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Meditation upon seeing a novel in Irish
May. 14th, 2012 12:47 pmThere are things that don't translate.
I was thinking about that today. I walked into the bookshop on Dawson St. after my interview ended and before I managed to miss my train. (The sky pallid blue between the buildings and the clouds, lanced through with occasional points of light: I'm still noticing the difference in small things. Other things are not so different: Game has closed up shop across the road, and there's still a To Let sign where Waterstones used to be. That's going on a year now.)
So I walked into the bookshop. Past the bestsellers rack to the left of the entrance is a little ramp. Up the little ramp, in the middle of the floor, is a double-sided breast-height bookshelf labelled "Irish Interest/Irish Language." There aren't an awful lot of Irish language books - and most of them are course books and dictionaries, unless you go around the little bookshelf to the clothbound hardcovers with the expensive academic editions of medieval and early modern Irish texts. But today, on the tail end of the "Irish Language" bookshelf, I saw a book with an attractive cover: An Litir, by Liam Mac Cóil. A basket-hilted rapier had pride of place on the cover, and the back copy had things to say about 1600s Galway and family troubles and war.
One of the things that won't translate is how it took me aback to see an Irish novel that looked like something someone would actually read: not a problem novel, with a title like "Addiction" or "The Debt," stuck somewhere in an unrecognisable Ireland of the 1950s or 60s or 70s; not poetry, not a play. An actual historical novel that looked like something I would be persuaded to read, sitting there in that pathetic bookshop selection of maybe forty books composed in Irish in the last century.
I wanted to take it home with me. But I'm broke, and I'd need to get a good dictionary to help matters along, too. So it stayed on its shelf, and I left without it.
But it took me aback, still. Evidence that the language isn't dead, despite it all. Despite everything. For a moment, there, I felt positively nationalistic. It's a peculiar thing, but the stories we learned in school? The seven centuries of "Irish dead," blood soil and the bitter fruit of making myths out of accommodation, disenfranchisement and famine and bloody defeat?
It sticks. It's down there in the bone, and no matter what civilised narrative of complicated cohabitation I layer it over with, the fact remains that 19th century British imperialism did its best to drive the Irish language out of common use.
And succeeded.
I come back to dwell on that at irregular intervals. I've been poking at my own relationship with the Irish experience of English hegemony since a Fourth Class history lesson in which we were introduced to the Plantation of Ireland, and I started to understand that Irish class wasn't this strange form of torture invented by teachers out of a sadistic desire to make us all suffer.
That's the bit of history you never get away from. Not living beside it. The part where it's personal.
The part where it hurts.
My life is easier in many ways because English is my native tongue. But that doesn't change the fact that my lack of fluency in Irish is a barrier between me and the literature of Ireland's past. Perhaps - it has been said, and sometimes I even agree - that in matters of national pride it is a mistake to dwell too closely upon the past. That the past is far less important than the future. It has been said - and sometimes I even agree - that it's just as well, really, we had us some British rule.
They were pretty good at bridges and railways.
On the other hand, it's hard to get past the forced resettlements of "to hell or to Connacht" after the English Civil Wars, or the sectarian cruelty that lasted entirely too damn long in the 20th century and has roots deep enough to still put out shoots every so often today, whenever someone waters it with the bile of hateful rhetoric.
And it's hard to get past the romanticisation of Ireland, sometimes, including by people who should know better. We become part of our own commodification. Culture changes - even in the cause of preservation, stasis is death - and we change as individuals, and in aggregate.
It's a complicated thing in my head and under my feet. So.
This is what I think about when I miss my train.
I was thinking about that today. I walked into the bookshop on Dawson St. after my interview ended and before I managed to miss my train. (The sky pallid blue between the buildings and the clouds, lanced through with occasional points of light: I'm still noticing the difference in small things. Other things are not so different: Game has closed up shop across the road, and there's still a To Let sign where Waterstones used to be. That's going on a year now.)
So I walked into the bookshop. Past the bestsellers rack to the left of the entrance is a little ramp. Up the little ramp, in the middle of the floor, is a double-sided breast-height bookshelf labelled "Irish Interest/Irish Language." There aren't an awful lot of Irish language books - and most of them are course books and dictionaries, unless you go around the little bookshelf to the clothbound hardcovers with the expensive academic editions of medieval and early modern Irish texts. But today, on the tail end of the "Irish Language" bookshelf, I saw a book with an attractive cover: An Litir, by Liam Mac Cóil. A basket-hilted rapier had pride of place on the cover, and the back copy had things to say about 1600s Galway and family troubles and war.
One of the things that won't translate is how it took me aback to see an Irish novel that looked like something someone would actually read: not a problem novel, with a title like "Addiction" or "The Debt," stuck somewhere in an unrecognisable Ireland of the 1950s or 60s or 70s; not poetry, not a play. An actual historical novel that looked like something I would be persuaded to read, sitting there in that pathetic bookshop selection of maybe forty books composed in Irish in the last century.
I wanted to take it home with me. But I'm broke, and I'd need to get a good dictionary to help matters along, too. So it stayed on its shelf, and I left without it.
But it took me aback, still. Evidence that the language isn't dead, despite it all. Despite everything. For a moment, there, I felt positively nationalistic. It's a peculiar thing, but the stories we learned in school? The seven centuries of "Irish dead," blood soil and the bitter fruit of making myths out of accommodation, disenfranchisement and famine and bloody defeat?
It sticks. It's down there in the bone, and no matter what civilised narrative of complicated cohabitation I layer it over with, the fact remains that 19th century British imperialism did its best to drive the Irish language out of common use.
And succeeded.
I come back to dwell on that at irregular intervals. I've been poking at my own relationship with the Irish experience of English hegemony since a Fourth Class history lesson in which we were introduced to the Plantation of Ireland, and I started to understand that Irish class wasn't this strange form of torture invented by teachers out of a sadistic desire to make us all suffer.
That's the bit of history you never get away from. Not living beside it. The part where it's personal.
The part where it hurts.
My life is easier in many ways because English is my native tongue. But that doesn't change the fact that my lack of fluency in Irish is a barrier between me and the literature of Ireland's past. Perhaps - it has been said, and sometimes I even agree - that in matters of national pride it is a mistake to dwell too closely upon the past. That the past is far less important than the future. It has been said - and sometimes I even agree - that it's just as well, really, we had us some British rule.
They were pretty good at bridges and railways.
On the other hand, it's hard to get past the forced resettlements of "to hell or to Connacht" after the English Civil Wars, or the sectarian cruelty that lasted entirely too damn long in the 20th century and has roots deep enough to still put out shoots every so often today, whenever someone waters it with the bile of hateful rhetoric.
And it's hard to get past the romanticisation of Ireland, sometimes, including by people who should know better. We become part of our own commodification. Culture changes - even in the cause of preservation, stasis is death - and we change as individuals, and in aggregate.
It's a complicated thing in my head and under my feet. So.
This is what I think about when I miss my train.
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