Seal sa Domhan Thoir: Sojourn in the Eastern World

Abstract

WHEN I was a very small child, farmed out to my Aunt May in West Kerry Gaeltacht, (1) one of our great joys was listening to wondertales in which hero had to make a perilous journey to an Domhan Thoir, 'the Eastern World', usually to bring back some pearl or other without price. Whether a princess or the silver apples of moon, golden apples of sun, whether a feather from a golden bird or water of eternal life from well that is at world's end, these marvels all came from an Domhan Thoir. It was as if coming from Ireland--the Western World or Hesperides--our own apples were considered ordinary or garden or commonplace. On principle that too much West is East, source and site of all marvels and wonders was its opposite, Eastern World. It has always seemed obvious to me that J.M. Synge's Playboy of Western World was called such to emphasize an ironic interplay with Eastern World of Gaeltacht storytellers. Little did I know at time that this very same Eastern World would play host to me for a very important and influential tire years of my young adult life. It is a place in which I have kept a foothold ever since. Years ago an applied linguist informed me that it would be hard to come across two languages that were phonetically more alike and morphologically more different than Turkish and Irish. This underlined my own deepest suspicions, though I would never have been able to put it so precisely. I had a real struggle to learn Turkish, my first non-Indo-European language, and even today my fluency depends greatly on how recently we have spent some time in country. But there was a time when linguistically I used to pass for an Alamanli, a Turk who had grown up in Germany. I remember once in Ankara, in bazaar area of Cikrikcilar Yokusu, I demurred from such an appelation, that I was actually an out-and-out gavur, or heathen, only to find that material I was buying suddenly doubled in price. That was last time I looked a gift horse in mouth, so to speak. I distinctly remember very first sentence I made in Turkish. I went to Turkey with my husband Dogan in October 1974 when I was six months pregnant with my first child. We traveled on Orient Express. This was not pampered, refurbished train of luxury tourism, but a higgledy-piggledy, mish-mash collection of run-down wagons which started off at various European cities like Paris and Munich and joined up in Belgrade before chugging its way slowly through Balkans to final destination of Sirkeci Station in Istanbul. As a train it was very rudimentary. It had no restaurant car, no opportunity for getting food of any sort, and if it hadn't been for yolluk, or travel provisions, including two cooked chickens and bosnak boreghi, a Bosnian-style pastry, given to us by my sister-in-law in Zurich, we would have been in a bad way. At Belgrade I was left looking after luggage while my husband went off to organize a couchette or wagon-lit for rest of journey. The carriage in which I was stranded was shunted back and forth umpteen times, sometimes an alarming distance away. Some Turkish workers spoke to me, asking what was up. I could recognize it was Turkish, but otherwise did not understand a word. But necessity being mother, etc., I came out with kocam yakinda gelecegim diyerek, gitti gelmedi, or saying he would come back soon, my husband went away and hasn't come back yet. The Turkish sentence has an economy of words and an elegance which are due to language being agglutinative, using participles, gerundives, and gerunds where an Indo-European language would use subjunctives and relative clauses. Kocam yakinda gelecegim diyerek, gitti gelmedi. This sentence drew forth a torrent of Turkish. Little did they realize how much I was at a loss. It would take at least five years of living in Turkey before I could make a sentence like that again with a similar insouciance. …