LAST LIVING SPEAKER
I
(Royal Free Hospital, London, 2009)
After the
stroke, English words
escaped
you, like a coop
of
cacophonous birds
you’d
failed to tame.
The
dialect of your distant
infancy –
that landscape
of stifled
voices - re-emerges
in their
wake: revenant
of a long-
dead
language,
it possesses
and reclaims
your abandoned
tongue.
II
(Von Humboldt’s
Expedition, Venezuela, 1800)
‘In a cage
hardly permitting
his dog-eared, blue
-and-yellow pinions
to extend
we came upon Angel
in the tribal village
hard by the Orinoco,
kidnapped trophy
of their enemies’
last demise.
From the beak
of a macaw
I heard at last
the cut-off tongue
of the Atures; met
the mournful,
gummy eye
of the oracle-bird
through whose mouth
so many voices
are now thrown.’
Footnote: Without factual precedent Part I yokes the phenomena
of stroke-victims’ reversion to a mother tongue they may not have spoken in
years to the dying-out of cultural legacies when a last surviving
native-speaker passes away (I was thinking particularly of Boa Snr, the last
speaker of Bo, a language of the Andaman Islands, who died in 2010). Part 2
adapts an apocryphal anecdote about the famous Prussian explorer (see Mark
Abley, Spoken Here: Travels among
Disappearing Languages 2004)