songs of exile (1)

Psalm 'By the Rivers of Babylon' from Chludov Psalter

Sometimes when you are all alone
You think back to that time you once knew,
When every thought
Was in a different tongue,
A language you could no longer speak.
And you'd realize as your mind goes back,
You'd felt things you could no longer say,
When every color
Was in a different shade,
A language you could no longer speak.
            --Ayuo, 'Different Languages' [click to listen], from Earth Guitar.

I have been pondering on whether to accept or decline a recent institutional request that will force me to dwell more than I wish to on a language I can no longer speak: my own native one. Not that I cannot function in Portuguese occasionally, when I speak with family & friends. I can, of course, but it has long ceased to be a vehicle I feel like using to convey my thoughts in any meaningful, creative, pleasant way, especially in writing. I can no longer speak it, because it no longer speaks me. It has become rootless, placeless, tied to environments, landscapes and memories that are fading away, cracking like old paintwork as time goes by and I realise there is no return. I will never return there (and where would I return to, where...?), except in passing, when I really have to, to dispatch family or professional commitments. As swiftly as possible, and never for pleasure, let alone for nostalgia. 'Environments are a part of thoughts' indeed, as Ayuo's song so beautifully phrases it. Some of my thoughts are homeless in this light. Orphans.

A while ago I wrote here that the alternative sense of home I envisage allows you to find roots and feel at home wherever you are. I was partly lying to myself, I guess, because there is a land where I feel hopelessly, heartbreakingly homeless and displaced - a fish out of water, gasping for breath: my own 'homeland'. But who has deserted whom? I recall an article by Neal Ascherson where at some point he mentions, citing J. R. Jones, 'the pain of exile', the most agonising and irreversible experience - that of 'knowing, not that you are leaving your country, but that your country is leaving you, being sucked away from you'.* That very much puts things as they crudely are, at least for me. The truth I will have to live with for the rest of my life: that my own tongue is the language of exile, the language I will never be able to relate to without the pain of exile. To ease it, I have endeavoured to master other languages to perfection, so that they can speak me while I speak them, quid pro quo. (Will we ever reach a fair deal, though...?)

Speaking of languages you can no longer speak always brings me back to that most moving, beautiful, painful song of exile ever written in the Portuguese language, which I can never read without tears (of exile). Camões wrote it as a gloss on the Biblical Psalm 137, 'Super flumina Babylonis', a hymn expressing the yearnings of the Jewish people in exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. The rivers of the famous opening lines - 'By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion' - are the Euphrates and its tributaries, but throughout art and literature these waters have come to symbolise all sorts of tears of exile and memory.**

And what did Camões make of them? This astounding 'Sobre os Rios / Over the Rivers' (original Portuguese followed by a rough translation - the whole thing does sound so much less painful and heartbreaking in English...):

Sobolos rios que vão
Por Babilônia m’achei,
Onde sentado chorei
As lembranças de Sião,
E quanto nela passei.
Ali o rio corrente
De meus olhos foi manado. . . .

[Over the rivers going by
I found myself in Babylon,
Where I sat down and wept
The memories of Zion,
And all that I have been through ever since.
There, the overflowing river
Poured from my eyes . . . .]


And, a couple of stanzas later, the most difficult of determinations:

Eu, que estas cousas senti
n’ alma, de mágoas tão cheia,
«Como dirá, respondi,
quem tão alheio está de si
doce canto em terra alheia?»
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
E se eu cantar quiser
em Babilónia sujeito,
Hierusalém, sem te ver,
a voz, quando a mover,
se me congele no peito.
A minha língua se apegue
às fauces, pois te perdi,
se, enquanto viver assi,
houver tempo em que te negue
ou que me esqueça de ti.

[I, who have felt all these things
Upon my soul so full of grief,
replied thus: 'How will someone
So utterly estranged from himself
Sing such a sweet song in a foreign land?'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If I ever, thus in Babylon imprisoned, wish to sing thee,
O Jerusalem, without seeing thee,
May my voice, when I move it, freeze in my chest.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, for I have lost thee,
If, while I thus live,
There should come a time in which I deny
Or forget thee.]

=============================================


So may mine. I've hung my harp on a tree a long, long time ago.



Notes:
*Neal Ascherson, 'Chords of Identity in a Minor Key' in Games With Shadows (London: Radius, 1988), p. 3.
**Most famoulsy in T. S. Eliot's line from The Waste Land, ''By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept'...