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Field Day Review is published annually by Field Day Publications in association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

ISSN 1649-6507 ISBN 978-0-946755-49-3

Field Day Review Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies 86 St. Stephen’s Green Dublin 2 Ireland [email protected] www.fielddaybooks.com FIELD DAY REVIEW 2010

Essays

Kevin Whelan 7 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s Translations

Michael Cronin 29 Kate O’Brien and the Erotics of Liberal Catholic Dissent

Emer Nolan 53 Sinéad O’Connor: The story of a voice

Paul A. Bové 71 Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory

Luke Gibbons 95 The Addressivity of the Eye: James Coleman’s Connemara Landscape

Breandán Ó Buachalla

Alan Titley 105 Uamhnach Ultach ag moladh Muimhnigh

Cathal Goan 109 Flaith na nÉigeas

Thomas Bartlett 113 The Pursuit of Helen Landreth: Robert Emmet, Gender and Historical Scholarship in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland

Catherine Morris 133 Alice Milligan: Republican Tableaux and the Revival

Terry Eagleton 167 Culture, Atheism and the War on Terror

REVIEWS

Seamus Deane 179 ‘To See Again The Stars’ Dictionary of Irish Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002

Essays Field Day review

Triangulation point and cairn. © Getty Images

6 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s 1 ‘Light troubles speak: the weighty strike you dumb’; Seneca, Phaedra Translations or Hippolytus. 2 Ironically, Friel moved Kevin Whelan ‘south’ by moving north geographically: although belonging to the South Curae leves loquuntur ingentes (i.e. the Republic of stupent.1 Ireland), the Inishowen peninsula in Donegal, to which he moved and in which his play is [This is the second of two essays saluting set, is actually further Brian Friel on his 80th birthday and north than any point in acknowledging the 30th anniversary of his Northern Ireland. He has lived for many years play Translations. The first essay, ‘Brian in Greencastle, opposite Friel’s Translations: The Origins of a Magilligan in Derry, Cultural Experiment’, by Ciarán Deane, where the base camp of appeared in Field Day Review 5.] the Ordnance Survey was located, and where its triangulation began. Brian Friel was born in 1929 3 Frank Curran, Derry: Countdown to Disaster at Kilclogher, near Omagh (Dublin, 1986), 37. 4 Partition created in County Tyrone, Northern marooned minorities on both sides of the Ireland, the son of a Derry border: substantial schoolmaster and a Donegal poor Protestant communities were exiled postmistress, a child of in Monaghan, Cavan, and especially Donegal. partitioned Ireland. He later They too were silenced post-partition. The moved just across the border into favoured trope in fiction and drama for the County Donegal in the Republic plight of the Protestant of Ireland.2 He belonged to landed class was the Big House as doomed the generation of northern remnant of culture and civility; the plight nationalists famously described of poorer Protestants found no comparable by the Derry MP Eddie McAteer representation. Friel (1914–86) as ‘the bastard has written ‘Big House’ plays, Aristocrats children of the Republic’.3 After (1979), with the twist that the proprietors the trauma of partition,4 and the are Catholics, and The Home Place (2005). brutal suppression of initial

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opposition to it in the 1920s, Northern state projects were being introduced: the 5 Cited from a 1973 Irish Catholics were cowed into silence. standardized mapping of the country by interview by Friel, in Tony Corbett, Brian Abandoned by both the British and Irish the Ordnance Survey, and the national Friel: Decoding the states, they became a subdued, silent, system of education to replace the existing Language of the Tribe watchful generation, internalizing their informal system of hedge-schools. Both (Dublin, 2002), 107. sense of historic betrayal. Friel taught had implications for the Irish language; 6 Paul Delaney, ed., Brian Friel in Conversation for many years in Derry, and he has the national schools were to be rigorously (Ann Arbor, 2000), 159. described ‘the personal, traditional and English-speaking, while the new maps 7 Christopher Murray, acquired knowledge that cocooned me: an would render the old place names in English ed., Brian Friel: Essays, Irish Catholic teacher with a nationalist orthography. Friel combines both of these Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London, background, living in a schizophrenic anglicizing projects in the setting for his play. 1999), 106. 5 community’. He diagnosed the Catholic Colonialism is never just a political and 8 Murray, ed., Brian Friel, population there as ‘a dispossessed people economic condition but also a psychic one. 106. living in a state they never subscribed to, Translations probes the psychodynamic 9 Brian Friel to K. Whelan. Sep. 10, 2010. with Donegal lying just across the bay. effects of colonialism as they play out in 10 On Field Day, see Janus-like, they had one head looking to the the linguistic realm, where the private and Marilynn Richtarik, north and one looking to the south.’6 Friel the public spheres meet. Masquerading Acting between the considered northern nationalists as being ‘at as a version of universalism, colonialism Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and home but in exile’,7 and talked of them (and presented the acquisition of English as a Irish Cultural Politics himself) feeling like ‘an exile in your home’, liberation, the golden bridge that carried 1980–1984, 2nd edn. their birthright more a disinheritance than the native beyond localism into the world (Oxford, 2001). an inheritance.8 And yet lurking somewhere at large, rescuing him from provincialism 11 The most complete treatment of the in the Northern Catholic imagination at this by awarding full participation in British context of the original time was what Friel has called ‘the secret civic life. The toll required was the production is Ciarán notion we nurtured that in some ridiculous relinquishment of the native language, Deane, ‘Brian Friel’s way we were the true keepers of some true disavowal of native history, severance from Translations: The Origins of a Cultural notion of what being Irish meant. The Free native culture. Edward Said’s memoir Out Experiment’, Field Day State squandered and abused that idea. We of Place probes the meaning of a displaced Review, 5 (2009), 7–47. guarded it in suffering silence.’ 9 linguistic identity: 12 Edward Said, Out of Translations was the foundational play Place (New York, 1999), 15–16. of the Field Day Theatre Company, 10 The basic split in my life was the one 13 George Steiner, established in 1980 by Friel and Stephen Rea. between Arabic, my native language, and After Babel: Aspects Friel finished writing it at the height of the English, the language of my education of Language and northern conflict on 5 November 1979, and and subsequent expression as a scholar Translation (Oxford, 1975). Likewise, Friel’s it was first produced on 23 September 1980 and teacher, and so trying to produce a Molly Sweeney (1993) is 11 in the Guildhall, Derry. The play can be narrative of one in the language of the inspired by a case study read as both a parable about, and a diagnosis other — to say nothing of the numerous in Oliver Sacks, ‘To See of, the conditions of the post-partition ways in which the languages were and Not See’ in the New Yorker, 10 May 1993, Catholic community in Northern Ireland. mixed up for me and crossed over from 59–73. Field Day sought to deploy the communal one realm to the other — has been a effects of theatre to release Northern Ireland complicated task.12 in particular from its numbing violence and stasis. Friel identified his involvement in the The master text for Translations is George enterprise as stemming from dúchas/pietas— Steiner’s After Babel.13 Steiner emphasized ‘a sense of loyalty and dutifulness towards that a language constitutes a community one’s own home’. of shared history and aspirations, and The play is set in a Donegal hedge-school that, accordingly, each language remains in 1833, before the devastating Famine of incommensurable and opaque to translation: the 1840s, at a time when two controversial

8 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s Translations

Etching. Thomas Frederick Colby (1784-1852). Director of the Ordnance Survey from 1820 to 1847. © Science and Society Picture Library

14 Steiner, After Babel, They are the instruments of storage and Friel’s borrowings from Steiner include 300. transmission of legacies of experience some of the best-known lines in the play: and imaginative construction particular ‘Uncertainty of meaning is incipient poetry’; to a given community ... Languages ‘a syntax opulent with tomorrows’; ‘Often communicate inwards to the native cultures seem to expend on their vocabularies speaker with a density and pressure of and syntax acquisitive energies and shared intimation which are only partly, ostentations entirely lacking in their material grudgingly yielded to the outsider. A lives’; ‘All communication “interprets” major portion of language is enclosure between privacies’; ‘Confusion is not an and willed opaqueness.14 ignoble condition’; ‘It is not the lived past, the

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“facts” of history that shape us but images of of the survey are emphasized: weapons- 15 These were first the past embodied in language’; ‘The fixity carrying sappers, army searches, ‘prodding carefully tracked by F. C. McGrath, ‘Irish of a linguistic contour ... which matches every inch of the ground with bayonets’ and Babel: Brian Friel’s only at certain, ritual, arbitrary points the (in a significant pun) ‘levelling the whole Translations and George changing landscape of fact’.15 Friel’s adroit land’. The stolen theodolite16 is wielded as Steiner’s After Babel’, manipulation of quotation and of intertextual if it were a weapon. Similarly, the ominous Comparative Drama, 23, 1 (1989), 31–49. echo is a rhetorical strategy, enhancing the Donnelly twins carry the resonance and 16 Friel is drawn to visually central action of the play in its rehearsal of threat of the modern Provos. Friel therefore striking instruments the oscillation between the historical and has argued that questions of historical and the technical the interpretative. Deliberate anachronisms, accuracy are fundamentally beside the point. vocabularies that identify them and their like the use of the word ‘cartographer’ (first Translations is ultimately a language play not functions. The Home used in 1839) or ‘contour’ (from c.1860), a history play, an emphasis that Friel himself Place (2005) makes extend this strategy and allow for the constantly stressed: ‘The play has to do and extensive use of the interpolation of the contemporary conflict only to do with language.’ 17 He wished exotic instrumentation of ethnographic calibration. in Northern Ireland. The military aspects to understand what it means to become a

10 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s Translations

17 Brian Friel, ‘Extracts people having to use a language ‘that isn’t our Thomas Colby’s Memoir;19 J. H. from a Sporadic Diary’, own’ and how Irish people today respond to Andrews’s, A Paper Landscape;20 Patrick J. in Tim Pat Coogan, ‘having to handle a language that is not native Dowling’s The Hedge Schools of Ireland;21 ed., Ireland and the 18 Arts: A Special Issue to them’. Consider Friel’s own mastery of and William Carleton’s vivid treatment in of the Literary Review the language as in a deceptively simple phrase Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.22 (London, 1986), 58. like ‘English cannot express us’: this has at A Paper Landscape provided Friel with 18 Murray, ed., Brian Friel, least three mutually enriching meanings in ‘a perfect metaphor’ for the trauma of 80. this context — to hurry us up, to squeeze us the linguistic lesion in nineteenth-century out, to describe us. Ireland, although his expansive treatment moves far beyond that of the austerely The Language of Landscape scholarly cartographic historian. Mick Lally and Ann Hasson in rehearsal for Brian Friel’s The mapping of Ireland had been a Translations at the Gulidhall, Friel’s programme notes list other sources long-standing colonial ambition. The native Derry, 1980. Photo Rod Tuach. that he used — John O’Donovan’s Irish tradition of dind seanchas (place © Field Day Ordnance Survey Letters: Donegal; lore) relied on a narrative rather than a technical mode of surveying the landscape. It produced a cultural landscape23 that coded a reciprocal, vernacular relationship between a community and its environment, not imposed from outside or above but developed cumulatively, spontaneously, organically. The material practices and associated symbolic forms that comprised this cultural landscape had a dual function. The first was secular, pragmatic, social; the second was symbolic, cultural, associational. The lived landscape provided a locus for human affection, imprinted as remembered forms, ways of being, ways of living, ways of seeing, ways of knowing. This version of landscape connected its outer contours with an inner vision: in place names the landscape and the imagination meet. Place names are an accumulated repertoire of historical knowing, a narrative sediment deposited by the continuous flow of history. The sense of place fuses a material environment, a historical experience and a lived reality, and is encapsulated in the Irish word dúchas.24 This version of landscape is embedded in the Irish tradition — the place lore of the dind seanchas, a liber locorum, lieux de mémoire, in which each place name bears a specific density of meaning. In Translations, Friel draws on this tradition. As the phrase la France profonde is widely used to indicate, even evoke, deeply enduring (or still surviving) aspects of French culture,

11 Field Day review

Mick O’Dea, b.1958 Portrait of Brian Friel, 2009 Oil on canvas Unframed: 60.5 × 50.5cm Photo © National Gallery of Ireland

19 John O’Donovan, Ordnance Survey Letters: Donegal. Letters Containing Information Relative to the Antiquities of the County of Donegal Collected During the Progress of the Ordnance Survey in 1835, edited and with an Introduction by Michael Herity, Preface by Brian Friel (Dublin, 2000); Thomas Colby, Ordnance Survey of the County of Londonderry, Volume the first: Memoir of the City and Northwestern Liberties of Londonderry, Parish of Templemore (Dublin, 1837). Friel’s diary described the latter as ‘a very rich and wonderful book’ and acknowledged that the Captain Lancey of the play is modelled on Colby. 20 J. H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford, 1975). For Andrews’s work, see Kevin Whelan, ‘Beyond a Paper Landscape: John Andrews and Irish Historical Geography’, in F. H. A. Aalen and Kevin Whelan, eds., Dublin City and County: Prehistory to Present (Dublin, 1992), 379–424. so a ‘Deep Ireland’ is evoked by place Gaeltacht ... anyone brought up in it 21 Patrick J. Dowling, names, a pre-colonial history still legible in has already absorbed a great deal of The Hedge Schools of them. Friel’s contemporary, the poet John the language. And to return to my Ireland (London, 1935). 22 William Carleton, Montague, makes the point: Knockmany poem; when I wrote those Traits and Stories of the lines about the hills burning with ‘golden Irish Peasantry, 5 vols. The Irish landscape is a kind of primal light’, did I realize that I was crossing the (Dublin, 1830–33).

12 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s Translations

23 In historical geography, Bealtaine, the ridge of the god of fire? The humanist scientist, like his predecessor, the term ‘cultural racial aspect of a poet’s inheritance should the great poet Edmund Spenser, advocated landscape’ denotes the be unconscious as breathing. Where I was genocide as a necessary prelude to a new landscape as it is altered by human occupance: brought up, Irish is no longer a spoken beginning in Ireland. Maps did not only fields, farms, roads, language, but it is still very much alive in record, they also obliterated. towns, houses, place the place-names and the local idiom ... I names: see F. H. A. must tap tradition where I find it, in my The Hedge-School Setting Aalen, Kevin Whelan 25 and Matthew Stout, part of the landscape. eds., Atlas of the Irish The patriot Henry Grattan brusquely Rural Landscape (Cork, The Ordnance Survey project became observed in 1811: 1997). for Friel a dramatic metaphor of both 24 See the pioneering treatment of the concept colonialism and the linguistic issue in One great object of national education of dúchas by Peter Ireland. The 1830s mapping sought to should be to unite the inhabitants of McQuillan in his Key give definitive shape to a long-standing the island and such an event cannot Words of the Irish project that went back to the seventeenth be well accomplished except they are Language: Essays in the Irish Ideas of Identity century. This cartographic transition from taught one common language. I think and Freedom (Cork, the Irish dind seanchas to the new colonial that the diversity of language, and not 2002). language and landscape of fact reached the diversity of religion, constitutes a 25 John Montague, ‘A an early culmination in the pioneering diversity of people. I should be very Primal Gaeltacht’, in his The Figure in the work of William Petty (1623–87). Petty’s sorry that the Irish language should Cave and Other Essays ‘political arithmetic’ (the origin of the be forgotten but glad that the English (Dublin, 1989), 42–44, discipline of economics) was itself a language would be generally understood 44. Montague was born response to the upheavals consequent ... A real political division is founded on in 1929, the same year 27 as Friel, in Brooklyn. on the Reformation: he sought to rescue the diversity of language. In 1933 he was sent ‘facts’ from the murderous anarchy of to live with his aunts theological disputation, which threatened His utilitarian-Benthamite stance was at Garvaghey, County to tear Britain apart in the mid-seventeenth matched by Daniel O’Connell in 1833: Tyrone, the same county where Friel was century. By rescuing ‘facts’ (generated by born. His The Rough mathematical and technical protocols) from I am sufficiently utilitarian not to Field (Dublin, 1972) is the partisan wrangling of theologians and regret its [the Irish language’s] gradual structured around an politicians, Petty sought a common ground abandonment. A diversity of tongues extended meditation 26 on the meaning of of reason. Rhetorically, he promoted is no benefit; it was first imposed on Garvaghey/Garbh the ‘plain’ style, shorn of baroque excess, mankind as a curse, at the building of Achaidh/the Rough inviting the consent of common experience Babel. It would be a vast advantage Field, as a metaphor and of a rationality based on observation to mankind if all the inhabitants of for understanding the modern conflict. and measurement. Facts in such a discursive the earth spoke the same language. 26 I am indebted here to regime were as far as possible divested of Therefore, although the Irish language is Mary Poovey, A History historical memory; indeed, their claim to connected with many recollections that of the Modern Fact: obdurate, scientific reality depended on twine around the hearts of Irishmen, Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of their repudiation of cultural ramification yet the superior utility of the English Wealth and Society as a significant dimension of knowledge. tongue, as the medium of all modern (Chicago, 1998), 92– Petty’s Down Survey (so-called because the communication, is so great, that I can 143. results for the first time were systematically witness without a sigh the gradual disuse 27 Cited in Thomas 28 Blayney, Narrative of a set down on paper) was based on of the Irish. Forced Journey through innovations in mathematical mensuration, Spain and France, as a precise instrumentation and bureaucratic The determined effort by state and Church Prisoner of War, in the efficiency. It should also be regarded as an to regain control of popular education years 1810 to 1814, 2 vols. (London, 1814), effort to strip the inherited Irish landscape via a national system stemmed from the vol. 1, 340–41. of meaning and narrative. This great conviction that the 1790s had exposed the

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political danger of allowing an informal quietly absorbed into the national system.32 28 Cited in Dermot education sector (the ‘hedge-schools’) But the curriculum and the organization Gleeson, ‘Peter O’Connell: Scholar to flourish with minimal supervision by of the schools themselves came under and Scribe 1755–1826’, Church and state. For conservatives, the sustained attack. Opponents of the hedge- Studies, 33 (1944), dominant role of schoolmasters in the schools regularly assembled lists of the 342–48. United Irish organization at local level had texts (primarily chapbooks) they used, to 29 [James Dunn?] Essay on the Present State of been one of the most disturbing aspects demonstrate how dissolute and archaic these Manners and Education 33 of that decade. Masterless men, hedge- establishments were. The Catholic bishop, among the Lower schoolteachers were to be feared as agents James Doyle (known as JKL), for example, Class of the People of of sedition. Outside the reach of Church disapproved of the mixed education of the Ireland and the Means of Improving Them and state, they had a foot — and a tongue informal schools: ‘the children are piled (Dublin, 1799), 7. — in both worlds: ‘From this it follows then on each other and the sexes promiscuously 30 Blayney, Narrative, vol. that education is your only resource; ’tis jumble together’.34 Educational historians 1, 344. this alone can open to you all channels of have been hasty in endorsing these partisan 31 L. M. Cullen, ‘Patrons, Teachers and Literacy instruction, and this will enable you to meet attacks. Yet the most striking feature of in Irish 1700–1850’, in the enemy, who has secretly got possession, the hedge-schools was their pragmatism Mary Daly and David not only on equal terms, but with superior and success. How, for instance, was the Dickson, eds., The advantage.’29 Richard Lovell Edgeworth astonishing language transition in Ireland Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland (father of the novelist Maria) observed: in the hedge-school period achieved or (Dublin, 1990), 15–44. ‘It is fresh in our memories that in the how did Ireland become English-speaking, 32 Mary Daly, ‘The progress of the last rebellion in this country, if not through the medium of the hedge- Development of the those who could read or write were at first school? The most effective anglicizing National School System 1831–40’, in employed to influence and direct the rest.’30 influence in eighteenth-century Ireland, Art Cosgrove and It suited both Church and state that these the hedge-schools were not an archaizing, James McGuire, eds., schoolmasters be demonized as a prelude to but a modernizing force. Their wholesale Studies in Irish History gaining control over them, hence the post- absorption into the new system shows that Presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, rebellion surge of polemical writing that what occurred was a takeover, not a radical 1979), 157. emphasized the luridly inappropriate school reform, by the state. 33 Rolf Loeber and texts, their anomalous emphasis on Latin The very term ‘hedge-school’ was a Magda Stouthamer and Greek and, ultimately, the character semantic deformation. It originated in the Loeber, ‘Fictions Available to and Written defects of the pedagogues themselves. common English usage of ‘hedge’ as ‘an for Cottagers’, in But this is all part of a propaganda attribute expressing contempt’ (OED), Bernadette Cunningham campaign that successfully obscured the for example, hedge-doctor, hedge-lawyer, and Máire Kennedy, reality that the national school project was hedge-alehouse, etc. Because of the informal eds., The Experience of Reading: Irish in essence a response to the success, not the nature of popular, especially Catholic, Historical Perspectives 31 failure, of the hedge-schools. The 1798 education and the lack of accredited (Dublin, 1999), 124–72. rebellion had shocked both Church and training for schoolteachers under the 34 Cited in W. Vaughan, state by demonstrating their lack of control Penal Laws, the term ‘hedge-school’ was ed., A New History of Ireland, Volume V: in this crucial area; part of the response increasingly applied in this pejorative sense Ireland under the Union in the post-Union period was a campaign as the education debate intensified in the 1801–1870 (Oxford, of increasingly vituperative attacks on the early nineteenth century when the word 1990), 582. hedge-schools’ allegedly baneful influence. was popularized. The application of the 35 Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland, 2 vols. Here the Catholic Church and the British term to mean schools held in the open air, (London, 1780), vol. 2, state shared a moral and political aim, or in the side of a ditch, is adventitious: 147. to control education. Their co-operation the original derivation has simply been was necessary for the success of the new occluded. The English traveller Arthur national school system. Control rather Young was one of the first to use the term than reform was the central issue; after all, ‘hedge school’.35 The first literary use 85 per cent of hedge-schoolmasters were occurs in John O’Keefe’s play The Wicklow

14 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s Translations

Commercial illustration depicting the 12-inch coast survey theodolite, no. 13, for primary triangulation. Undated engraving. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Goldmines (1796). Matt Frayne, the hedge- and his school as a site for a picturesque 36 Flanagan’s close friend Seamus Heaney was schoolmaster in Carleton’s popular Traits ‘Gaelic’ cultural dilapidation. Thomas the model for the and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830– Flanagan’s novel The Year of the French poet/teacher Cormac 33), became the model for future literary (1979) offers a modern example.36 The McCarthy. versions, in which the ‘master’ was regularly overblown romanticization of this figure represented as the epitome of Gaelic Ireland, conceals the English-speaking mundanity

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Building the Tower of Babel, from Bedford Book of Hours 1423. © The Art Archive / British Library

37 Thaddaeus [Thady] Connellan (1780–1854), a native of Skreen in County Sligo, received a ‘fair classical education’, started his own small school and became ‘a thorough Irish scholar’. He converted to Protestantism c.1808, and like many other ‘manuscript men’, he ran an evangelical Bible school dedicated to converting the native Irish through the medium of the Irish language. His An Irish and English Spelling Book reached a nineteenth edition by 1848, and he also produced An English– Irish dictionary, Intended for the Use of Schools (1814) and The Proverbs of Solomon (1823), containing English, Irish, and Hebrew versions. He died in great poverty in Sligo, and his funeral provoked bitter sectarian scenes. All previous accounts are superseded by the magisterial treatment in Pádraig de Brún, Scriptural Instruction in the Vernacular: The 37 Irish Society and Its of the actual Irish popular education system Connellan in her Patriotic Sketches of Teachers 1818–1827 that worked so effectively. 1807.38 Although Friel never refers to (Dublin, 2009), 14–39. The locus classicus of the description it, his hedge-schoolmaster Hugh seems 38 Sydney Owenson, of a hedge-schoolmaster is Lady Morgan’s closely modelled on it. He was later Patriotic Sketches in Ireland (London, 1807), (Sydney Owenson’s) chapter on Thady drawn to the reminiscences of Charles 131–50.

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39 Charles McGlinchey, McGlinchey (1861–1954), a weaver and binding versions of place names in the The Last of the Name, tailor of Meentiagh glen in the Inishowen modern Republic of Ireland. edited and with an peninsula of County Donegal (the setting of This little man (five feet, two inches) was Introduction by Brian Friel (Belfast, 1986). Translations). Friel edited and introduced a giant of nineteenth-century scholarship, McGlinchey’s tales the book The Last of the Name.39 He the greatest-ever scholar of the Irish had been transcribed presents the old man, as he does Hugh language. His exemplary edition, including by Patrick Kavanagh, in the play, as a Janus figure, inhabiting text, translation and notes, of Annála the local teacher, in the 1940s and 1950s. both ‘a rural community in the process Ríoghachta Éireann/Annals of the Kingdom For the chapter on of shedding the last vestiges of a Gaelic of Ireland, appearing in six volumes education, see 107–11. past and of an old Christianity that still from 1848 to 1851, established new and 40 Friel, Introduction, The cohabited with an older paganism’, and formidable scholarly standards for Irish- Last of the Name, 2. 47 41 Murray, ed., Brian Friel, an emerging community coming to an language material. His translations opened 108. uneasy accommodation with the modern to English speakers the hitherto sealed 42 Murray, ed., Brian Friel, world, ‘the buses, the cars, the silk casket of the Irish literary tradition. In that 116. Friel lived for many stockings’.40 In forming this figure, Friel sense, O’Donovan was an indispensable years about a mile from 48 Burnfoot, a key location also had in mind his Irish-speaking and precursor of the Literary Revival, which in the play. illiterate grandparents,41 and a great-great- sought, in the aftermath of the linguistic 43 John O’Donovan/ grandfather McCabe, a hedge-schoolmaster shift from an Irish-speaking to an English- Seán Ó Donnabháin from Mayo who settled in Donegal and who speaking Ireland, to establish a version of (1806–61) was born in the parish of Slieverue, was remembered as being ‘fond of a drop’. English sufficiently distinctive to anchor County Kilkenny, to a This world was not at all remote in any an Irish aesthetic. The Revival could be Catholic farming family. sense — ‘It’s very close, you know’.42 regarded as an extravagant discourse in He was employed as the English language about dumbness in a scribe to copy Irish 49 manuscripts and legal John O’Donovan the Irish language. It craved access to the documents in 1827, world of a vanished or vanishing Gaelic prepared an analytic Friel has confirmed that the character civilization, whose ambiguous absence must catalogue of Irish Owen in the play is a version of be brought to renewed presence in English- manuscripts at Trinity 43 College, Dublin, and John O’Donovan. O’Donovan, the language forms. Hence the Revival featured was co-founder of the indispensable Irish-language adviser to strenuous efforts to invent a new English- Irish Archaeological the Ordnance Survey, was appointed based but distinctive language capable of Society in 1840. He ‘orthographer and etymologist’ to the that task. The experiments include W. B. wrote topographical 44 and historical essays survey in 1830. He quickly acquired Yeats’s occult dialect in A Vision, James for the Dublin Penny a pivotal role in the new topographical Joyce’s molten English in Finnegans Wake, Journal and the Irish department, investigating the derivation of Lady Gregory’s Kiltartanese, heavily Penny Journal. His Irish place names.45 In 1834, he commenced influenced by the sounds and grammatical serviceable Grammar of the Irish Language on his heroic fieldwork, travelling on foot forms of Hiberno-English, J. M. Synge’s appeared in 1845. across Ireland to study the vast array of variations on folk-dialect, and Samuel Appointed professor of place names, sending back an inexhaustible Beckett’s experiments in escaping ‘the Celtic Studies at Queen’s flow of correspondence, at once witty, Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms’ by University, Belfast, in 1849, he continued irascible and erudite (the justly celebrated writing in French and then back-translating to live in Dublin. The ‘Ordnance Survey Letters’)46 from 1834 to into an almost comically austere English. last decade of his life 1841. He personally sourced 140,000 Irish Yet despite O’Donovan’s eminence as was preoccupied with place names in the field, and established an Irish-language scholar, none of his six his editorial work on 50 the ancient Irish laws the authorized versions in anglicized surviving sons was an Irish speaker. He (the so-called Brehon orthography, chosen to mimic the sound himself believed that the language did not laws), the Seanchas of the Irish-language names, which were merit a future role in the public sphere: Mór: See R. B. Walsh, subsequently inscribed on the Ordnance ‘John O’Donovan: The Man and the Survey maps, and which are still the legally I respect it as a great influence that has Scholar’, in Cyril

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Mick Lally and Ann Hasson in rehearsal for Brian Friel’s Translations at the Gulidhall, Derry, 1980. Photo: Rod Tuach. © Field Day

Byrne and Margaret Harry, eds., Talamh an Éisc: Canadian and Irish essays (Halifax, NS, 1986), 119–39; Éamonn de hÓir, Seán Ó Donnabháin agus Eoghan Ó Comhraí (Dublin, 1962); Nollaig Ó Muraíle, ‘John O’Donovan’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 44 Patricia Boyne, John O’Donovan, 1806– 1861 (Aberystwyth, 1987). 45 Art Ó Maolfabhail, ‘An tSuirbhéireacht Ordanáis agus logainmneacha na hÉireann 1824–34’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 89C (1989), 37–66; Art Ó Maolfabhail, ‘Éadbhard Ó Raghallaigh, Seán Ó Donnabháin agus an tSuirbhéireacht Ordanáis 1830–4’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 91C (1991), 73–103. 46 These survive in manuscript (Ordnance Survey Archives, Phoenix Park, Dublin), in typescript volumes been and no longer is or can be. It fed the and imaginative people to a truly noble edited by Fr Michael O’Flanagan from poetical flame within the people’s mind, standard among the civilised nations of 1924 to1932 (National and was the parent of true poetry in the modern Europe: but its office has been Library of Ireland), more cultivated: it nourished the latent, fulfilled: it is no longer necessary to the and in a modern series instinctive aspirations of the Irish race, exigencies of modern society, with which published by Four Masters Press. Friel gave them aliment, and directed their the Irish race must either amalgamate or contributed the Preface movements, and rescued their ancestors perish. The only interest it can have is a to the Donegal volume: from the dominion of brutish ignorance, historical or poetical one. 51 John O’Donovan, stirred them with insatiable thirst for Ordnance Survey Letters: Donegal. true knowledge, which, when established Owen in Translations is ‘a city man’, Letters Containing on a right basis, will raise this ancient ‘wealthy’, who ‘got out in time’: he shrugs Information Relative

18 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s Translations

to the Antiquities of off his dual identity as Owen/Roland — ‘it’s was held at the end of the nineteenth the County of Donegal the same me’, ‘a mistake’. He works for century. Consider the contribution of Collected During the benefit of the colonists, he is on their John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919),55 the Progress of the Ordnance Survey in payroll, he is a go-between, and he is faintly provost of Trinity College, prolific, if 1835, edited and with soiled by the taint of being an informer. In erratic, classical scholar, leading Anglo- an Introduction by the context of Northern Ireland in 1980, at Irishman, and brilliant conversationalist.56 Michael Herity, Preface the height of its dirty war, the long-standing Mahaffy, a quintessential Trinity man, gave by Brian Friel (Dublin, 2000). Irish paranoia about informers had reached six decades of service as student, tutor, 47 Nollaig Ó Muraíle, another culmination, driven to it by the new professor, senior fellow, vice-provost and ‘Seán Ó Donnabháin, British tactic of employing ‘supergrasses’ provost: he was accordingly taken to speak “An Cúigiú Máistir”’, — informers whose uncorroborated as the official voice of Anglo-Ireland. He in R. Ó hUiginn, ed., Scoláirí Gaeilge XXVII: testimony jailed large numbers of their dismissed cultural nationalism as a diseased Léachtaí Cholm Cille former colleagues. Friel’s own comments version of provincialism, and vigorously (Magh Nuad, 1997), are that O’Donovan could be seen both resisted efforts to have Irish taught as a 11–82. to have performed ‘the actions and the subject at any level in the Irish education 48 Vivian Mercier, Modern Irish Literature: Sources perfidy of a quisling’ but also to have system. He disparaged Gaelic literature on and Founders (Oxford, embarked on a ‘task of honour’.52 (We are the grounds that it was impossible to find 1994), 10–11. Joyce’s reminded of the long-standing joke among a text in the language that was not ‘either gleeful parodies of the translators: traduttore/traditore, translator/ religious, silly or indecent’.57 In his 1896 mellifluously alliterative O’Donovan translations traitor, as in the mocking nickname ‘the essay ‘A Modern Babel’, directed at a British pepper both Ulysses and Translator’ given by Barcelona fans to José audience, Mahaffy distinguished between Finnegans Wake. Mourinho.)53 William Hazlitt claimed in advancing and receding civilizations: one 49 This argument is made 1814 that ‘He who speaks two languages spoke a universal imperial language; the at greater length in Kevin Whelan, ‘The has no country’ — but adds: ‘The French, other a local ‘tongue’. A common language Memories of “The when they made their language the common like Latin or its modern successor English Dead”’, Yale Journal of language of the courts of Europe, gained was ‘a lever of civilisation’: ‘The British Criticism, 15, 1 (2002), more than by all their other conquests put tongue, like British gold, will probably 59–97. 54 50 Four of them joined together.’ Here again in Translations a pervade the world’ — ‘the great object the Irish revolutionary question is posed but not resolved: should which every promoter of imperial Britain group the Fenians, we admire or condemn Owen/O’Donovan? interests should have in view’. He dismissed including the flamboyant And here, too, we can see a recurrent Irish as a ‘miserable remnant of barbarism’, Edmund, a pioneering ‘war correspondent’ pattern in Friel’s work; his plays often ‘a most difficult and useless tongue, not in Spain, Bosnia and feature an outsider figure whose comments only useless, but a mischievous obstacle to Afghanistan, whose on the action of the drama constitute civilisation’ and sneered that Irish-language final fatal posting was to a translation that is both a rational enthusiasts ‘might also turn their attention cover the Mahdi revolt in the Sudan in 1883. account of it and yet is suspect in virtue to the dying language of the Maories [sic] 51 John O’Donovan, ‘On of its detachment, a distance that seems and the natives of Australia’.58 Thus the the Traditions of the scandalous, as, for example, Tom Hoffnung entire Revival project was a retrograde County of Kilkenny’, in Aristocrats or Mabel Bagenal in Making step, a retreat to the Dark Ages, a futile Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries History. Their ancestry ultimately extends scrabbling in the ruins of Babel. of Ireland, 1 (1849–51), to Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town 369. (1938), whose Grover’s Corner is an obvious The Hidden Ireland 52 See Delaney, ed., Brian antecedent of Friel’s Ballybeg. Friel in Conversation, 118; in another The most considered riposte to such revealing comment, The Irish Language: ‘The Modern Babel’ dismissals came from Daniel Corkery.59 Friel agreed that the His cultural criticism was established on Owen/O’Donovan We cannot properly weigh the language a Ruskinian basis of contempt for neo- character could be regarded as ‘a typical issue in Friel’s play unless we understand classical ‘egotism’. From John Ruskin, he SDLP man’ (86). The the contempt in which the Irish language learned to value the integration of art and

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Ray Hanlon in rehearsal for Brian Friel’s Translations at the Gulidhall, Derry, 1980. Photo: Rod Tuach. © Field Day

Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) repudiated the use of violence as a political weapon and pursued moderate constitutional nationalist goals. Hard-line republicans regarded the party as too craven (the ‘Stoop Down Low Party’) in its response to the British presence. Its leader, and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, John Hume, was a Derry man, so an overtly political reading of the play would have resonated with the play’s first audience in the Guildhall in Derry, including Hume himself. 53 Mourinho worked at the Camp Nou, the Barcelona football stadium, in the 1990s translating for the English manager Bobby Robson— thus earning him the taunting nickname from Barcelona fans. 54 William Hazlitt, ‘Illustrations of Vetus’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols., ed. P. Howe (London, 1930–34), vol. 7, 374–75. life as an expression of cultural unity that antidote to the pallor and disconnectedness 55 R. B. McDowell and W. B. Stanford, Mahaffy, A sustained social harmony. Yet it took him of modern urban life. Because these Biography of an Anglo- some time to realize that he was himself communities had never been severed from Irishman (London, 1975 living in such a polity. When he had first their ancient attachments, they did not [1971]). seen Gaelic script in Cork shop signs, he suffer the dissociation of sensibility that 56 Mahaffy was a sparkling if malicious thought that it was Chinese. Although the Ruskin before him and T. S. Eliot after conversationalist and Cork city hinterland had vibrant Irish- him diagnosed as a morbid symptom of epigrammatist: ‘An speaking communities, he was incredulous modernity.60 In an Irish context, Yeats Irish bull, Madam, is that people still lived their lives through the had striven, unconvincingly, to promote always pregnant.’ His The Principles of the language. Gradually, as his awareness of the Anglo-Irish Big House as an achieved Art of Conversation the language deepened, he came to regard culture, a serene remnant of the ancient (1887) was reviewed by living Irish-language communities as an unity: now Corkery transposed the his pupil Oscar Wilde,

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