The sea, o the sea, a ghra gheal mo chroi,
Long may it roll between England and me.
It's a sure guarantee that some day we'll be free,
Thank God we're surrounded by water.
Contemporary ballad
Water: what a word. We understand you, lifr.
Paul Celan
PUTTING these two quotations side by side at any time is ironic. But doing so in a page marking Ireland's assumption of the Presidency of the European Union? The ironies are oceanic, certainly for this swimmer.
The first chorus - was it written by Dominic Behan? - was popular during the balladry boom in the 1960s and was sung with what used to be known as gusto. Hardly anyone, I think, paid a blind bit of notice to the political content; after 50 years of being caught in our free state, mumbling the Sinn Fein crust, isolationism was part of what we assumed we were. And yet before the decade was out the pot had boiled over, our nagging mini civil war had begun and on January 1st, 1973, we were in Europe.
As an ex Christian Brothers boy, no longer speaking their compulsory Irish, still trying to re-magic, their horrible fascination with sex, rejecting their nationalistic religion and their religious nationalism, I might have been expected to say an unfond farewell to all that and to vote whole heartedly for Ireland's entry into Europe. But being part of a Market that was Common seemed as absurd as the idea of a Brother who was Christian. So I voted yes to the Irish Sea and no to the EEC.
And yet at the same time, and feeling not a moment's confusion or uncertainty about the contradictions, people like myself were wildly in favour of Europe and everything that came from it.
Joyce was our guiding star and the places he lived in, Trieste, Rome, Zurich, Paris, were star places. But why did he describe this living abroad as exile? One is sent into exile and even if, a vital distinction, Joyce chose it, isn't there still a whiff of victimhood off the word?
For this reader, though, it was the discovery of Celan during the Christmas of 1972 that revealed a different way of thinking poetically about the European world. Even now, 25 years later and having translated (with Peter Jankowsky) 65 Celan poems, I can still be brought up short by that difference - today, as I'm trying, with some difficulty, to compare the two quotations that head this article I pick up a book about Celan and read of him agitatedly and vehemently rejecting comparison. How can one write without this measuring stick? But Celan "insisted on the incomparable". He was just himself, or rather, himself, just. So there.
So here I recall how the person I was, as it were "surrounded by water", came to 1972. It was the year of Bloody Friday when the IRA exploded nine bombs one afternoon in Belfast. Such a miracle, to have turned so much water into so much blood.
But in 1972 Celan was two years dead. Just short of his fiftieth birthday he drowned himself in the Seine. What weighed him down, of course, was history - both his parents were victims of the Holocaust - but it was also language: "Water: what/a word. We understand you, life". Understanding and drowning, surely the one can't lead to the other?
It is a question that can only be answered by living, not with words - the pursuit of the meaning of meaning too often ends up doing what Hard Hearted Hannah does in the song: "pouring water on a drowning man". Even the certainty of the link that Celan created by his suicide, testing it to destruction, is, it now seems to this reader, uncertain, the real result of yet another delusion. As for thanking God that we're surrounded by water and swimming in blood as a consequence, perhaps it is possible, and therefore necessary, to say that this too is a delusion, a nightmare from which we, if not the dead, may awaken.
Celan belonged to a Jewish Europe that no longer exists. Czernowitz, his birthplace, is in the Bukovina, that "land of wells" through which the river Dniestr runs on and on the other side of which is "the Ukraine. In recent days General Lebed has taken control of the security apparatus of Russia, his electoral success largely due to the way he put down a rebellion in territory Celan claimed as his homeland. It is a far off place of which we know little, but then who had heard of Mostar five years ago?
Celan has nothing overtly political to say about the problem of borders, the settling of which is the true purpose of the European Union. But political community, the hopeless hope of "a home become a sister to me" and of "No one's root - O ours", wells up in every word. Now, as Europe temporarily roots her future in Ireland, she may find a foothold on our own peculiarly ironic combination of water and earth and say, as Celan did in the poem called "Irish":
Give me the right of way over the corn steps into your sleep, the right of way over the sleep path, the right to cut turf on the heart slope, tomorrow.