The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens by Vito Carrassi

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens by Vito Carrassi Ronan Crowley (bio) THE IRISH FAIRY TALE: A NARRATIVE TRADITION FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO YEATS AND STEPHENS, by Vito Carrassi, translated by Kevin Wren. Lanham, Maryland: John Cabot University Press, 2012. ix + 207 pp. $35.99. In The Trembling of the Veil, W. B. Yeats’s volume of memoirs published in the same year as Ulysses, the poet recounts his first meeting with Douglas Hyde, genteel scion of three generations of Church of Ireland clergymen.1 Yeats was struck by Hyde’s “considerable popularity” as an Irish-language poet and records “mowers and reapers singing his songs from Donegal to Kerry” (Veil 100). “Years afterwards,” he stood at the Roscommon man’s side “and listen[ed] to Galway mowers singing his Gaelic words without knowing whose words they sang” (Veil 100). This easy commute between authorship and the cultural commons, between writing and orality, is central to Hyde’s The Love Songs of Connacht: Being the Fourth Chapter of the “Songs of Connacht,” a volume to which Joyce was no stranger.2 Serialized in the Weekly Freeman in 1892 and co-published as a book the following year by T. Fisher Unwin in London and by Gill and Son in Dublin, Love Songs was, as Clare Hutton has determined, “one of Dublin’s best-selling books in the Autumn of 1893” and remained a popular work in Ireland over the years of the Irish literary revival.3 According to Hutton, five commercial reprints appeared between 1893 and 1909, which, taken together with the limited fine-press edition issued by the Dun Emer Press in 1904, indicates a broad, enduring popular appeal for the collection (379).4 The poems were taken “from the lips of the Irish-speaking peasantry” or else “extracted from MSS. . . . made by different scribes during this century,” as Hyde explains in a preface addressed to George Sigerson.5 This imbrication of speech and the written word also figures repeatedly in the work’s early reception. J. M. Synge, encountering a copy in a homestead in the course of a visit to the Aran Islands at the turn of the century, persuaded his host to read some of the verses [End Page 484] aloud, whereupon Synge discovered that an old woman living in the cottage recognized them from her childhood: “several times when the young man finished a poem she took it up again and recited the verses with exquisite musical intonation, putting a wistfulness and passion into her voice.”6 Padraic Colum made a cultural passport of the volume, carrying it on his rambles around Connacht, where it occasioned similar moments of intergenerational accord between page and voice; Colum would read aloud, his delivery frequently unintelligible, “for the language in which I read was unfamiliar to me,” but a chance sentence coming out correctly turned his listeners into reciters who “would repeat the sentence, the verse, or the poem out of his or her memory.”7 An alternative form of repetition from the Love Songs echoes in Ulysses, as Joseph Prescott was perhaps the first to notice, because the pallid lyric that Stephen works over on Sandymount Stand is largely derived from “My Grief on the Sea,” Hyde’s translation of “Mo bhrón ar an bhfarraige.”8 Less well known is the fact that Joyce’s fictional act of creative rewriting has a real-life counterpart in James Stephens, whose poem “The Coolun” lifts and reworks a verse in Love Songs from Hyde’s translation of the same name (71).9 Alas, precious little of this traffic between speech and writing registers in Vito Carrassi’s The Irish Fairy Tale: A Narrative Tradition from the Middle Ages to Yeats and Stephens, a translation from the author’s Il Fairy tale nella tradizione narrativa irlandese: un itinerario storico e culturale.10 The emphasis is unreconstructedly structuralist, from the schematic diagrams of the fairy tale that pepper several chapters to the dichotomy of orality and literacy subtending much of the analysis. Carrassi does observe that the transcription of oral tales represents a “middle ground between two...