OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID165and technological marvel, and the mimicking poem thus does not have
to go far to speak as this animal.
Murray’s poem “Raven, Sotto Voce” also features a bird-speaker who
ponders the strange communication of humans in the animal world. The
raven is suddenly quiet (sotto voce) as it becomes aware of human pres-
ence and then speaks through this silence.^18 The “stalk” before it is “so
unlike every other flight, or walk... / it’s out of whack / with all lives
around.” The stalk is a human or human effigy, a scarecrow, perhaps,
standing in for a human. A scarecrow is intended to symbolize a fearful
human presence to other animals, and this raven notes how “out of
whack” this human is: “Its head has eyes in the neck, in the back.” It is
a “prime of lies” that “stills normal sound,” suggesting too that the stalk
might be a human stalker, a hunter carrying a stick or gun, causing a
ripple of silence to go through the life around it. The fear produced by
this disturbing human presence “makes loosely shared flesh speak / in
flashed silence, in whirrs.” So the raven, a normally loud and vocal
bird,^19 understands silence as meaning, even as the bird speaks softly to
itself in the poem. “The first pan-warmblood talk” is both the silence
and the Benjaminian notion of an ur-language that signals understand-
ing between animals as well as human kinship with animals. The poem
presents the human as disrupting this kinship and normal animal com-
munication, a predator whose forms of communication are awry even
as the implied critique of the human in the poem suggests sympathy for
it and for animals in general. Both of Murray’s bird poems are hybrid in
that we are never allowed to forget that the speaker is really human (for
one thing, both poems foreground prosody), even as they appear to cap-
ture not just characteristics of the bird species but also of how they
might think.^20
Most of Murray’s translations represent distinct species attributes
and so are in that sense “species” poems, although poems representing
migration, fruit, clay, DNA, puss, and the animal perspective on the
birth of Christ (in “Animal Nativity”) suggest Murray’s interest in test-
ing and undermining categories of being. The poems “Pigs” and “The
Cows on Killing Day” present animal speakers becoming aware of their