In many places it was the usual shade tree, the traditional spot for outdoor dancing and summer courtship.
I'm taking all this from A.T. Hatto's article "The Lime-Tree and Early German, Goliard and English Lyric Poetry" (The Modern Language Review, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Apr., 1954), pp. 193-209. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3718904 .
Though I was a bit surprised by his characterization of the Broad-leaved Lime as "altogether a more magnificent tree" than the Small-leaved Lime... the two species can attain similar heights and today the Small-leaved Lime is often described as the more attractive tree. Maybe Hatto was reflecting German tastes. In German "Sommerlinde" is the Broad-leaved Lime and "Winterlinde" is the Small-leaved Lime.
There's much more in his article to ponder. Well worth a read if you have at least an hour!
Young leaves of Broad-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos). Frome, 21 April 2023.
Broad-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) and Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata). Frome, 1 May 2023.
May 1st: the Broad-leaved Lime is now in full leaf. Still no leaves on the Small-leaved Lime. But . . .
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata). Frome, 1 May 2023.
.... The leaf-buds are finally swelling.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata). Frome, 15 May 2023.
Two weeks later (15 May 2023), a Small-leaved Lime clothed in fresh leaves.
A week later (22 May 2023) and the Broad-leaved Lime now displays its hanging flower-bracts (though the flowers are still in bud). No bracts to be seen on the Small-leaved Lime yet. Laura calls these bracts "keys". Well, why not?
Broad-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) showing hanging flower-bracts; Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata) in the distance. Frome, 22 May 2023.
Broad-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos). Frome, 7 June 2023.
And so here we are with two of the basic building blocks of June. The Broad-leaved Lime is now entirely shiny and sticky to the touch (the honeydew of millions of aphids), and is trashing all the car windscreens in its vicinity.
Small-leaved Lime doesn't attract aphids on this scale. It also looks very different at this time of year, because the keys and flowers, instead of hanging from the leaves, poke out above them in every direction, creating a frosted effect.
Small-leaved Lime (Tilia cordata). Frome, 7 June 2023.
Gus Wylie's two earlier Hebrides books were black and white photographs, but Hebridean Light (Birlinn, 2003) is in colour. This, as I mentioned before, was the treasure I recently hauled from the paper-recycling skip. Where it goes now, I don't know, but before it does, here's a somewhat bleached-out flavour of some of its inexhaustible pages, and the pretext for some other Hebrides-related samples.
chan eil mi nad aghaidh
1
chan eil mi nad aghaidh a thaistealair ghil
tha thu ruith tro mo chuislean mar aran mo bhith
chan eil mise an aghaidh do mheuran a’ slìobadh nan clach
do theanga mar theine a’ tionndadh nam fòd
chan eil mi an aghaidh do shùil a bhith suaineadh
nan teagamh trom chlaigeann, trom
chliabh, trom chruth
’s ged a shìneadh tu gu dà cheann na sìorraidheachd
By Màiri NicGumaraid. Poem source: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/an-taigh-tasgaidh-s-an-leabhar/ . from An Aghaidh na Sìorraidheachd: Ochdnar Bhàrd Gàidhlig – Duanaire Dà-chànanach / In the Face of Eternity: Eight Gaelic Poets – A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Christopher Whyte (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991)
Six songs in a barn: lockdown broadcast by Colin Macleod, crofter and singer-songwriter from Lewis:
The second song:
The Long Road
[Verse 1]
Take a little while to reach you in the morning
I've been driving here since yesterday
Feels good now to get out in the open
It's been getting far too real back there at home
[Verse 2]
They found him in the kitchen in the morning
He was such a good ol' boy, you know
Had a little hard time, had stretched out far too long
But no one ever wished to see him gone
[Pre-Chorus]
Well, it's been so hard these last few years
I don't want to face the truth
It was there she told me what I needed to hear
[Chorus]
She said, "you have to take the long road
You know that it's a slow road
And it'll be a hard road
But you’ve gotta take the long road"
[Verse 3]
It's been good to talk to you these last few days
And it's good to get some space inside my head
I know I need to go back home, I need to see that stone
The chief complaint was the same wherever we went: "We have not enough land; we could and would pay rent willingly if we had more ground to cultivate. As it is, our crofts are not large enough to keep us in food." The outside world has been busy watching the battle in Ireland; little attention has been spared to the Highlands; yet every small paragraph on the subject for which newspapers can make room, between accounts of stolen breeches and besieged members of Parliament, shows the determination of the men who are fighting the same battle in the far north. If troops are kept in Ireland, if Welsh tithes can only be collected by hussars, war-ships are sent to the Islands. If Irishmen, protected by a Land League, refuse to pay rent, so do Scotch crofters. Indeed, the latter are far more determined and daring. They know, too, how to hold together. In Glendale, an out-of-the-way corner of Skye to which strangers seldom penetrate, not a crofter has paid rent for five years. An old man, tenant on another estate, told us about them with pride. "No, sir," he said, "they have no paid a penny for five years, but the factor he will keep friends with them. He will know ferry well if he wass not their friend it will be worse trouble that will be coming whatever."
He was a fine, healthy old man, between sixty and seventy; and when he found that we sympathized, he walked about half a mile just to talk with us. He pretended he came to show us the way, but as the road was straight before us it was easy to see through his excuse.
J—— asked him what he thought about the crofter question. "I will be a real old Land Leaguer every time," he declared; and then he went on to tell us that in his part of the island the crofters held together like one man. The Commission was coming; it was slow, but they would wait for it. Then, if it did not improve their condition, they would take matters into their own hands. Their landlord was good enough, as landlords went; he was a civil-spoken gentleman if rents were paid on the very day they were due, but that was about all that could be said for him. Rents were not so high on his estate as on others, but the taxes were heavy, and it was more land they needed. "You will see those potatoes"—and he pointed to a tiny green patch sloping down from the road to a ditch, beyond which was heather—"you will see for yourself they grow well whatever. And they would be growing as well on the other side of the ditch, where I myself have planted them in other days. But what will grow there now? Heather and ferns! And it will be heather and ferns you will see as far as you can for twelve miles. If they will be giving us more land, sir, it's no trouble from the Highlanders they will be having; but if they don't give it to us we will take it."
He shook hands heartily with us both when he left. One may doubt the demagogue who uses the people's suffering for political capital; but one can but respect a man like this sturdy old crofter, himself one of the people, who knows his wrongs and determines to right them. His methods may be illegal; so have been those of many men who have struggled for freedom.
From Our Journey to the Hebrides (1890), by the American graphic artist Joseph Pennell and his wife Elizabeth Robins Pennell. The Pennells loved a fight. Their combative support for the crofters' cause was admirable, but it ran alongside Joseph's equally combative anti-Semitism (The Jew at Home, 1892) and his racist views of African Americans.
DIA liom a laighe,
Dia liom ag eirigh, Dia liom anus gach rath soluis, Is gun mi rath son as aonais, Gun non rath as aonais.
Criosda liom a cadal, Criosda liom a dusgadh, Criosda liom a caithris, Gach la agus oidhche, Gach aon la is oidhche.
Dia liom a comhnadh Domhnach liom a riaghladh, Spiorad liom a treoradh, Gu soir agus siorruidh, Soir agus siorruidh, Amen. Triath nan triath, Amen.
GOD with me lying down, God with me rising up, God with me in each ray of light, Nor I a ray of joy without Him, Nor one ray without Him.
Christ with me sleeping, Christ with me waking, Christ with me watching, Every day and night, Each day and night.
God with me protecting, The Lord with me directing, The Spirit with me strengthening, For ever and for evermore, Ever and evermore, Amen. Chief of chiefs, Amen.
THIS poem was taken down in 1866 from Mary Macrae, Harris. She came from Kintail when young, with Alexander Macrae, whose mother was one of the celebrated ten daughters of Macleod of Rararsay, mentioned by Johnson and Boswell. Mary Macrae was rather under than over middle height, but strongly and symmetrically formed. She often walked with companions, after the work of the day was done, distances of ten and fifteen miles to a dance, and after dancing all night walked back again to the work of the morning fresh and vigorous as if nothing unusual had occurred. She was a faithful servant and an admirable worker, and danced at her leisure and carolled at her work like 'Fosgag Moire,' Our Lady's lark, above her.
The people of Harris had been greatly given to old lore and to the old ways of their fathers, reciting and singing, dancing and merry-making; but a reaction occurred, and Mary Macrae's old-world ways were abjured and condemned.
'The bigots of an iron time Had called her simple art a crime.'
But Mary Macrae heeded not, and went on in her own way, singing her songs and ballads, intoning her hymns and incantations, and chanting her own 'port-a-bial,' mouth music, and dancing to her own shadow when nothing better was available.
I love to think of this brave kindly woman, with her strong Highland characteristics and her proud Highland spirit. She was a true type of a grand people gone never to return.
From Carmina Gadelica (1900, 2nd edition 1928), the remarkable storehouse of Gaelic oral tradition collected by Alexander Carmichael.
The opposite side of the lake seemed quite pathless, as a huge mountain, one of the detached ridges of the Quillen, sinks in a profound and almost perpendicular precipice down to the water. On the left-hand side, which we traversed, rose a higher and equally inaccessible mountain, the top of which seemed to contain the crater of an exhausted volcano. I never saw a spot on which there was less appearance of vegetation of any kind; the eye rested on nothing but brown and naked crags, and the rocks on which we walked by the side of the loch were as bare as the pavement of Cheapside. There are one or two spots of islets in the loch which seem to bear juniper, or some such low bushy shrub.
Returned from our extraordinary walk and went on board. During dinner, our vessel quitted Loch Scavig, and having doubled its southern cape, opened the bay or salt-water Loch of Sleapin. There went again on shore to visit the late discovered and much celebrated cavern, called Macallister's cave. It opens at the end of a deep ravine running upward from the sea, and the proprietor, Mr. Macallister of Strath Aird, finding that visitors injured it, by breaking and carrying away the stalactites with which it abounds, has secured this cavern by an eight or nine feet wall, with a door. Upon inquiring for the key, we found it was three miles up the loch at the laird's house. It was now late, and to stay until a messenger had gone and returned three miles, was not to be thought of, any more than the alternative of going up the loch and lying there all night. We therefore, with regret, resolved to scale the wall, in which attempt, by the assistance of a rope and some ancient acquaintance with orchard breaking, we easily succeeded. The first entrance to this celebrated cave is rude and unpromising, but the light of the torches with which we were provided is soon reflected from roof, floor, and walls, which seem as if they were sheeted with marble, partly smooth, partly rough with frost-work and rustic ornaments, and partly wrought into statuary. The floor forms a steep and difficult ascent, and might be fancifully compared to a sheet of water, which, while it rushed whitening and foaming down a declivity, had been suddenly arrested and consolidated by the spell of an enchanter. Upon attaining the summit of this ascent, the cave descends with equal rapidity to the brink of a pool of the most limpid water, about four or five yards broad. There opens beyond this pool a portal arch, with beautiful white chasing upon the sides, which promises a continuation of the cave. One of our sailors swam across, for there was no other mode of passing, and informed us (as indeed we partly saw by the light he carried), that the enchantment of Macallister's cave terminated with this portal, beyond which there was only a rude ordinary cavern speedily choked with stones and earth. But the pool, on the brink of which we stood, surrounded by the most fanciful mouldings in a substance resembling white marble, and distinguished by the depth and purity of its waters, might be the bathing grotto of a Naiad. I think a statuary might catch beautiful hints from the fanciful and romantic disposition of the stalactites. There is scarce a form or group that an active fancy may not trace among the grotesque ornaments which have been gradually moulded in this cavern by the dropping of the calcareous water, and its hardening into petrifactions; many of these have been destroyed by the senseless rage of appropriation among recent tourists, and the grotto has lost (I am informed), through the smoke of torches, much of that vivid silver tint which was originally one of its chief distinctions. But enough of beauty remains to compensate for all that may be lost. As the easiest mode of return, I slid down the polished sheet of marble which forms the rising ascent, and thereby injured my pantaloons in a way which my jacket is ill calculated to conceal. Our wearables, after a month's hard service, begin to be frail, and there are daily demands for repairs. Our eatables also begin to assume a real nautical appearance—no soft bread—milk a rare commodity—and those gentlemen most in favor with John Peters, the steward, who prefer salt beef to fresh. To make amends, we never hear of sea-sickness, and the good-humor and harmony of the party continue uninterrupted. When we left the cave we carried off two grandsons of Mr. Macallister's, remarkably fine boys; and Erskine, who may be called L'ami des Enfans, treated them most kindly, and showed them all the curiosities in the vessel, causing even the guns to be fired for their amusement, besides filling their pockets with almonds and raisins. So that, with a handsome letter of apology, I hope we may erase any evil impression Mr. Macallister may adopt from our storming the exterior defences of his cavern. After having sent them ashore in safety, stand out of the bay with little or no wind, for the opposite island of Egg.
(From Walter Scott's diary of his trip to Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides, 24 August 1814. The diary is included in Lockhart (vol IV) : this extract comes from Chapter XXXI. Scott used the cave as a setting for one of the scenes in The Lord of the Isles. It is now known as the Spar Cave; it is visitable, though not easily, for an hour at low tide. Info and pics: https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/skye/sparcave.shtml . Apparently a sailor later demolished the wall by firing a cannon at it.)
The Cas Chrom is a foot plough. It can also be used for digging peat.
Robin A Crawford has an excellent peat blog. This post is about turfing:
We went to Burnham-on-Sea (9 April 2023), for the first time in quite a few years. (As usual we left the van in Highbridge and walked to Burnham along the Brue Estuary.) Fresh from leafing through the photographer Gus Wylie's Hebridean Light (rescued from the paper-recycling skip at the dump), I tried to take some atmospheric photos of the light of the Bristol Channel.
“She’d never noticed if it hadn’t been for Sid. Confound it! sometimes she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to gee-miny she’d stick to one or t’other—I can’t keep the run of ’em. But I bet you I’ll lam Sid for that. I’ll learn him!”
He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him.
Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man’s are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time—just as men’s misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it un-disturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music—the reader probably remembers how to do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.
I spent 50p on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and another 50p on Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto (in C minor, with the second movement in the transcendent non-sequitur of E ... though to be fair he does this kind of thing in the first and fifth piano concertos too), and the Fidelio Overture. Oh, and another 50p on an old road map of the Western Isles to help me navigate around Hebridean Light. That's my favourite kind of shopping.
Seedlings on the seaward edge of the dunes.
White variety of Red Deadnettle (Lamium purpureum).
Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) on the walk back to Highbridge along the Brue Estuary. We stopped to have an unnecessary thermos, and watched a Great Egret poking about in the pools. It was unnecessary because we knew we were going straight to the new Starbucks at Dunball services. Here we watched a pair of eager crows sitting in the gantry above the fuel pumps. Possibly not an ideal perch from the air quality perspective, but perfect for spotting any dropped subs or pastries.
Reading Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Wild Berries has reminded me how little Russian literature I really know, and especially Russian poetry. So this evening I picked one of the recurring names, it was Sergei Yesenin (1895 - 1925), and decided to read a little deeper.
I was helped by finding this site: https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/ , an assemblage of all the translations it could find (with the Russian text opposite), mostly into English but also other languages. The texts are often a mess (the French ones, for instance, contain no accents).
(It also includes a quite informative introduction; an anonymous bit of soviet-style propaganda. "His grave is perpetually scattered with flowers left by admiring readers — taxi drivers, workers, students, and simple Russian grandmothers.")
They are drinking here again, brawling, sobbing, to the amber woes of the accordion. They curse their luck and they hark back to a Russia — a Moscow — of other days.
For my part, I duck my head, my eyes foundering in wine, rather than look fate in the face, I think of something else for a while.
There is something that we have all lost forever. My dark blue May, my pale blue June, that must be why the corpse smell dogs this frantic carousal.
Oh, today’s a great day for the Russians the homemade vodka’s flowing and the noseless accordionist’s singing of the Volga and the secret police.
They’re grumbling that bony October caught them all in its blizzard courage has gone back to whetting the knife from its boot.
A hatred shifts in the eyes rebellion grates in the raised voices and they pity the young and foolish whose blood flamed up and burned away.
Where are you now and why so far? Do we shine brightly for you? The accordionist’s on a vodka cure for his clap caught in the Civil War.
No. the lost Russia will not be silenced. On all sides the rot feeds a wild courage. Oh Russia, my Russia, rising in Asia.
This was in 1922, three years before Yesenin took his own life. That's if he did; there's a touch of doubt he might have been murdered. The poems suggest, anyway, that the thought of suicide was no stranger to him.
The translator here is W.S. Merwin, apparently... but it's far less obviously Merwinesque than the three others I've found. Here's one of them:
In the country of yellow nettles the twig fences are brittle the log houses huddle like orphans into the pussy-willows
through fields over the hills’ blue by the greenness of lakes a road of sand leads to the mountains of Siberia
Between Mongols and Finns Russia is lost there before she is frightened along the road men make their way in irons
Each one has robbed or killed as his fate would have it I am in love with the grief of their eyes and the graves in their cheeks
many have killed from pure joy they are simple-hearted but in their darkened faces the blue mouths are twisted
I cherish one secret dream that I am pure in heart but I too will cut a throat to the whistling of autumn
I too on the blown road on these same sands will go with a rope at the neck to make love to mourning
I will smile as I go by I will swell out my chest and the storm will lick over the way I came
I love this, but possibly more for its Merwin elements than its Yesenin ones. (On the surface such extremely different writers.) This poem is from 1915, quite early in Yesenin's brief career (the author just twenty).
I think the "yellow nettles" are most likely Large-flowered Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis speciosa), a beautiful arable weed native from N.Europe to Siberia. Russian sources say that Hemp-nettles are poisonous, causing paralysis in livestock, but I couldn't find much detail about this on the Internet. An alternative might be Yellow Archangel (Lamium galeobdolon), also native as far east as Iran, but this is a woodland plant.
Yesenin, himself of peasant stock, wrote a popular poetry. His poems are mostly rhymed, and most of the other translators try to emulate this, with mixed results. It's perhaps a kind of poetry that intrinsically resists transplantation into another language.
But, brought up by his better-off grandparents, he never really lived a peasant's life. The constant evocation of the peasant country where he was born (Konstantinovo, some 100 miles SE of Moscow) is a torturing nostalgia for what he had left behind. By the time he was publishing poetry, he was hanging out with people from much posher backgrounds, such as his writer pal Anatoly Marienhof or, the second of his four wives, Zinaida Reich, who later became a prominent actress until she was horribly murdered, probably by Beria's people.
He was a troubled soul, an alcoholic, and a rowdy. The later poems become increasingly fixated on his own disastrous trajectory.
His third wife was Isadora Duncan, eighteen years his senior. (He doesn't appear in My Life, whichends just as Isadora is setting off for Moscow, "the beautiful New World... the World of Comrades...") During their two-year marriage he travelled with her to Europe and the USA, but they didn't really have much in common except alcohol.
*
'But Yesenin behaved like a hooligan sometimes,' the cashier added insidiously. 'And he even admitted it.'
The leader grew angry. 'What terrible things did Yesenin do, really? Turned over a dozen tables, punched a dozen faces, and -- who knows? -- all dozen faces may have deserved it. If he was guilty of anything, he repented and punished himself. He punished himself too harshly, unreservedly. Some people will never overturn a table or punch anyone's face -- quiet, modest people -- but they'll betray you in a moment, ruin you. And no-one calls them hooligans. Of course, you can write bad poetry and be a good person. But you can't write good poetry and be a bad person. '
'My opinion exactly, ' the director's secretary said, looking at everyone with great dignity, as if the last phrase had been meant for her.
(Wild Berries, Ch 14; Yevtushenko depicting literary societies in a time of denouncers and informers.)
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I don't understand why the ruverses.com site omits the remarkable 1920 poem Sorokoust (prayer for the dead). Perhaps it's not as comprehensive a collection as I've assumed. There's a translation of Sorokoust, by Rose Styron, here: https://www.oocities.org/sulawesiprince/russpoets/yeseninpoetry1.html
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An interesting article about Yesenin's life and reputation by Alexandra Guzeva, with some great photos:
