Grievous Music: Randolph Stow’s Middle Ages
Randolph Stow's poem 'Outrider', which forms the epigraph to Stow's 1981 novel The Girl Green as Elderflower, tells of loss, dislocation, and 'ancestral ghosts'. The 'grievous music' of the poem is a music of exile: it sings of a lost land, a home which can never be returned to. It is tempting to read the poem, as Dorothy Hewett does, as Stow's farewell to Australia: an expatriate writer's bittersweet missive to an abandoned homeland (Hewett 59). The lost land, however, is more resonant than this. The experiences of leaving and listening are repeated throughout Stow's work, but in The Girl Green as Elderflower they take place in the context of the English Middle Ages, specifically the twelfth century. In this novel, written as a sequel to Visitants (1980), the antipodean patrol officer Crispin Clare recovers in England from a traumatic experience of malaria and attempted suicide in the Trobriand Islands. His method of recovery is to translate and rewrite stories from twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources.
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"Kutoka kwa mshairi Randolph Stowe, ""Outrider"" ni wimbo wa kwanza wa riwaya ya Stowe ya 1981 ""The Girl Green as Elderflower"" ambayo inazungumzia juu ya kupoteza, kupotea, na roho za mababu." 'Muziki wenye kuhuzunisha' wa shairi hilo ni muziki wa uhamisho: huimba juu ya nchi iliyopotea, nyumba ambayo haiwezi kurudi kamwe. "Kama Dorothy Hewitt, ""Stowe's Farewell to Australia: A Expatriate Writer's Bittersweet Missive to an Abandoned Homeland"" (Hewett, 59)." Hata hivyo, nchi iliyopotea ina maana zaidi kuliko hii. Uzoefu wa kuondoka na kusikiliza unarudiwa katika kazi ya Stowe, lakini katika The Girl Green as Elderflower, hufanyika katika muktadha wa Enzi za Kati za Kiingereza, haswa karne ya kumi na mbili. Katika riwaya hii, iliyoandikwa kama mwendelezo wa Wageni (1980), afisa wa doria ya antipodean Crispin Clare anapata nafuu nchini Uingereza kutoka kwa uzoefu wa mateso ya malaria na jaribio la kujiua katika Visiwa vya Trobriand. Njia yake ya kupona ni kutafsiri na kuandika upya hadithi kutoka vyanzo vya karne ya kumi na mbili na kumi na tatu. Tafadhali jiunge ili ufikie makala hii na hifadhidata yetu yote.