The Future of East and West--Colm Breathnach

To talk of East and West is to suggest immediately a sharp dichotomy or an obvious division, and indeed it is a distinction we are accustomed to making. Like any other easy assumption, though, it is one that needs to be examined or at least questioned.
The first thing that comes to mind for me when I hear the words East and West mentioned together, however, is a line from a love song from the Irish language tradition. The girl has been abandoned by the man she loves and she is so devastated that she declares:
‘do bhainis soir díom is do bhainis siar díom’
[You took my East and you took my West]
One could say that line points to a dichotomy, but you could equally argue that it refers to two parts of a whole.
As an Irish language poet who didn’t grow up in an Irish-speaking district in Ireland, I am used to carrying a similar dichotomy around with me as part of my world view. I will tell you a little about that world view and how I feel it relates to what is important with regard to a question such as the future of East and West.
The Irish language is a Celtic language. At one time (500-300 BC) peoples who we now refer to as Celts were found right across the north of mainland Europe and down into Italy and Spain. The surviving Celtic languages we have today, however, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton are minority languages in Brittany, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Irish as an everyday spoken language is confined to pockets mainly on the western sea-board of Ireland, so in my mind East and West very often stand for the English and Irish languages. I should say of course that, alone among the Celtic languages, Irish is an official language of an EU Member State and has the status (since 2007) of an official and working EU language. All Irish children (even outside of the official Irish-speaking districts) learn basic Irish in school but it is, still and all, what is referred to as a lesser-spoken language that clings to life on the fringe of Europe. The poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, a native speaker of Irish from Donegal compares the plight of the language to that of a sheep stuck on a ledge on the cliff-face. In the poem ‘Caoineadh’ (Lament) he says:
Inniu tá mo theangaidh ag saothrú an bháis.
Ansacht na bhfilí – teangadh ár n-aithreacha
Gafa i gcreagacha crochta na faillí
Is gan ionainn í a tharrtháil le dásacht.
Cluinim na smeachannaí deireanacha
Is na héanacha creiche ag teacht go tapaidh,
A ngoba craosacha réidh chun feille.
[Today my language is dying.
Darling of the poets – the language of our fathers
Trapped on the steep rocks of neglect
And we can’t save her through audacity.
I hear the last gasps
And the birds of prey are gathering speedily
Their voracious beaks ready for treachery.]
There is, as it happens, another society on the edge. The island of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean recently announced plans to switch across the international dateline which is west of the island at the moment. To effectively change from being the last place where the sun sets to being the first place the sun rises. The island’s economy is now more aligned with Australia and New Zealand and with China and other Pacific Rim countries than it is with the USA as it was back in 1892 when Samoa switched the other way. Moving from West to East isn’t as relatively simple as that for the rest of us but as I said, the question needs to be asked is it a dichotomy pure and simple or is it a case of different points on a continuum. My experience as a bilingual speaker in Ireland has been a little like that of Samoa, switching from one language to the other is like deciding to switch from west to east and vice versa. Every language because of its own particular history and even the particular topography of the place or places it is spoken, and because of the way it joins words together and even because of the sounds of those words and the echoes and images evoked by them, develops its own distinctive sets of systems of concepts (the way it divides the colour spectrum or refers to different colours, the way it names different species of plants and animals, names for different items of clothing, etc.) and these systems of concepts can be said to contribute to what may be seen as the worldview of that language. Of course, this is not a static given. As language is an organic construct so its accidental structures are organic and are subject to change and development and disintegration. Human societies, just like languages, are subject to change and development. For well over five hundred years now we are accustomed to referring to the East and West but what those cardinal points actually referred to at any time during that period has changed over time and with reference to the speaker. Europe has always been self-centred, so much so thar it has only recently been acknowledged, for instance, that our atlases have invariably portrayed the vast continent of Africa as being considerably smaller scale-wise than it actually is, thus reinforcing our belief that western Europe isn’t in fact geographically puny in comparison to it. Our political importance was thus bolstered by a false sense of our physical presence in the world. The Mercator projection enhanced the European project, as it were. Throughout almost all of the twentieth century, for western Europe and the United States, Russia, which is part of Europe was the East, now it is in the West again and the idea of the East has changed fundamentally. The dichotomy is becoming a continuum, differing points on the spectrum rather than opposites. This may not always be because of a softening of views on one side rather than because of a hardening of attitudes on the other. But societies everywhere are becoming more alike as we all begin to come to terms with the new realities of the state of the global environment. My turf-smoke is your acid rain and your deforestation is my increased annual snowfall.
I am a writer, not a political analyst, or a global economist nor even an environmental expert. The only area a writer as writer can lay claim to expertise in is language and what language can do. I can’t tell you what the future of East and West will be and if I pretend I can you can take it as simply fiction. I can tell you what language is doing. There are world languages now — global languages — English, (American) Spanish and Chinese. One thing, interestingly enough, that all of those languages have in common according to a recent BBC television documentary series is that, in London, Mexico City and Shanghai, they all contain within the geographical regions where they are spoken most, what are now referred to as megacities. Science Fiction writers might say that language is not only reflecting our environment but quite possibly shaping it in that large agglomerations occur in the heartland of global languages. This is the writer fictionalising language of course, but it does make you think about the power of language. Let me return, however, to the writer’s reality. I believe as a writer, and also of course as a former professional terminologist, that we are, at one and the same time, not only the producers of language but also the products of language. As we use language to interpret the world around us so too inevitably does language define how we see ourselves. As I said earlier, no two languages entirely match in the way they divide the world into individual concepts or in the relationships they establish between those concepts. For example until the recent introduction, and still not general use, of the borrowed word hanla, the Irish language did not, and as I say generally still doesn’t, have a single concept corresponding to the concept referred to, say by the English word, as ‘handle’, a word which denotes that part of an implement or a utensil, etc., that the user holds or grips. Rather than one word, the Irish language has quite a few words which denote that part of the object held by referring to the shape of each particular type of handle. For instance, the handle of a cup or a mug is cluas which is also the word for an ‘ear’, because of the likeness between them and similarly the handle of a knife is cos which is also a ‘leg’ and the handle of a implement that is held by making a fist around it, such as a sword or a scythe or an oar, is dorn or ‘fist’. This may seem like a trivial difference, but the Irish system offers a poet like Michael Davitt, for instance, the opportunity to use the adjective maolchluasach, which is literally ‘droop-eared’ and means ‘crestfallen’ or ‘sheepish’, in reference to the mugs in which makes tea for himself and his wife in his poem ‘Urnaí Maidine’ [Morning Prayer], and it is around that one word that the poem turns and that the humour of the poem emerges. The poem in translation ends:
The kettle comes with metallic splutters
three pints of milk from the step
two sheepish earthenware mugs.
It’s morning, pet, wake up,
there you go,
a cup an tea.
I’m dying,
what about you?
I can’t prove it, but as a speaker of two languages, one of which is a global language that allows me to make myself understood (if not express myself entirely) anywhere in the world virtually and the other of which, though it has a long and proud tradition, being the oldest written language in Europe apart from Greek and Latin, is in danger of extinction, I feel that every language has a unique perspective to offer on the world and that, for the sake of all the world, we must strive to preserve each such unique perspective. There is an old saying in Irish – “Dhá dtrian rince gothaí”, which means “The greater part of dancing is appearance”. I think in a way this can also be applied to language, in so far as the greater part of the effect in the creative use of words is realised not through the surface meaning of the words but through the sound and even the shape of the words and combinations of words that are chosen. This being the case every language will achieve its effects in its own unique ways. And it can be this very quality in a language that inspires the writer. Though I am a native speaker of English, I classify myself as a native learner of Irish as it happens that my mother and my grandfather before me also learned the language and used it in their daily lives. And now, in my case, it is the Irish language, rather than my native English, that arouses the creative impulse in me. The act of writing in Irish is for me both conscious and willed, on the one hand, and unavoidable on the other hand. I can only imagine this is due in large part to the way in which I am influenced by what I call the world view of the Irish language as expressed not only through the complete corpus of Irish literature and folklore but also through the syntax, sounds and spirit of the language itself.
The poet Seán Ó Ríordáin speaking about the Irish language in the second half of the last century said he thought it would be the poets who would save the language. I believe, insofar as creative writers, be they poets, playwrights or prose-writers, mould and shape language, they are expressing and preserving and also creating the unique perspective of the language they use. It is important to preserve the unique perspective of the Irish language and I may say of the English language as it is used in Ireland, not only for the people of Ireland but also for the sake of the world and for the sake of the cultural diversity of the world in an age where maybe the continuum between East and West is becoming less differentiated. As a translator, of course, I have to say, also, that despite the uniqueness of the perspective of each language it is possible to convey something of the character and of the richness of one language in another language and so to enrich the world view of the receiving language. It is for this reason that I say it is important for every language that each individual language is preserved. And I think we as writers should ensure that the future of East and West will be one where we all endeavour, through our work, to preserve and share in the diversity of world views provided by our most basic of literary tools, the languages we write.
'turf-smoke'. In Ireland we use the word 'turf' for what the English refer to as 'peat'. We cut from the bog and dry it and use it as fuel to burn in the fire.