The dialects that make up the Romani language offer an opening, not a fence, between fields of language. Romani contains so many words and phrases from other languages; language is absorbed as it is travelled through. The words are pronounced exactly as they appear, and their meaning is best caught by reading the poems aloud at a canter without leaning too hard into the glossary, and by listening to the meaning through the verbal music of the words. When a Romani word has two or more meanings in English, all those meanings are in play.
‘Hedgehurst’: my version drew inspiration from Duncan Williamson’s version in Fireside Tales (1985) but is very much a free adaptation of the tale.
‘Clearing a Name’: muck is a term for family or clan; Gaujo is the term used by Roma for non-Romani. As with ‘taig’ (Catholic Irish) or ‘gyp’ (traveller) the terms are pejorative but used freely in Romani conversation.
‘You Were Broken’ opens on an image of an araucaria in a poem of the same title by Ungaretti.
‘Sèsi o Lety U Písku’: Nazi concentration camp for Roma from Bohemia, responsible for the eradication of more than half of the Roma population in the Czech lands.
‘Ludus Coventriae’: what we know as Ludus Coventriae is a collection of Mystery Plays that were once thought to have been presented in Coventry (the plays as such are not of Coventry). The Coventry Carols, however, are a series of songs from The Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors and The Pageant of the Weavers. Members of those guilds and also perhaps professional players performed these ‘true’ Coventry Corpus Christi plays in Coventry during the celebrations on Corpus Christi Day, the religious festival closest to Midsummer. The carols within the plays have entered folk memory as lullabies. ‘Ludus Coventriae’ borrows phrases from these plays and excerpts from the carols. ‘The Charges on Midsummer Night’ is freely adapted from Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, edited by R.W. Ingram.
‘Kings’: the Book of the Wisdom of the Egyptians deals in field-knowledge of the Romani. It is a kind of hedgerow schoolbook for travelling people. It contains sayings for survival, for living on edges, including within the margins of error imposed by the demands and prejudices of Gajo (non-gypsies) should offence be taken, and the law, or worse, be thrown against a travelling group or tribe My language sources for this poem include the website on Romani culture, the Patrin Web Journal (http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/patrin.htm) and its Romanichal Word List. I have also used The Gypsy–English English–Gypsy Concise Dictionary by Atanas Slavov (New York, 1999). Two phrases, including the epigraph to ‘Kings’, are adapted from Romano Lavo-Lil by George Burrow, 1974 edition. The phrase ‘little wicked wicket gate’ comes from Edwin Muir’s ‘The Castle’. Atanas Slavov writes in The Gypsy–English English–Gypsy Concise Dictionary: ‘Word stress does not play a significant role in the Gypsy language. It is presented in this work the way words were pronounced by the Gypsies we interviewed. If the interviewees or the written sources we used show differences in applying stresses in certain words, we do not show them’. à, è, ì, ò, ù, òo – stressed vowels.
‘Taken Away’: a free adaptation of a well-known traveller and folk tale. ‘The Taen-Awa’ in Duncan Williamson’s The King and the Lamp: Scottish Traveller Tales (Canongate, 2000) provided my way into writing the poem.
‘The Circling Game’: the narrative took inspiration from the rendition of this traveller’s tale in ‘The Boy and the Blacksmith’ from Duncan Williamson’s The King and the Lamp: Scottish Traveller Tales (Canongate, 2000).
‘The Library Beneath the Harp’: the poet Bronisława Wajs (1908–87) was known by her Romani name Papusza which means ‘doll’. She grew up on the road in Poland within her kumpania or band of families. She was literate and learned to read and write by trading food for lessons. Her reading and writing were frowned upon and whenever she was found reading she was beaten and the book destroyed. She was married at fifteen to a much older and revered harpist, Dionýzy Wajs. Unhappy in marriage, she took to singing as an outlet for her frustrations, with her husband often accompanying her on harp. She then began to compose her own poems and songs. When the Second World War broke out, and Roma were being murdered in Poland by both the German Nazis and the Ukrainian fascists, they gave up their carts and horses but not their harps. With heavy harps on their backs, they looked for hiding places in the woods. 35,000 Roma out of 50,000 were murdered during the war in Poland. The Wajs clan hid in the forest in Volyň, hungry, cold and terrified. A horrible experience inspired Papusza to write her longest poem, ‘Ratfale jasfa – so pal sasendyr pšegijam upre Volyň 43 a 44 berša’ (‘Bloody tears – what we endured from German soldiers in Volyň in ’43 and ’44’), parts of which are used in ‘The Library Beneath the Harp’. In 1949 Papusza was heard by the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, who recognised her talent. Ficowski published several of her poems in a magazine called Problemy along with an anti-nomadic interview with Polish poet Julian Tuwim. Ficowski became an adviser on ‘the Gypsy Question’, and used Papusza’s poems to make his case against nomadism. This led to the forced settlement of the Roma all over Poland in 1950, known variously as ‘Action C’ or ‘the Great Halt’. The Roma community began to regard Papusza as a traitor, threatening her and calling her names. Papusza maintained that Ficowski had exploited her work and had taken it out of context. Her appeals were ignored and the Baro Shero (Big Head, an elder in the Roma community) declared her ‘unclean’. She was banished from the Roma world, and even Ficowski broke contact with her. Afterwards, she spent eight months in a mental asylum and then the next thirty-four years of her life alone and isolated. Her tribe laid a curse on Papusza’s poems and upon anybody using or performing her work. ‘The Library Beneath the Harp’ partly borrows and reshapes some of Papusza’s introductory autobiography from the Songs of Papusza as well as three of her poems.
‘A Lit Circle’: the epigraph is from Josser: The Secret Life of a Circus Girl (Virago, 2000) by Nell Stroud, now Nell Gifford, owner of Gifford’s Circus.