“The English Language Belongs to Us”: Irish Writing at a Tangent

Abstract

“THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BELONGS TO US”: IRISH WRITING AT A TANGENT JOHN CRONIN what follows derives most immediately from the author’s recent experience of teaching, at the Queen’s University of Belfast, a short course entitled “Bilingual Writers in Modern Ireland.” A one-semester option for the Wnal year of the B.A. degree in English, this course was based on writers who had produced creative work in Irish and English. Teaching it was an interesting and, in some respects, a chastening experience as it brought home painfully the rusty condition of the tutor’s once reasonably Xuent Munster Irish. A further complication was that the students who elected to read the course were inevitably, in the main, speakers of the Donegal dialect of Irish, which I confess to Wnding diYcult and almost alien. This regrettable, personal example of provincial intolerance gnawed at the conscience until George Steiner’s After Babel oVered the consoling information that “a Milanese has diYculty in understanding the Italian spoken in neighboring Bergamo”! At any rate, small groups of students who spoke Donegal Irish and a tutor engaged in trying to resurrect his neglected Munster dialect soldiered on together, reading what may seem a curiously disparate set of texts, linked in no other way than by their authors’ linguistic duality. Beginning with Patrick Pearse’s Suantraighe agus Goltraighe, we found his English versions of the poems pedestrian and ruinously literal— pace Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, who commend him as a translator .1 We related the stories in Liam O’Flaherty’s Dúil (1953) to their English versions in various collections and, with the valuable assistance of Tomás de Bhaldraithe, succeeded in sorting out a muddled chronology and in reaching some tentative conclusions concerning the writer’s varia- “THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BELONGS TO US”: IRISH WRITING AT A TANGENT 27 1 An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed ed. Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella (Mountrath: The Dolmen Press, 1981), xxxvii. tions in style and idiom in the move between the languages.2 Other fruitful couplings were Brendan Behan’s An Giall with The Hostage, Flann O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht with At Swim-Two-Birds, and Eoghan O’Tuairisc’s Aifreann na Marbh with The Week-End of Dermot and Grace. We also attended to Michael Hartnett’s rather hectic oscillations from English to Irish and back again, and we read a good deal of poetry by Pearse Hutchinson in both languages. This bifocal reading earned at least one very valuable bonus by introducing us to a rewarding body of critical work by a talented set of bilingual critics among whom may be mentioned Declan Kiberd, Robert Welch, Alan Titley, Colbert Kearney, Richard Wall, Philip O’Leary, Michael Toolan, Frank O’Brien, and Máirin nic Eoin. While reading critical work in the two languages often proved demanding, it was invariably rewarding as well. This essay’s title quotation comes from Seamus Heaney’s Station Island but, before joining the poet on his pilgrimage to Lough Derg, it would seem helpful to sketch something of the linguistic background to what Heaney—or the ghost of James Joyce—contempuously dubs “that subject people stuV” and the ways in which it aVects the literature. Reconsideration of this issue has been prompted by a recent reading of David Lloyd’s trenchant essay, “Violence and the Constitution of the Novel.”3 The main thrust of that essay “covers one set of subaltern movements, the agrarian movements of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Ireland as they intertwine with increasingly dominant cultural and political narratives in the period before the Famine.”4 Lloyd aims to challenge received scholarly opinion concerning the “inadequacy” of Irish Wction of the nineteenth century and, to this end, he advances some alternative views on issues relating to such matters as the suggested instability of Irish society of the period, the supposed nonexistence of a middle class, and so on. When he turns to the question of bilinguality, he touches on various possible responses to the literary use of an emergent Irish-English. In eVect, he describes a range of possible reactions which traverse a gamut from an intransigent...