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2001
Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs
James E. Doan Nova Southeastern University, [email protected]
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NSUWorks Citation Doan, J. E. (2001). Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs. Irish Studies Review, 9 (1), 81-86. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670880020032717
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Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs
James E. Doan
To cite this article: James E. Doan (2001) Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs, Irish Studies Review, 9:1, 81-86, DOI: 10.1080/09670880020032717 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09670880020032717
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REVIEW ARTICLE
Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs
Mar na´ beidh a´r leithe´id´õ ar´õ s ann [Our A Day in Our Life like will not be there again]. (Toma´s SEA´ N O’CROHAN , Translated from the Irish by O’Crohan, The Islandman) Tim Enright, 1993 Oxford, Oxford University Press Island Cross-Talk: Pages from a Blasket Is- pp. 159, ISBN 0-19-283119-4 , £5.99 (pb) land Diary TOMA´ S O’CROHAN , Translated from the Irish by In 2000, Oxford Paperbacks reissued a set of Tim Enright, 1986 translations of the memoirs from the Blasket Is- Oxford, Oxford University Press lands and the nearby West Kerry mainland, writ- pp. 224, ISBN 0-19-281909-7 , £5.99 (pb) ten for the most part in Irish between 1919 and the 1960s. The originals form an important cor- pus of Irish writing from the Corca Dhuibhne The Islandman (Corcaguiney) Gaeltacht re ecting a way of life TOMA´ S O’CROHAN , Translated from the Irish by which has now completely disappeared, centred Robin Flower, 1977 on shing and the salvaging of wrecks off the Oxford, Oxford University Press islands and the Dingle Peninsula. These memoirs pp. 261, ISBN 0-19-281233-5 , £6.99 (pb)
The Western Island or The Great Blasket ROBIN FLOWER, 1978 Oxford, Oxford University Press pp. 153, ISBN 0-19-281234-3 , £5.99 (pb)
Twenty Years A-Growing MAURICE O’SULLIVAN, Translated from the Irish by Moya Llewelyn Davies and George Thomson, with an Introductory Note By E. M. Forster, 1983 Oxford, Oxford University Press pp. 312, ISBN 0-19-281325-0 , £6.99 (pb)
An Old Woman’s Re ections PEIG SAYERS , Translated from the Irish By Se´a- mus Ennis, with an Introduction by W. R. Rodgers, 1977 Oxford, Oxford University Press pp. 148, ISBN 0-19-281239-4 , £5.99 (pb)
A Pity Youth Does Not Last: Reminiscences of the Last of the Great Blasket Island’s Po- ets and Storytellers MICHEA´ L O’GUIHEEN , Translated from the Irish by Tim Enright, 1982 Oxford, Oxford University Press FIG. 1. Peig Sayers. Front cover, An Old Woman’s pp. 160, ISBN 0-19-281320-X , £5.99 (pb) Re ections. Courtesy of the Blasket Centre. ISSN 0967-0882 print/1469-9303 online/01/010081-06 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0967088002003271 7 82 Review Article were a direct outgrowth of the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893, after which Gaeilgeoir´õ (Irish-language enthusiasts) began journeying to the Gaeltachta´õ in search of the purest surviving Irish and discovered the oral poets and storytellers of Great Blasket Island (Blascaod Mo´r), such as Toma´s O´ Criomhthainn (Anglicised as O’Crohan) and Peig Sayers. The impetus for much of this writing came from Celtic linguists and folklorists, such as the Norwegian Carl Marstrander (who arrived in 1907), followed by the Swede Carl Wilhelm von Sydow and the English scholar Kenneth Jackson, as well as classi- cal and medieval Irish literary scholars, such as George Thomson and Robin Flower. The visitors to the island encouraged the sce´ala´õ (storytellers) and seancha´õ (tradition bearers) to record their stories and life experiences, so that the memoirs under review are not actually based on a native memorial tradition. O’Crohan (1856– 1937), for example, was in uenced by Pierre Loti’s Peˆcheur d’Islande (Iceland Fisherman) and Maxim Gorky’s autobiography, read to him by the Killarney schoolteacher and Gaelic League member, Brian O’Ceallaigh (O’Kelly), who spent much of 1917 with Toma´s on Blascaod Mo´r perfecting his Irish. Rather than being the result of an unre ective recording process, the memoirs often show considerable self-consciousness and FIG. 2. Toma´s O’Crohan outside his house. Front artistry. For example, in his diary of the years cover, Island Cross-Talk. Courtesy of the Blasket 1919 to 1923, Island Cross-Talk ( rst published as Centre. Allagar na hInse in 1928, edited by Pa´draig O´ Siocfhradha [Sugrue, also called An Seabhac, ‘The Hawk’], and translated into English in old school, practically uneducated in the modern 1986), O’Crohan expresses a sense of the numi- sense, though highly trained in the tradition of an nous and his own participation in nature while ancient folk culture’, in Flower’s introduction to watching the sun emerge after a period of severe O’Crohan’s autobiography The Islandman ( rst weather in early spring 1920. In the translation by published as An tOilea´nach in 1929, also edited by ´ Tim Enright (who successfully captures the O Siocfhradha, and translated in 1937). avour of his own Kerry English in the three There is often an affectionate, yet condescend- translations he undertook for this series), we read: ing, tone of cultural superiority in the prefaces and introductions by the English novelists and There is no doubt that the works of scholars who comment on these memoirs: for man are wonderful and what he has example, in his introductory note to Muiris O´ accomplished all over the world, but Su´ illeabha´in’s (Maurice O’Sullivan’s) autobiogra- look at what the great sea has done phy Twenty Years A-Growing (published as Fiche with the power of God and it will make Blian ag Fa´s in 1933, and translated into English you ponder awhile. The pillars of rock the same year, with a revised translation pub- uprooted by the sea, the islets lished in 1953), E. M. Forster tells the reader, wrenched out of their foundations, the addressing him in the third person: big islands stripped of their topsoil along with the grass, the rocks swept But it is worth saying ‘This book is from one end of the shore to the other, unique’, lest he forget what a very odd many gone altogether. There are those document he has got hold of. He is who would scarcely believe you that about to read an account of neolithic any power exists surpassing what they [my emphasis] civilization from the in- can see with their own two eyes. Fool- side. Synge and others have described ishness! (p. 72) it from the outside, and very sympa- This is from a man who is called a ‘peasant of the thetically, but I know of no other in- Review Article 83
views on Homeric epic which were developing at this time [1], and not surprisingly scholars such as Thomson and J. V. Luce found analogies between Great Blasket life and literature and the early Ionian life described by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as speci c stylistic similarities between O’Crohan’s and Homer’s writings. Both societies evoked communal self-reliance; a simple, humanistic yet heroic way of life; and a ‘pre- capitalist’ or ‘primitive communist’ economy in which poverty left no mark of shame [2]. In the early part of the twentieth century the island’s ‘tenants still held their land under the medieval rundale system of scattered unfenced strips in large open elds’ [3]. As Tim Enright points out, since marker stones were the only way of identify- ing which strips were whose, rearrangements would cause blood to ow. Arguments over land markers are ancient, with parallels found in the book of Deuteronomy and Homer’s Iliad [4]. Though literate in English from an early age, O’Crohan did not learn to read and write his own language until late in life. However, even as a young man he had taken interest in the oral verse of the Blasket poet, Sea´n O´ Duinnshle´ibhe (O´ Du´õ nnle´), Anglicised as Shane Dunlevy in The Islandman, whose work he would eventually write down as the poet dictated to him. The need to FIG. 3. Blasket Islanders. Front cover, Twenty Years construct O’Crohan as a pure, primitive, almost A-Growing. Courtesy of the Department of Irish illiterate Gael, though, is apparent even in Sug- Folklore, University College Dublin, and the rue’s introduction to the original edition of Island Blasket Centre. Cross-Talk (1928): This book is a voice from the stance where it has itself become vocal, Gaeltacht itself. … Toma´s is of the and addressed modernity. Gaeltacht. He knows nothing else in the wide world. He never put a foot Forster implies that life in the islands has some- outside Corcaguiney, he never spoke how become fossilised, not changing for over anything but Irish, he never read any- 4,000 years despite contact with the outside thing of literature except a little world, and that somehow this civilisation has recently in Gaelic. He has known managed to represent itself (perhaps via auto- nothing of a life of ease or of wealth matic writing?) and address modernity all at the from the day he was born, only of hard same time, quite an accomplishment! The Blasket work and of few possessions. He Islands offered numerous visitors, including the understands the Gaeltacht, what is Cambridge classicist, Thomson, as well as deep in its heart and the heart of its Flower, deputy keeper of manuscripts in the people. He is not conscious of this British Museum, an escape from the rigours of awareness, however, only as a bird is of English society, yet they failed to break free of the its own song. It is displayed here in this imperialist and colonial cultural biases which book, in the way best known to a man bound them. not nurtured in learning and without In the account of his experiences in the islands literary training. [5] during holiday visits over a twenty-year period (1910–30), The Western Island or The Great Blasket The texts under review became charter docu- (published in 1944), Flower presents O’Crohan ments for the new Irish Free State so that, in the as the symbol of a fundamental shift in civilis- process of editing An tOilea´nach for publication, ation’s development: representative of an oral tra- Sugrue expunged more explicit passages: dition which had survived unchanged for O’Crohan’s accounts of adolescent sexuality in centuries, yet now forever changed by the intro- the Blaskets, for example. In telling of how the duction of literacy. This is remarkably close to Blasket boys were delighted by a gust of wind 84 Review Article which raised the girls’ skirts, O’Crohan wrote: and witty turns of phrase which are largely lost in ‘D’fhe´achas isteach in a´it na´r shaighnea´il an translation’ (pp. viii–ix). ghrian ariamh’ (I looked into a place where the The translations of these memoirs, often in a sun never shone before), which was excised by stilted prose, led to parody during the 1940s. In Sugrue before publication [6]. As in the more addition, the identi cation of Irish-language cul- notorious case of the stories of the Tailor and ture with hard times, espoused in all the Blasket Ansty, censored by De Valera’s government for Island memoirs as well as in works from the their seeming obscenity, these ‘pure’ Gaelic writ- Rosses of Donegal, such as the novels of Se´amus ings had to be made safe for classrooms on the O´ Grianna (‘Ma´ire’), fuelled Flann O’Brien’s Irish mainland. satire on Gaeltacht writing, as well as the Gaelic Maurice O’Sullivan, the second of the Blasket Revival movement in general and the romanticisa- triad, born forty-eight years after O’Crohan, actu- tion of the Irish peasant in literature and art, in ally spent his early years in an Anglophone An Be´al Bocht (‘The Poor Mouth’, 1941), set in environment in Dingle, before being brought back the imaginary Gaeltacht of ‘Corca Dorcha’ to Blascaod Mo´r by his father, at the age of seven. (Corkadoragha), a humorous reference to Nevertheless, he adapted in a seamless fashion to Corcaguiney, which was eventually translated into island life and one nds, in his writing, echoes of English in 1973 [8]. the older tradition, which he learned from his Unfortunately, of the three great Blasket writ- grandfather and other relatives. There is a ers, O’Sullivan didn’t share O’Crohan’s (or Peig strength and economy in his prose which was not Sayers’) fame to the same extent, perhaps because lost on writers such as E. M. Forster and which he only wrote the one book after leaving the emerges despite the quaintness of Davies and Blaskets for a career as a Civic Guard in Con- Thomson’s translation (intended clearly for an nemara and dying at an early age (drowning while English-speaking audience with no knowledge of swimming in Galway in 1950, aged forty-six). Irish orthography or phonology) [7]. For exam- Peig (1873–1958), the third of the Blasket triad, ple, in describing a journey to the Kerry mainland was actually born in Dunquin but ‘married into for a wedding, O’Sullivan writes: the Great Blasket’, where she spent the greater part of her life. Known among the islanders and We put out the curraghs and rowed, outsiders as ‘Queen of the Storytellers’, Peig had stripped to the shirt, across the Sound learned much of her repertoire from her father, a till we were approaching Great Cliff in master of the oral tradition. Many writers visited Dunquin. There must be some magic her to collect her stories, including Ma´ire N´õ connected with the sea, it lled me Chinne´ide who edited her autobiography (Peig, with such delight that morning. It was taken down in dictation by her son, Michea´l low tide, without a stir in the water; O’Guiheen, called ‘An File’ [The Poet] and pub- red weed and wrack-weed lying still on lished in 1936, with a translation appearing in the sand; rocks all around us warming 1973). Ma´ire also edited Machtnamh Seana-Mhna´ their pates in the sun; barnacles and (published in 1939, and translated by Se´amus periwinkles loosening their hold on the Ennis in 1962 as An Old Woman’s Re ections). A stones and creeping around at their further instalment of her autobiography, Beatha leisure; little clusters of crabs coming Pheig Sayers (‘The Life of Peig Sayers’), also out of their holes, a sea-raven and dictated to her son, appeared in 1970. The Irish diver, with their wings outspread to Folklore Commission’s collector, Seo´ samh O´ seaward and their necks craned watch- Da´laigh, gathered some 375 stories from her, ing us. They looked at us, then at each including forty long Fenian tales ( ana´õ ochta), other, and then again at us, as if to say, local tales and folksongs. Regarding the gather- Are they dangerous? (pp. 204–205) ings (ce´il´õ ) in her house and her style of story- telling, O´ Da´laigh wrote: Once again, as with Island Cross-Talk and The Islandman, the translators presented Twenty Years When the visitors arrived (for all gath- A-Growing as a virtual palimpsest of medieval ered to the Sayers house when Peig Irish life. In their preface, Davies and Thomson was there, to listen to her from supper- claim that the tradition preserved by these story- time till midnight) the chairs were tellers ‘includes ancient legends, some of them moved back and the circle increased. older than Beowulf’, clearly an attempt to claim News was swopped, and the news an antecedence for Irish (albeit oral) over English often gave the lead for the night’s sub- literature. ‘The language, like the life, is largely ject, death, fairies, weather, crops. … medieval [my emphasis]—vigorous, direct, rich in Great artist and wise woman that she oaths and asseverations, and delighting in neat was, Peig would at once switch from Review Article 85
gravity to gaiety, for she was a light- high point of about 170 persons in 1917 until the hearted woman, and her changes of last remaining inhabitants were removed by the mood and face were like the changes of government in 1953. By the time Toma´s’ son, running water. As she talked her hands Sea´n O’Crohan’s La´ Da´r Saol (‘A Day in Our would be working too; a little clap of Life’) was published in Irish in 1969 (the English the palms to cap a phrase, a ash of translation did not appear until 1992), the story- the thumb over her shoulder to mark a teller was a relic of the past and the pub had mystery, a hand hushed to mouth for become the principal ‘gathering house’. However, mischief or whispered secrecy. [9] despite the decline of the Blasket population and Flower wrote of her Irish that its culture during this period, both writers (partic- ularly Sea´n) present a lively view of island and she has so clean and nished a style of mainland life with memorable characters who, for speech and you can follow all the example, after a long, hard night at sea, come nicest articulations of the language on alive in port to drink, dance and play the ddle. her lips without any effort; she is a These books are very handsomely produced, natural orator, with so keen a sense of including end papers with maps of the islands and the turn of phrase and the lifting West Kerry, photos and line drawings of the rhythm appropriate to Irish that her inhabitants, their houses and public buildings. words could be written down as they Quite appropriate for use in courses dealing with leave her lips, and they would have the Irish ethnography, folklore, history, geography effect of literature with no savour of and autobiography, they are equally well suited arti ciality of composition. [10] for readers with a more general interest in Irish Following the medieval trope of Davies and culture. One cannot help but experience a certain Thomson, Kenneth Jackson wrote of her in the nostalgia for the past in reading these memoirs in collection of her stories which he edited, that ‘she which, despite the hardships they experience, the was like a woman from the Middle Ages’ [11]. authors and their neighbours live life to the Since Peig was required reading for the Leaving Certi cate for two generations of Irish schoolchil- dren, Peig became the representative voice of the Gaeltacht. Her Catholic nationalism, as well as the accessibility of her texts, accounts for her former institutionalisation in the Irish curriculum [12]. Not surprisingly, this forced reading of her memoirs led to a certain resistance to her on the part of the adult Irish population, somewhat alle- viated by recent critical reappraisals of her work as well as the other Blasket Island writers con- comitant with the opening of the Great Blasket Centre in Dunquin, within sight of the islands, in 1998. The Centre features exhibits on life in the islands, including music and storytelling, shing and other crafts, the ora and fauna, as well as on emigration to the Kerry mainland and to Amer- ica, particularly Spring eld, Massachusetts, which has the largest number of Blasket descendants of any city in the USA. In 1989, Great Blasket Island was declared a National Historic Park by the Irish Government and placed under the care of the Board of Public Works. Tourism to the islands has begun to increase, generally day-trips when the weather allows, although there are hos- tels and a cafe´ on Great Blasket. The remaining texts reissued by Oxford Paper- backs, A Pity Youth Does Not Last and A Day in Our Life, represent the memoirs of the last gener- ation, increasingly displaced from the islands in the 1930s and 1940s. Michea´l O’Guiheen, Peig’s FIG. 4. Sea´n O’Crohan and his wife Eilis. Front son and the last of the Blasket poets and story- cover, A Day in Our Life. Courtesy of the Blasket tellers, saw the island’s population dwindle from a Centre. 86 Review Article fullest. As Toma´s O’Crohan wrote in The Island- (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 490. man in words which sum up the joie de vivre of the Kiberd also points out that Sea´n O´ Coilea´in texts examined here: ‘Yerra, wisha, this is a day in is currently restoring the original text in our life, and we shall not always be in the way of what should prove to be a de nitive edition a day like it’. (p. 689, n. 16). [7] In fact, one of my major criticisms of the JAMES E. DOAN, Nova Southeastern University reprinting of this series is that there has been no attempt to regularise spellings, so that the same placename or personal name may ap- pear in three different forms, depending on NOTES which translation is being read, undoubtedly confusing to most readers. The older trans- [1] See Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy’s lations (i.e. The Islandman, Twenty Years a introduction to the second edition of Albert Growing and An Old Woman’s Re ections) Lord’s The Singer of Tales (Harvard Univer- could easily have been regularised to con- sity Press, 2000), pp. vii–xxix, for a recent form with the newer ones in terms of orthog- excursus on theories concerning the oral raphy. composition of Homeric epic. [8] For a recent study of this text within the [2] Co´il´õ n Owens, ‘Toma´s O´ Crohan’, in Mod- context of post-colonial Irish literature, see ern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, Kiberd’s discussion in Inventing Ireland, ed. Alexander G. Gonzalez (Greenwood pp. 497–512. Press, 1997), p. 324. [9] Cited in W. R. Rodgers’ introduction to An [3] Tim Enright’s introduction to A Day in Our Old Woman’s Re ections, p. xiii. Life, p. 2. [10] The Western Island, p. 49. [4] Enright’s introduction to A Day in Our Life, [11] Sce´alta O´ n mBlascaod (Irish Folklore Com- p. 3. mission, 1939), cited in Tim Enright’s intro- [5] Cited in Tim Enright’s introduction to Is- duction to A Day in Our Life, p. 2. land Cross-Talk: Pages from a Blasket Island [12] Co´il´õ n Owens, ‘Peig Sayers’, in Modern Irish Diary, p. 5. Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, ed. Gon- [6] Cited by Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland zalez, p. 370.