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The Blackbird of Belfast Lough keeps singing
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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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