This manuscript pairs Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘Marsh Languages’ with Luce Irigaray’s recent philosophical text In the Beginning She Was. By doing so, an important conceptual resonance emerges between the two texts on the status of the loss of a maternal language and more broadly of the founding Mother at the origins of Western thought. Advancing a feminist poetics and ethics of the maternal, with its roots in nature, Atwood and Irigaray’s works are at odds with the enlightened language of our western masculine time, which seeks to disinherit its roots or to uproot itself. Atwood’s appeal in her poem ‘Marsh Languages’ reverberates with Luce Irigaray’s argument in In the Beginning She Was, which is that it is necessary for western philosophy to return to the marshes, so to speak, to return to the Presocratic philosopher-poets in order to discern how the logic of Western truth (via the male master-disciple) formed, and consequently discredited and covered over, a ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’. Engaging with Greek myth (Hesiod’s Muses, Plato’s cave and mother-daughter duo Persephone-Demeter), Atwood as poet and Irigaray as philosopher interrogate and contest our western patriarchal tradition, for its erasure of ‘she – nature, woman, Goddess’, and suggest that the ethical implications of this silencing and forgetting have led to corrupt, destructive crisis-level relations, e.g. between humans, between humans and gods and between humans and nature.

该手稿将玛格丽特·阿特伍德的诗作《沼泽语言》与卢斯·伊里加里最近的哲学著作《她是个开始》相结合。这样一来，两种文本之间就母体语言的丧失以及更广泛的创始母亲的地位在西方思想的起源之间产生了重要的概念共鸣。提倡起源于自然的母性的女性主义诗学和伦理，Atwood和Irigaray的作品与西方男性时代开明的语言背道而驰，后者试图剥夺其根源或使自己根深蒂固。阿特伍德在其诗作《沼泽语言》中的魅力与露西·伊里格里（Ruce Irigaray）在《她开始的时候》中的论点相呼应，这就是说西方哲学有必要回到沼泽地，可以这么说，回到苏格拉底哲学家诗人，以便辨别西方真理的逻辑（通过男性大师）是如何形成的，因此抹黑，并掩盖了一个“她-自然，女人，女神”。迷恋希腊神话（海西德的缪斯女神，柏拉图的洞穴和母女二重奏珀西塞米勒·德米特），诗人阿特伍德和哲学家艾里格里因其对“她-自然，女人，女神”和“女权主义”的抹杀而质疑和挑战我们的西方父权制传统。这表明这种沉默和遗忘的伦理意义导致了腐败，破坏性的危机级关系，例如人与人之间，人与神之间以及人与自然之间。