East Anglian ‘Rosetta’ stone

Welsh slate plaque, 2004 (private collection)
h.60cm, w.25cm, d.4cm.

This piece is probably Breeze’s most important work to date, bringing together his sadness for the loss of dialect words and his interest in the process of translation. The text is a pastoral poem written by Breeze lamenting the loss of our ability to ‘read’ the natural world around us. Beneath it is a translation into Greek, which consequently gives the key to the largely undecipherable East Anglian tongue. Translated by Colin Sydenham it is written in the iambic metre used by the Greek tragedians, the equivalent of English blank verse. The translation is as follows:

Along the shore of the sea and the ponds of the beach,
as the north wind drives the waves, only the cockle
and the mussel know the cry of the seabird.
The hare, hearing the wind bringing the sound of the rain,
will hope for the song of the returning spring;
now the cold thaws out of the fields and ditches,
the young of the duck searches for its watery food,
the frogs bring forth their eggs in the marsh,
and the flying insect displays its many-coloured wing
to the reeds.
Even calm has some kind of meaning,
When the breeze
suddenly cools the over-hot day.
For if a storm beats flat the standing corn,
a butterfly will utter a silent sound to the poppy,
and a lark will soar aloft to the heavens.
But once the whole of the crop has been harvested
the young man will sing of his pay and his deep thirst,
praising the new produce before the autumn.
Then a magical owl will call forth from the mist
a company of ghosts, terrors that walk the night.
Who now hears this song from the east?
The trees, the stream and the wild beasts.