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Such a brightly gleaming essay that it made me laugh! It strikes me that part of poetry’s role is to articulate the allatonceness of language itself, as it carries word meanings and cultural histories along, as lightly as a cloud does its water droplets. And this reminds me of Rody Gorman, who writes in Irish and Scottish Gaelic and English, and recently published a translation of the medieval Irish text Buile Shuibhne, The Madness of Sweeney, subtitled An Intertonguing, where the three languages intersect. A random example: My curse on Sweeney, he-it loveshareoffencedestroyedme the hourtime he javelindashattacked my little clusterclockbell in a javelintroopspray frenzy.

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Thanks James! Love the bit of Gorman text. I’ve worked a bit (on the academic side) on early modern examples of macaronic and since my own household is bilingual I think quite a lot about the creativity / playfulness of language mixture.

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