In the first quarter of the 20th century, Daniel Thaly (1879-1950) of Dominica, then a British Caribbean colony, was one of France’s most celebrated poets.
Looting Hummingbirds, the selected poems of Daniel Thaly edited and translated by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Mark Andrews, is the first English translation of his works.
Speech by Polly Pattullo, publisher of Papillote Press, at the launch of Looting Hummingbirds on 14 March in Roseau, Dominica.
Daniel Thaly, who was born in Dominica in 1879 and died there in 1950, wrote almost entirely in French. He was educated in Martinique and France, where he trained as a doctor. He became famous in French literary circles and was dubbed “the Prince of Antillean Poetry”. His poetry is lyrical and nostalgic. And he wrote passionately about Dominica’s environment – you could say he was an early environmentalist. As Celia Sorhaindo has written: “Thaly points out what’s at stake and what is being lost with our disregard and disconnection from self, each other and nature.” Yet, although he was born in Dominica – his mother was a Bellot while his father was from Martinique – and spent much of his life here his name is barely recognised in Dominica today.
Interestingly, though, a Dominican friend who teaches French in Roseau said that she had heard of him. Indeed, she had studied his work while at university in Guadeloupe, alongside the classics of French literature. But she had had to go to a French-speaking island to hear his name.
So Looting Hummingbirds is a way of reclaiming his work and his poetry for Dominica and for a global English-language readership – and importantly, the book also outlines what little is known of his life.
It was Professor Lisa Paravisini who started this whole thing. Lisa is a Puerto Rican who lives and works in the US and is Professor of Hispanic Studies and of Caribbean Culture and Literature at Vassar College. She has visited Dominica many times. She is also, importantly for us, the biographer of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, author of The Orchid House.
Daniel Thaly was a family friend and knew Phyllis as a child, and brought her and her sisters books – including his own – and treats. Later, Phyllis became a friend of Thaly’s adopted daughter, Roma. Phyllis couldn’t resist writing about Thaly in one of her short stories, It Falls into Place.
As Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert writes:
“My first encounter with Daniel Thaly’s poetry came through Phyllis Allfrey’s novel The Orchid House, which opens with a few lines from “The Distant Island”, Thaly’s most famous poem. “I was born on an island enamoured of the wind.” I was struck then by Phyllis’ deep sense of kinship with a poet I hadn’t heard of, one about whom little was known and whose work could only be found in distant libraries of difficult access. For Phyllis, however, he had been a known and loved figure, and a poet who served as her own model of what a Dominican poet could be. She would later echo Thaly’s deep love for his home island in her own paean to Dominica, with her poem “Love for an island is the sternest passion; pulsing beyond the blood through roots and loam.”
My interest in Thaly’s poetry grew out of that sense of kinship present in Phyllis’ own writing: a shared love for Dominica and the challenge of expressing that love in verse. Phyllis read Thaly with awe and admiration. I have come to believe that if we read Thaly, we will love him too. This collection was born from a wish to share Thaly’s poetry—whether in his original French or in our English renditions. Translation is always “less than” the original, but where language divides us translation can serve as a bridge to understanding. In Thaly’s work—with his tender attention to the birds, flora, and insects of Dominica—I found a portrait of the island as a place of wonder, an Eden that his poems evoke so naturally. My hope is that you, too, will be drawn in by their beauty.”
Looting Hummingbirds is out now.
