National Identity and National Unity in Contemporary East Timorese Literature

Beginning with a panoramic analysis of the role played by East Timorese poets in the struggle for liberation from Portuguese and Indonesian colonial rule, this article examines the extent to which an East Timorese national identity and unity repeatedly featured in the poetry of the 1970s and 80s are represented in contemporary Timorese literary production. By reading the work of the novelist Luís Cardoso, and the poets Abé Barreto and Celso Oliveira, the article also assesses whether the independent nation envisioned earlier by those such as Borja da Costa, Fernando Sylvan and Xanana Gusmão, has been realised. In doing so, critical attention is brought to bear on the intimate relationship between the specific material and political circumstances of East Timor and the literature produced in colonial and postcolonial moments in the nation’s history.

Transgressing Contemporary Boundaries:The Narrator as True Custodian of Cultural Knowledge in Ulster Society

Historically in Gaelic culture, the bard was greatly valued and admired as an important and integral part of society. Travelled, schooled and specifically trained in their art, the bard helped ensure identity and reassurance for Gaelic families by grounding them both temporarily and spatially into their landscape. Entrusted with the duty and responsibility of recording place and event, the bards worked without writing and by transgressing man-made boundaries, travelled throughout the land weaving their histories into the very fabric of society.

Now no longer with us, we find ourselves without the distinguished chronicler to undertake this duty. Yet the responsibility of the Gaelic bard is one still shared by all artists today; to facilitate memory and identity, whether good or bad. Many Ulster writers, by happenstance and geography have found themselves located in a place of painful histories. An immediate difficulty for those local writers becomes manifest by being intrinsically implicated into those histories – whilst having first-hand knowledge and comprehension beyond that of the outsider, the local writer is automatically damned by association and relationship, thereby tarnishing their voice in comparison to the perceived impartiality of others.
Some writers however have successfully sought ways to escape this limitation and have worked in ways that can transgress the restrictions of prejudgement. John Hewitt, by purposely becoming a self-imposed tourist was able to distance himself to write impartially about the past, recognising that ’the place without its ghosts is a barren place.’1 In ‘The Colony’,2 tradition, peoples and mapping of the land are all narrated by Hewitt in a similar way to the Gaelic bardic topographic poems of Sean O'Dubhagain and Giolla Na Naomh O'Huidhrin3 in compiling a rich cultural atlas.

Similarly the Belfast poet and novelist Ciaran Carson also writes and records the city from an intermediary position; that of translator. Mediating between reader and aisling,4 Carson himself takes the reader on a journey into name, meaning, time and place, focusing primarily on the city of Belfast, familiar in name but impenetrable in depth to most.

Furthermore, this once-forgotten tradition to chronicle is now being continued by the new breed of Irish crime writers where the likes of Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty can, by way of the crime novel, accurately record contemporary society. Thus, ghost estates, listed buildings, archaeological digs, street and city have all provided setting and subject matter for recent novels. Moreover by choosing the ‘outsider from within’ as their chief protagonist, whether detective or criminal, each author is able to transgress the boundaries of prejudice and preconception that hinder genuine understanding and knowledge.

Looking in turn at the Gaelic bard, the twentieth century Ulster poet and the new breed of Irish crime writer, the authors will outline the real value of the narrator, by being able to act as cultural transgressor beyond the seeming and alleged as the true chronicler in society, and then with specific reference to city and countryside in Ireland, as a valuable custodian of knowledge in architecture and place.

Keywords
Architecture, Crime Fiction, Cultural Atlas, Place, Poetry.

1 From ‘The Bloody Brae’, a one act play written by John Hewitt in the 1930’s.
2 Hewitt, J. (1968) published in Collected Poems 1932-67. London:McGibbon & Kee.
3 Lengthy and detailed medieval Gaelic poems composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries first edited by John O'Donovan in 1862 for the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society in Dublin.
4 The aisling is the Irish song or poem genre when the poet is visited by their muse in a daydream or dream-vision state.

Navigating the Borderlands: Brian McGilloway as Contemporary Cartographer of the Liminal in the Ulster Landscape

Set in the borderlands between Letterkenny and Derry-Londonderry, a landscape scarred by geological fold, river and cartographer’s pen, the Ulster crime novelist Brian McGilloway chronicles the hopes and fears of a contemporary society unable to escape a complicated history, redolent and entwined with the voices of its ‘ghosts of its past.’ Through his choice of chief protagonist, An Garda Síochána officer Benedict Devlin, McGilloway turns detective to critically investigate the both the seemingly straightforward and the unseen dwelling in the rural Ulster landscape. Following in the footsteps of Nordic and Tartan Noir in making commentary on current societ,y McGilloway recognises the importance of the past in trying to reach an understanding of the present. His critique however goes beyond criminal behaviour motivated primarily by politics or religion, allowing a deeper and more meaningful diagnosis of the ‘state of the nation’. Place, name and event become especially important in contextualising the liminality of McGilloway’s real rural border settings. In doing so, McGilloway continues in the rich tradition of Ulster poet such as Heaney, MacNiece, Muldoon and Hewitt in trying to rationalise the man-made amidst the elemental in the land of both the ‘Planter & The Gael.’ History, language, tradition and the sacral are all instruments of investigation in helping McGilloway present a revealing pathology and atlas of our times to his readers. Turning literary investigator, the author contends that there is much to learn from this physiography, not just for the borderlands region, but for the wider countryside and society beyond. Keywords Cultural Atlas, Crime Fiction, Place, Poetry, Rural.

Andrew Marvell's Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (356pp.)

David Norbrook, Review of English Studies 56 (Sept. 2005), 675-6.
‘We have waited a long time for a study of Marvell’s Latin poetry; fortunately, Estelle Haan’s monograph generously makes good the loss ... One of her most intriguing suggestions … is that Marvell may have presented paired poems like ‘Ros’ and ‘On a Drop of Dew’, and the poems to the obligingly named Dr Witty, to his student Maria Fairfax as his own patterns for the pedagogical practice of double translation. Perhaps the most original parts of the book, however, move beyond the familiar canon to cover the generic range of the Latin verse. Haan offers a very full contextualization of the early Horatian Ode to Charles I in seventeenth-century exercises in parodia. In a rewarding reading of the poem to Dr Ingelo she shows how Marvell deploys the language of Ovid’s Tristia to present Sweden as a place of shivering exile, only to subvert this model with a neo-Virgilian celebration of Christina as a virtuous, city-building Dido. She draws extensively on historical as well as literary sources to offer very detailed contextualizations of the poem to Maniban and ‘Scaevola Scotto-Britannus’... This monograph opens up many new ways into the Latin verse, not least because it is rounded off with new texts and prose translations of the Latin poems. These make a substantial contribution in their own right. They are the best and most accurate translations to date (those in Smith’s edition having some lapses); they avoid poeticisms but bring out the structure of the poems' wordplay very clearly. This book brings us a lot closer to seeing Marvell whole.'

Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison's Latin Poetry

J.W. Binns, Modern Language Review 101.2 (2006), 504-5:
‘This book is an important contribution to the study of Anglo-Latin poetry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries … ’Haan provides an able and authoritative account …, setting the poems in their contexts, and providing for each a very clear and penetrating analysis which traces the classical well-springs that lie behind much of Addison’s Latin writing, and also calls attention to non-traditional elements’.