Review of Never Still, Nivver Still, by Joan Lennon, Anne Sinclair & Lucy Wheeler, pub. Hansel 2023
This is a narrative poem in three parts by Joan Lennon, presented both in English and in a Fair Isle dialect translation by Anne Sinclair, and illustrated by Jenny Wheeler. It concerns life on Fair Isle, seen from three viewpoints: coming, going and staying, ie someone coming to live there, an emigrant leaving, and someone becoming acclimatised to the island, plus three short “interleaves” which separate the longer sections. To quote the author; “three narrative poems, telling the stories of three women’s experiences of Fair Isle in three distinctly different time periods, interleaved with descriptive poems about the way the natural world was constantly changing. In geological time, Fair Isle has travelled from the South Pole, been part of and then split away from North America, been engulfed and scoured by glaciers, and surrounded by sea. Now it is midway between the Orkney and Shetland archipelagos, where the Atlantic and the North Sea meet. But physical change has not stopped. The wind and the water continue to carve and shape the Isle.”
It may be necessary to explain to non-Shetlanders that even within a remote island group, Fair Isle is quite particularly isolated, almost as close to Orkney as to Shetland and far enough from anywhere that, for instance, children at high school on the mainland have to board away from home during the week. Even its dialect varies noticeably, particularly in pronunciation, from Shetlandic dialect elsewhere.
To speak first of the original poem, the voice in the “coming” section is very much that of someone who has immigrated, as the isle’s first settlers probably did, from Scandinavia and is temporarily traumatised by the huge difference in the landscape, especially the total lack of trees:
At home, she could see the other side of the fjord
and the deep green pines clinging to the mountain.
Here there was no other side
only a heaving grey line
where the grey of the water reared up to meet
the grey of the sky.
The second voice, which to me was the strongest, is that of a woman leaving the isle for the New World and apprehensive about her reception. This gives rise to a fascinating moment in the dialect translation; the lines
Their sister had written to warn them
“It’s only the English they speak here”
become in dialect
Der sister haed writtin te warn dem
“Dey oanly knap whaur we bide.”
That second line may not look much like the original, but to “knap”, in Shetlandic, means to speak affectedly, used in particular of a dialect speaker attempting more standard language. Here the translation arguably adds something to the original, and it isn’t the only time. When “stitching sky to sea” becomes “shooin lift te løybrak”, the care with which the alliteration is preserved by using “løybrak” (surf) instead of “haaf” (sea) is notable. When reading this section, it may help to know that the emigrating family could not have gone direct from Fair Isle to the Scottish mainland to embark for America. They would first have had to take ship north to Lerwick, then go south from there to the mainland, which means their ship would actually pass Fair Isle on the way south. This moment of keen nostalgia is skilfully conveyed:
the bog cotton flying their flags of fluff -
pinks, snugged down tight amongst the grasses -
the way the sheep tracks rayed out
beige through the brittle heather
[…]
She couldn’t see them
but she knew they were there.
The shorter “interleave” poems relate to the isle itself and its geography rather than to people. This is also true of the powerful illustrations by Lucy Wheeler; I don’t know enough to judge them as art, but they convey both the beauty and austerity of the landscape.
I’ve complained before in reviews about forewords detailing the author’s reasons for writing the book - the dreaded “journey” that is generally of interest to nobody else. In this case I would concede that some background is necessary, both on the place, which will be unfamiliar to many, and on the translation process. I do think the intro could be shorter; leave out all the chatty stuff about PhD proposals, funding applications, covid etc. All that matters is that she wanted to write about Fair Isle, went there to do so and that what developed was a project about three women on an island at different times, by three women on an island, working in different media. It is very readable both as an original English poem and in the dialect translation. There is also much interest, for anyone fascinated by languages, in how the translation process worked, and the illustrations are most pleasing.