Top Bards

Raphael: Mount Parnassus (Vatican Apartments, 1510-11)

Raphael's famous Vatican fresco portrays Apollo and the nine Muses with, on the left, the greatest poets of antiquity; on the right, we have a group of moderns. The classical group includes Dante, a very blind-looking Homer, Virgil pointing somewhere offstage, and (down at the bottom left) Sappho. If you're curious, a plausible set of labels and identifications for most of the other figures can be found here on Wikipedia.

Raphael: Dante, Homer, Virgil (detail)

I was reminded of this famous image when I stumbled across a Reddit thread entitled "Who are the Shakespeares of other countries?"

I actually thought that question was pretty well done and dusted already, but it turned out that a number of the participants in the discussion were misled by the fact that Shakespeare was (primarily) a playwright into thinking that the contest was for the best dramatist in their respective countries.

It did get me thinking, though. What are the qualifications for being a "national bard" - besides being a great and influential writer, that is? Does it require an international reputation? Not really, I think - you can be little known outside your own culture, and still a powerful arbiter within it.

Suzuki Harunobu: Murasaki Shikibu (978-c.1016)

It is, I think, primarily a Western obsession - but the concept has certainly gone far beyond that now. Who, for instance, would question the primacy of Lady Murasaki, author of the Tale of Genji, in Japanese literature?

There are problems, too, with colonial and post-colonial countries. Are English-speaking nations such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States simply offshoots of English-language culture, or have they developed their own unique voices by dint of geographical separation? Shakespeare certainly continues to hold a certain primacy in all of them.

Right at the end of the long - somewhat repetitive - Reddit discussion, a contributor called "SciGuy241" commented:

How obvious our bias to western civilization is. See how nobody mentions Asia or Africa.

That isn't entirely accurate, as he would have found if he'd gone through the entire thread. Nevertheless, there's a good deal of truth in what he says.

In any case, I've done my best to redress that objection in the series of suggestions listed below. For the most part I've been able to rely on the thread itself to provide me with useful candidates for cultures and literatures I'm unfamiliar with.

It's important to note, however, that I've tried to reflect as many as possible of the suggestions made in the Reddit thread, rather than trying to impose too many - beyond the most obvious ones - myself.

Estelle M. Hurll: The Parnassus with possible figural identifications (1899)

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Emily Holleman: The Roman Empire (31 BCE)


Classical Antiquity:

1. Ancient Greece: Homer (c.8th century BCE)
   • (There were also some strong proponents of the great tragic dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides on the Reddit thread)


2. Ancient Rome: Virgil (70-19 BCE)
   • (There was at least one vote on the thread for Ovid. I suppose some purists might want to go as far back as Ennius)

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Map of the British Isles


Great Britain:

1. England: William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
   • (One or two people mentioned John Milton as a contender. Myself, I'd have felt inclined to add William Blake)


2. Ireland: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
   • (Some preferred James Joyce - of course, neither man spoke Irish; one might have to go to Flann O'Brien for that)


3. Scotland: Robert Burns (1759-1796)
   • (Some went for Walter Scott instead; Gaelic speakers might prefer the Jacobite Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, or perhaps the more contemporary Sorley MacLean)


4. Wales: Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
   • (Dafydd ap Gwilym was the greatest medieval Welsh poet; R. S. Thomas might be an alternative Welsh-speaking modern)

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Map of Europe


Europe:

1. Austria: Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
   • (Stefan Zweig and Robert Musil were also mentioned as possible alternatives)


2. Belgium: Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979)
   • (Some preferred Hugo Claus, "if only for Het Verdriet van België [The Sorrow of Belgium]"; others suggested the 13th century Willem die Madocke maecte, author of Van den vos Reynaerde [Reynard the Fox])


3. Czechia: Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
   • (Jaroslav Hašek or Karel Čapek were mentioned as possible alternatives)


4. France: Molière (1622-1673)
   • (Some preferred Victor Hugo; others Voltaire)


5. Germany: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
   • (Some, inevitably, went for Schiller instead)


6. Greece: Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933)
   • (There were also some strong proponents of Nikos Kazantzakis and George Seferis)


7. Hungary: János Arany (1817-1882)
   • ("... or Petőfi Sándor from the Romantic era. From earlier it's Balassi Bálint, Janus Pannonius or Zrínyi Miklós. Our country has many great poets, but ... our only great playwright is Katona József")


8. Italy: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
   • (Though some preferred Petrarch - or even Boccaccio)


9. Montenegro: Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (1813-1851)
   • (There weren't any other suggestions, so I guess he's it. There's a section on Montenegrin literature on Wikipedia)


10. The Netherlands: Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679)
    • (Other suggestions included P. C. Hooft, Gerbrand Bredero, and Louis Couperus.)


11. Poland: Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855)
    • (Though some went for Henryk Sienkiewicz instead)


12. Portugal: Luís de Camões (1524-1580)
    • (Though some went for Fernando Pessoa)


13. Romania: Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889)
    • (The one alternative mentioned was the novelist Liviu Rebreanu)


14. Russia: Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)
    • (Though some preferred Lev Tolstoy - or even Boris Pasternak)


15. Spain: Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
    • Tthough some preferred Lope da Vega, for some odd reason:

      The people of Spain think Cervantes
      Equal to half a dozen Dantes
      An opinion resented most bitterly
      By the people of Italy)



16. Ukraine: Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861)
    • (Though some went for Nikolai Gogol instead)

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The Baltic Sea


Scandinavia:

1. Denmark: Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)
   • (Karen Blixen and Søren Kierkegaard were also contenders)


2. Estonia: Anton Hansen Tammsaare (1878-1940)
   • (Kristjan Jaak Peterson, the "founder of modern Estonian poetry" (according to Wikipedia) was also in the running)


3. Finland: Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884)
   • (This one depends very much on what you expect from a national "Shakespeare" - the Kalevala is definitely the most famous work of Finnish literature, but did Lönnrot really write it, or simply assemble it? Aleksis Kivi and Mika Waltari should also be considered)


4. Iceland: Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241)
   • (For modern Icelandic literature, Halldór Laxness might be a more suitable candidate)


5. Norway: Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
   • (Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson is also considered to be among the "four great Norwegian writers, alongside Ibsen, Jonas Lie, and Alexander Kielland")


6. Sweden: August Strindberg (1849-1912)
   • (Some preferred Selma Lagerlöf or even Astrid Lindgren)

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Map of the Middle East


The Middle East:

1. Egypt: Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)
   • (Other suggested candidates included "The Dean of Arabic Literature" Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-Hakim, and feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi)


2. Iran: Ferdowsi (940-1025)
   • (Though some preferred those other great lyric poets Hafez and Omar Khayyam)


3. Lebanon: Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931)
   • (Some suggested Amin Maalouf or May Ziadeh)


4. Palestine: Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008)
   • (Others suggested the novelist Ghassan Kanafani)


5. Syria: Adonis (1930– )
   • (Some preferred Nizar Qabbani, or even the medieval poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri)


6. Turkey: Nazim Hikmet (1902–1963)
   • (Others preferred the foundational man of letters Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil)

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Map of Africa


Africa:

1. Nigeria: Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
   • (Though some preferred Wole Soyinka)


2. South Africa: Breyten Breytenbach (1939-2024)
   • (Though some preferred Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, or - more to the point - Sol T. Plaatje)

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Map of Asia


East Asia:

1. China: Cao Xueqin (1710-1765)
   • (Some preferred the Tang dynasty poets Li Bai or Du Fu; others went for one or other of the great canonical novelists: Shi Nai'an (Outlaws of the Marsh) or Wu Cheng'en (Journey to the West). "The one most commonly compared to Shakespeare is probably Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong ... its impact on Chinese language and culture is certainly not less than Shakespeare's impact on English.")


2. India: Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
   • (The British Raj nominated the Sanskrit playwright Kalidasa as the "Shakespeare of India"; the Hindustani social novelist Premchand was another popular choice)


3. Japan: Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014)
   • (Though some preferred the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō)


4. Korea: Jo Jeong-rae (1943- )
   • (Others preferred Han Kang)


5. Vietnam: Nguyễn Du (1861-1941)
   • (Others preferred the poet Hồ Xuân Hương)

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Map of North America


North America:

1. Canada: Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942)
   • (Though some preferred Leonard Cohen - or Robertson Davies)


2. Quebec: Michel Tremblay (1942- )
   • (Though some preferred Marie-Claire Blais)


3. United States: Mark Twain (1835-1910)
   • (Other nominations included Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville)

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Map of South America


Latin America:

1. Argentina: Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
   • (Some preferred Julio Cortázar or Ernesto Sábato - others would have preferred to go all the way back to Sarmiento or José Hernández)


2. Brazil: Machado de Assis (1839-1908)
   • (Though some preferred Carlos Drummond de Andrade or Clarice Lispector)


3. Chile: Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
   • Though some preferred José Donoso - or even Isabel Allende)


4. Colombia: Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)
   • (Though there were also some mentions of José Eustasio Rivera, author of The Vortex)


5. Guatemala: Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974)
   • (Francisco Ximénez, first translator of the Popol Vuh, also got a mention)


6. Guyana: Wilson Harris (1921-2018)
   • (Though some preferred poet David Dabydeen)


7. Mexico: Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695)
   • (Though some preferred Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes or Octavio Paz)


8. Paraguay: Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005)
   • (Though some preferred the poet José Ricardo Mazó)


9. Peru: César Vallejo (1892-1938)
   • (Though some preferred José María Arguedas or Mario Vargas Llosa)


10. St. Lucia: Derek Walcott (1930-2017)
    • (Though some preferred Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul as a Caribbean writer)


11. Uruguay: Mario Benedetti (1920-2009)
    • (Others preferred the epic poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín)

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Map of Oceania


Oceania:

1. Australia: Banjo Paterson (1864-1941)
   • (Some preferred Henry Lawson or Patrick White)


2. New Zealand: Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
   • (Though some nominated Janet Frame - or Barry Crump; interestingly, there were no votes for Baxter or Curnow)


3. The Philippines: Francisco Balagtas (1788-1862)
   • (Though some nominated José Rizal instead)


4. Samoa: Albert Wendt
   • (Some nominated Tusiata Avia instead)

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I'm well aware that the absences in this list are probably far more significant than the presences. Reddit has to take some of the blame, as I would certainly have added many additional African, Asian, and Oceanic authors if I'd had more suggestions to work with.

What would be most interesting, of course, would be to generate a bit of discussion over the 59 choices presented here - but also about all those gaps. Nominating a national bard may seem like a pretty futile thing to do - one of the main joys of literature is, after all, the fact that it presents such a rich smorgasbord of choices ... Is it so futile, though?

Do we somehow need a designated Shakespeare or Pushkin to free up the rest of us from wearing our ethnicities on our sleeves? It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

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Caryl Churchill: Top Girls (1982)

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Warwick Freeman: Sentence or Alphabet?

Warwick Freeman: Sentence (2024):
Pink Monkey Bird, Face Ache, Poppy, Hanger Hook, Pāua Brooch, Red Butterfly, Apron Hook
[all exhibition photos by Sam Hartnett]

Yesterday, on Saturday, I went to an artist's talk at Objectspace with the curators of Kiwi jeweller Warwick Freeman's survey show Hook Hand Heart Star. I was there mainly to support Bronwyn, who put three years of work into compiling a massive electronic archive of Freeman's work, then working with Objectspace Director Kim Paton on the content and design of the exhibition, first unveiled last year at Die Neue Sammlung Design Museum in Munich.

But you know how it is, after looking in all the vitrines, listening to Bronwyn's explanations of the objects inside them, and then hearing Warwick's own expositions, I found I was hatching a few opinions of my own. Impudent opinions based on ignorance, no doubt - Art criticism is definitely not my field - but nonetheless of interest to me.

Warwick Freeman: Sentence [photo: Sam Hartnett]

"Sentences", as he calls them, are an important part of Warwick's practice. Arts commentator Hamish Coney describes these as:

linear groupings of ... forms – wee hearts made from pounamu or scoria from Rangitoto, stars formed from lustrous polished shells finished with elegant, serrated edges, metal hooks as metaphors for both weightiness and weightlessness and suggestive wooden hands beckoning, greeting or asking to be held.

Here are a couple more of these sentences:

Warwick Freeman: Sentence [photo: Sam Hartnett]

Warwick Freeman: Sentence [photo: Sam Hartnett]

You'll note at once the repetition of particular symbols - or emblems, as Warwick prefers to call them - in the examples given above. They often include butterflies, flowers, hearts, stars, and tiny skulls, in various materials. Freeman refuses to 'read' or 'interpret' them, beyond pointing out that a kind of implicit syntax underlies the logic of their arrangement.

They might, in that sense, be regarded as cryptograms. Or, alternatively, as something analogous to the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Ancient Egyptians or Mayans.

Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription (Tomb of Seti I, c.1294 BCE)

Mayan hieroglyphic charm for beekeepers (Madrid Codex, c.1250 CE)

A long time ago, back in the 1980s, I took a paper in Ancient Egyptian at Auckland University, and learned the rudiments of reading hieroglyphics. They may look like a series of pictures of animals, birds, and body parts - and that's what they originally were - but they evolved over time into a very complex library of symbols, which included a proto-alphabet alongside large numbers of biliterals and stand-alone ideographs.

The point is, they can be read pretty fluently by Egyptologists - as, now, can the even more complex Mayan writing system. What Warwick's sentences reminded me of most strongly, though, were not so much hieroglyphic inscriptions as alphabets.

Matt Baker: Evolution of the Alphabet

At one time or another, most of us have probably seen one of those charts which purport to show the growth of the modern alphabet from some set of ancient squiggles. It's not that there isn't a fair amount of truth in this, it's just that it (inevitably) oversimplifies a far more complex and nuanced process.

There are some basic principles at work, however. One is the tendency of an original piece of denotative drawing to be gradually stylised into a set of eventually unrecognisable lines. You'll see that in the chart above in the shift from a bull's head to the letter 'A'.

Another important feature is the use of homophones for tagging sounds to letters. The classic analogy we were given in Akkadian 101 (again at Auckland Uni) ran more or less as follows:

4 sail

It's pretty obvious what this sign is supposed to mean. "Four sail" = "For sale." It's a pun, in other words. Each of the symbols sounds like another word, so most readers can be trusted to arrive at the correct meaning.

For Sale

Over time the symbols become streamlined, and the original puns become less and less necessary. Readers already know what's intended, so they read the message through the original images without even being conscious of the play on words.

This is, mind you, an English-language based pun. It wouldn't work in any other language, because "4" and "sail" don't sound like "for sale" in, say, French (à vendre) or German (zu verkaufen) - let alone (say) Russian or Chinese.

Nimrud: Royal hand of king Assurnasirpal II (c.860 BCE)

Cuneiform, the dominant form of writing in the Middle East for roughly 3,000 years, is a script which originally encoded a series of pictorial puns in Sumerian, but was subsequently adopted by a number of speakers of completely different languages.

None of the original Sumerian puns worked in the Semitic language Akkadian, which succeeded it as the dominant idiom of Mesopotamia - let alone the Indo-European Hittite language, or any of the others it was eventually used to record. But that made no different to how useful it was to have a commonly understood set of signs which encoded particular ideas and sounds.

Proto-Sinaitic Script (c.1900-1800 BCE)

These two scrawled lines of script from Wadi-el-Hol in Egypt "appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date." They show the origins of a line of development which would eventually lead to the Phoenician alphabet, thence to ancient Greek, and then onto the Latin alphabet which we still use today.

Phoenician Alphabet (c.1200-900 BCE)

When I gaze at those two scribbled inscriptions from Wadi-el-Hol, though, they remind me strongly of Warwick Freeman's lines of carefully arranged symbols. There's no repetition of objects in Freeman's lines, however, which makes them seem to me less like sentences than alphabets.

After all, the nature of a sentence is that it should contain repeated letters - if not entire words. An alphabet, by contrast, encodes a kind of potential speech: a vehicle for communication rather than the communication itself.

Proto-Semitic Alphabet (c.1550 BCE)

Do these proto-Semitic letters look at all like Warwick's syllabary to you? I have to say, they certainly do to me.

Warwick Freeman: Sentences (c.2025 CE)

It's not that I want to suggest that Warwick's lines of symbols are decipherable in the same way as other language systems. I do think they're meant to evoke the earliest roots of written language, though - either spontaneously, or because at some point he'd seen and been intrigued by one of those diagrams which show how "our alphabet got to us."

Perhaps, like so many of us, he feels that our writing system - as well as the language we encode with it - is in sore need of a makeover: that we need to look at the world afresh with uncomplacent eyes.

Universität Tübingen: 40,000-year-old mammoth figurine with early precursor to writing

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The Voynich Manuscript