Something Broke Apart or Came Together

Something broke apart or came together and now I can read in my dreams

---

In retrospect, it was a crime to let Baby Natasha read medieval literature. Who thought it was a good idea for a melodramatic teen to read lyrics like this:

Foweles in the frith,
The fisses in the flod,
And I mon waxe wod.
Sulch sorw I walke with
For beste of bon and blod.

Birds in the forest
Fish in the stream
And I must go crazy
I walk with such sorrow
Because of the best of bone and blood

—Anonymous, 13th century, my translation

---

As a teen, I read this verse as a secular love poem. It could be that, it could be symbolic of Jesus, it could be both. Middle English writing was like that. Ian Pittaway has a really good, easy to understand breakdown of possible meanings, “Foweles in þe frith (birds in the wood): mystery and beauty in a 13th century song.”

---

Or songs from MS Harley 2235, written in the 1340s. It contains religious works found elsewhere, but also secular songs not found anywhere else. Aniina Jokinen’s translation of this stanza from “When the Nyhtegale Singes” fueled many a sad teenaged night:

I have loved all this past year
    So that I may love no more;
I have sighed many a sigh,
    Beloved, for thy pity,
My love is never thee nearer,
    And that me grieveth sore;
Sweet loved-one, think on me,
    I have loved thee long.

Like so much medieval poetry, we return to it because of its ambiguity, its fluidity. “I have loved all this past year/So that I may love no more.” Has the speaker focused all of their love on one person and thus cannot love anyone else? Has their heart been broken, and so they will never love another? Is it a plea, that the speaker cannot possibly love this person more than they already do? Has the speaker stopped loving the object of their affection? (The rest of the stanza suggests no, the speaker still loves their sweetie, but sometimes love and hate and jealousy and revenge get all tangled up.) I took it to heart as “I can’t love any[one/thing] more this year. My amount of love is used up.” (“Reno Dakota, I’m reaching my quota/of tears for the year,” as The Magnetic Fields say more lyrically.) And though that sentiment sat on my heart, it was a falsehood: I fell in love so easily then, and I still do.

Even if, In reality, I loved everyone, my teenage sights were set on two: Raj and Holly. Raj, with warm brown eyes, and the biggest smile, and dimples when he smiled. One Saturday, he invited me to the mall! 🙂 To help him get a gift for his girlfriend. 😦 It was the best and worst day of my life. And Holly, outgoing, fearless, curly hair and glasses (and warm brown eyes, too, behind those glasses). Our class thought both of them would be president one day. I had a type. Oh, I swooned, I sighed for the best of bone and blood, but I would never be out of love, nor run out of love.

---

However, that’s not the only way to translate this stanza. Jokinen’s translation was the first I read, and so I kept it. If “that” is a pronoun and not an adverb (changing to “so” in the modern translation), the line might be read as “I have loved all this year that [one/person] I can’t [not allowed] love any more.” That is a minor quibble, and translating poetry is often about feels, not dictionary definitions, and I think most interpretations of “I have loved all this year/That I may love no more” are probably a correct feeling.

The next two lines are very straightforward, and then the Middle English does what it does best: ambiguity.

---

Ich have loved al this yer
    That Y may love na more;
Ich have siked moni syk,
    Lemmon, for thin ore,
Me nis love neuer the ner,
    Ant that me reweth sore;
Suete lemmon, thench on me,
    Ich have loved the yore.

Let me make it more clear which two lines I mean:

“Me nis love neuer the ner,    
Ant that me reweth sore;”

---

The second line is actually pretty clear: “And that me rue-th sore,” that is “rue” like “rue the day.” Regret, grieve. Whatever is happening in the line above, it pains the speaker, and sorely. No, it’s the first of the two lines that is, shall we say, liminal:

“Me nis” [nor his, not is] love never thee ner [near, but could be neither/nor]. Jokinen takes it as “my love is not any closer to you,” that is the love the speaker possesses. The writer behind the blog “A Clerk at Oxford” renders the line as “To me love is never any nearer, And that I sorely regret.” Both express the idea of lack of physical closeness or perhaps emotional intimacy, but I do think the shades between “I am not close to you” and “you are not close to me” are interesting. (Or perhaps the superlative is in the wrong place: no longer near thee.)

What confounds me is the “me nis.” “Me” could be first person (I, me, my) but also an indefinite third person pronoun (him, her, they). Given the use of first person elsewhere in the poem (Ich have loved), it’d be strange to change to third person here. (Additionally, the “me” is the next line is pretty clearly first person.) Nor could it refer to the sweetie, since they are referred to as “thee” in the same line. Likewise “nis” is most likely a contraction, but it could stand in the place of several word pairs: ne + his, ne +is. It could also signify a question, though its position in the line suggests that’s not the case. So “Her love is not near” could be a possible translation, but seems unlikely to me. (I suppose “the” could actually be “the” and not “thee,” but “never the near[er]” feels more like a 19th century construction.)

However, “nis” could also be a form of “nice.” And in Middle English “nis” meant foolish. Perhaps the line could be read as “my foolish love [is] never near you” or “I can’t get near you with my foolish love.” Someone who has sighed many sighs could also call themselves foolish.

---

I have loved all this past year
    one that that I am not allowed to love anymore;
I have sighed many a sigh,
    Beloved, for thy pity,
My foolish love is no nearer to thee,
    And that sorely pains me;
Sweet one, think of me,
    I have loved thee long.

---

So I laid the gray carpet in my bedroom, crying and listening to The Mediaeval Baebes perform songs like this one, based on “The Seven Deadly Sins” by William Dubar (c. 1460-c. 1530 or c. 1456-c. 1513):

In secreit place, this hindir nicht
I hard ane beirne say till ane bricht
“My huny, my hart, my heill
I have bene lang your luifar leill
This hindir nicht
Ye brek my hart, my bony ane”

In a secret place this past night
I heard one brave say to one bright
”My honey, my heart, my health,
I have long been your loyal lover.
This past night,
You broke my heart, my bonny one.”

My translation

The plaintive strings, the echo-y voice all add to the inherent sadness. Divorced from any other context, we can imagine the speaker strolling through a garden on a moonlit night, overhearing the end of a relationship. What did she do to break his heart? We can fill in our own sad stories. For example, going to the mall with Raj. How could he, in good conscience, take me to Bath and Body Works?!

(I know the word “heill” means “health,” but it felt like a fitting pun, “my honey, my heart, my hell.” Love is a battlefield, etc.)

---

Obviously Dunbar straddled the line into the Renaissance. But that just made things worse. We started Shakespeare in earnest in ninth grade. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet came out the year I turned 14! Even something as simple as A Midsummer Night’s Dream left an impression on my soft, malleable brain:

“I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worse place can I beg in your love,—
And yet a place of high respect with me,—
Than to be used as you use your dog?”

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.1.202-210

Obviously the audience is meant to see Helena as a pitiable figure, one who should move one, one who is, perhaps, melodramatic. But as a silly [nice] teenager and nice [silly[ young adult, I recited these lines about people who, probably, did not deserve them. All I wanted was to bask, but a little, in warm smiles and bright eyes.

---

Oh Raj! :_(

---

Thus did I sleep poorly in my teen years, a combination of biology, caffeine, late night study sessions, worry about my father, and hormones. And thus, too, began my interest in the Middle Ages. Shakespeare in ninth grade, learning “The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales in tenth, Napster introducing me to The Medieval Baebes in eleventh, Dad’s death in twelfth. . . .I was cooked.

One of the dreams that has stayed with me was from that time. Tenth grade, maybe, around 16 or so. I was already helplessly in love with Raj and Holly, far too cowardly to say anything. I loved a doomed noble romance: Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, Magus from the animated show Gargoyles, Niles and Daphne on Frasier, Betty and Scott on Remember WENN.

Remember WENN? An obscure show that aired on AMC, centered on a Pittsburgh radio station in the late ‘30s/early ‘40s. My father, born in 1942, loved AMC anyway, and enjoyed the nostalgia hit. I scorned it at first, but soon became engrossed, particularly in the unresolved love triangle of Betty, Scott, and Victor. (Unresolved because the show was canceled.) The corny silliness (niceness?) of the early seasons gave way to the corny romance of the later, and that was perfect for Teenager Natasha. It was the second IP for which I ever wrote fanfic, after, of course, The X-Files. (The X-Files! Of course I was a Mulder/Scully shipper, but I also loved that doomed crush Agent Pendrell had on Scully. I wrote fanfic about that, too.)

And so one night I dreamed of the characters from Remember WENN. A red couch in a desert war zone, a woman cries for a fallen man, “Stay here, I love you.” She curls her body around him. The likeness of those actors, filled with wisps of my own emotions. The dream felt so real I even searched out a dream interpreter online. She kindly did a reading for me for free; I wish I still had her analysis! But I remember vaguely that it was the bland meanings one would suspect: imagery from the news, concern about someone close to me.

---

Often when one suffers trauma, they become stuck at the age it happened. I was 18 when Dad died, so I went to college with grief and a high school teenager-ness that didn’t end until probably my mid-30s. I retained my love for medieval lit and unrequited love, and began to carve out an academic path. While in college, I joined a historical re-enactment group, The Society for Creative Anachronism, which only aided and abetted my interests. I wrote my little papers on Chaucer, engaged in several doomed love affairs, and rarely slept because of the nightmares.

---

Because I had taken four years of high school German, I was exempt from college language courses. Still, I dabbled in Old and Middle English, and lightly danced around Latin. In fact, I occasionally dreamt in German in high school, but the grammar was always incorrect (I still remember telling a blond dream-boy, “Ich bin Amerikanerin!”) Never really fluent in anything other than English, in the ensuing decades I tried my tongue at Hindi, French, Spanish, and Irish.

A few years ago, in a desire to learn more about Oregon and its indigenous people, I started (and subsequently completed!)(it’s cool, no big) a two year program in Chinuk Wawa, an indigenous pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest. Composed primarily of Old Chinookian, Kalapuyan, other indigenous languages, plus English and French, its relatively small vocabulary is used in ingenious ways. The word for dream is “musum-nanich,” look while asleep. Nightmare is “mashachi-musum,” evil sleep.

I truthfully participated in the beginner sentences: pulakʰli-pʰupʰup nayka (I am a night owl). nayka ɬatwa musum kʰapa kikwəli-san (I go to sleep very late). nayka kitəp kʰapa katsaq-san (I wake up at noon). For two terms, we were tasked with recording weekly one minute videos, talking about any subject. I spoke about my struggles with nightmares and seeking treatment for them. nayka ɬatwa kʰapa dokta. aná miɬayt kʰapa nayka musum (I go to the doctor. There is pain in my sleep.)

While studying Chinuk Wawa, I continued my “lessons” on the Duolingo language learning app. Usually Spanish, but sometimes other languages. A little ritual before bed. Then my friend from the SCA days asked a favor: could I translate something into Middle English? And Old English if I was able? Sure, send it over. She sent me the (English) dialogue of the Hungarian character in the musical Chicago.

The Middle English was fairly straight-forward, but my Old English is, well, as fragmentary as the corpus itself. I read through my copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, looking for sentences I could pull that kinda sorta meant what the character says.

And so I spent a week, diving into and out of English, Middle English, Old English, Spanish, and Chinuk Wawa. One night, something either broke apart or came together, but after looking at five languages in one day, I was able to read in my dreams. Something I’d thought impossible, something I was sure I was faking: surely I wasn’t actually reading but making sense of gibberish once I was awake. If I could read in my dreams, I’d never be able to tell if I was asleep or awake. That idea filled me with dread.

Though I’ve not been able to find the basis for the statistic, various articles suggest about 1% of people can actually read in their dreams. Writers and poets, usually, people who work with language. And I suspect that if those of us in this very strange 1% are turning gibberish into actual language upon waking, that’s significant, too. Reflecting on these years of language, poetry, love, and trauma, my dreamspace had fragile walls, barely holding together when I started Chinuk Wawa. As my insomnia worsened, it’s little wonder the walls broke and I can now read in my dreams.