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Men in War by Andreas Latzko

A >> Andreas Latzko >> Men in War




What Bogdan said infuriated the master. Bogdan let him shout and stared
like a man hypnotized at the nickeled hilt of the hunting-knife. It was
not until the name "Marcsa" again struck his ear that he became
attentive.

"Marcsa is in my employ now," he heard the lord saying. "You know I am
fond of you, Bogdan. I'll let you take care of the horses again, if you
care to. But Marcsa is to be let alone. I won't have any rumpus. If she
still wants to marry you, all well and good. But if she doesn't, she's
to be let alone. If I hear once again that you have annoyed her, I'll
chase you to the devil. Do you understand?"

Foaming with rage, Bogdan let out the stream of his wrath.

"To the devil?" he shouted. "You chase me to the devil? You had first
better go there yourself. I've been to the devil already. For eight
months I was in hell. Here's my face--you can tell from my face that I
come from hell. To play the protector here and stuff your pockets full
and send the others out to die--that's easy. A man who dawdles at home
has no right to send men to the devil who have already been in hell for
his sake."

So overwhelming was his indignation that he spoke like the humpback
Socialist and was not ashamed of it. He stood there ready to leap, with
tensely drawn muscles, like a wild animal. He saw the lord make ready to
strike him, saw his distorted face, saw the riding-crop flash through
the air, and even saw it descending upon him. But he did not feel the
short, hard blow on his back.

With one bound he ripped the hunting-knife out of the scabbard and
thrust it between the lord's ribs--not with a long sweep, so that some
one could have stayed his arm before he struck. Oh, no! But quite
lightly, from below, with a short jerk, exactly as he had learned by
experience in battle. The hunting-knife was as good as his bayonet. It
ran into the flesh like butter.

Then everything came about just as it always did. John Bogdan stood with
his chin forward and saw the lord's face distorted by anger suddenly
smooth out and turn as placid and even as if it had been ironed. He saw
his eyes widen and look over at him in astonishment with the reproachful
question, "What are you doing?" The one thing Bogdan did not see was the
collapsing of the lord's body, for at that instant a blow crashed down
on the back of his head, like the downpour of a waterfall dropping from
an infinite height. For one second he still saw Marcsa's face framed in
a fiery wheel, then, his skull split open, he fell over on top of his
master, whose body already lay quivering on the ground.

At least 13 ways of looking at a blackbird

Int én bec
    ro léic feit
    do rind guip
    glanbuidi
    fo-ceird faíd
    os Loch Laíg
    lon do craíb
    charnbuidi

This weird little scrap of Irish syllabic verse, probably from the 9th century, consists of just 24 syllables, broken up into eight short lines, which have somehow continued to echo in modern Irish verse: the little lyric seems to have stuck; it has proved itself, in Seamus Heaney's words, to have "staying power".

First used in a metrical tract of the 11th century to illustrate a metre called snám súad, the lyric might be translated, literally, as: "The little bird which has whistled from the end of a bright-yellow bill: it utters a note above Belfast Lough – a blackbird from a yellow-heaped branch" (in a translation by Gerard Murphy). Or perhaps: "The little bird has whistled from the tip of his bright yellow beak; the blackbird from a bough laden with yellow blossom has tossed a cry over Belfast Lough" (translation by David Greene & Frank O'Connor).

Perhaps the poem's recent appeal has something to do with the character of the plucky little bird singing out over Belfast – the site of so much tragedy during the past three decades. Blackbird = poet? That, at least, is one way of looking at it.

Poetic versions, and rewrites, and reinterpretations of the poem abound, by John Montague, and John Hewitt, and Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Kinsella (in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse), and Tomás Ó Floinn (in modern Irish), and by the current director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Ciaran Carson.

Carson tells the story of how, when appointed as the first director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, he saw a blackbird pecking around in the little garden outside the School of English and thought it might make an interesting symbol for the newly established centre for creative writing. And so "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough", in word and image, became the Centre's motto and emblem.

Some years later, as writer in residence at the Heaney Centre, I found myself in conversation with two artists, the brothers Oliver and Rory Jeffers. We'd occasionally meet, the three of us, on Saturday mornings to drink coffee and to talk about art and literature, and Oliver would sometimes bring along work-in-progress and Rory would try to explain to me the structure and meaning of the language of images (which I never understood). On a whim, and high on caffeine and big ideas, I thought I would invite a number of local and international artists to read "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough" in its original Irish and its English translations, and to make of it what they would. Which is how I found myself putting together an exhibition now on show at the Heaney Centre.

In his preface to the exhibition catalogue Seamus Heaney suggests that the images might be a way of keeping "the perpetual motion machine of art on the go". I couldn't – obviously – have put it better myself.

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