Irish Literature Is Not Comparative Literature Jerry White University of Alberta

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Irish Literature is Not Comparative Literature Jerry White University of Alberta

Irish literature exiﬆs as a dual entity. It was composed in two languages.

omas Kinsella, e Dual Tradition

       . . ’s  essay “Cana- Mdian Literature Is Comparative Literature.” Published in College English, it argues that studies of Canadian literature worthy of the name need to acknowledge the comparative essence of the exercise, acknowledge not only that Canadian literature exists in many languages but is also formed by multiple cultural communities. Blodgett’s essay is a pithy summary of what has become known as “Comparative Canadian Literature.” Although Clément Moisan lamented in  that “il n’existe pas encore d’études com- parées des deux littératures du Canada” [comparative studies of the two literatures of Canada do not yet exist] (–), by the s and s, such studies had become more common. e best-known examples in French are Moisan’s Poésie des frontières: Étude comparée des poésies canadienne et québécoise () and Comparaison et raison: Essais sur l’histoire et l’institution des littératures canadienne et québécoise (); in English they are Blodgett’s own  book Configuration: Essays on the Canadian

ESC .– (June/September ): –

White.indd 115 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM Literatures and Ronald Sutherland’s books Second Image: Comparative Studies in Québec/Canadian Literature () and e New Hero: Essays in Comparative Quebec/Canadian Literature (). Blodgett’s most recent book, the meta-historical Five Part Invention (published in ; see  J W is :, –, for Tracy Ware’s review), is very much in the tradition of this Associate Professor body of Comparative Canadian Literature. ese are some of the real high of Film Studies at the points of the Canadian literary criticism of the s and s, embodying a University of Alberta and critical ethic that is textually engaged, culturally aware, and linguistically Editor of the Canadian pluralist. And they lead to very exciting developments in Canadian intel- Journal of Irish Studies lectual life; Moisan is a distinguished literary historian and until recently / Revue canadienne headed up the Centre de recherche en littérature québécoise at Université d’études irlandaises. He Laval in Quebec City, Blodgett helped to found both the Canadian Com- is the author of Of is parative Literature Association and its journal the Canadian Review of Place and Elsewhere: e Comparative Literature / Revue canadienne de littérature comparée (both Films and Photography of which remain committed to making Canadian literature part of world of Peter Mettler (Toronto literature, and doing so in a way that is multi-lingual), and Sutherland was Film Festival / Indiana instrumental in creating and developing a graduate program in Canadian UP, ), editor of Comparative Literature at Université de Sherbrooke. e Cinema of Canada It is tempting, then, to think of this work as a potential model for Irish (Wallflower Press, ), literature. ese sorts of “Comparative” studies seemed to be what Declan and co-editor (with Kiberd was calling for in his  manifesto “Writers in Quarantine? e William Beard) of North Case for Irish Studies,” published in e Crane Bag. He insisted there that of Everything: English- a reasonable Irish Studies needed to be bilingual, so that its practitioners Canadian Cinema Since could deal with texts in both Irish and English in a way that recognized  (University of that they were basically part of the same tradition. is essay shares a great Alberta Press, ). deal with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s call for a Comparative Literature that integrated the best aspects of Area Studies. Writing in Death of A Dis- cipline, the book-length version of her  Wellek Library lectures, she called for a next step that “would work to make the traditional linguistic sophistication of Comparative Literature supplement Area Studies (and history, anthropology, political theory and sociology) by approaching the language of the other not only as a ‘field’ language.[…] We must take the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropoli- tan migrant” (). is sort of sanctioned ignorance is a recurring complaint

 Anne MacCarthy discusses this article in her book Identities in Irish Literature, especially on pages – and –. I gave this book a mostly negative review in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies / Revue canadienne d’études irlandaises . (Fall ), ; nevertheless, writing that review started me thinking about some of these issues.

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White.indd 116 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM of Irish-language activists, who often feel they are portrayed as toiling in some arcane, eccentric pursuit, whereas everyone knows that the real action is in English (even though Article  of the Constitution of Ireland specifically identifies Irish as thefirst language of the Republic). One of the more eloquent expressions of this frustration comes from the Belfast poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, whose poem “Aistriucháin” reads in part: Amanna, éiríonn tú tuirseach de chluasa falsa Éireannacha. Féinsásamh an monoglot a deir leat— ‘It sounds lovely. I wish I had the Irish. Don’t you do translations?’ Iad ag stánadh orm go mórshúileach mar a stánfadh ar éan corr a chuireann míchompord de chinéal orthu. Iad sásta go bhfuil sé thart sásta go bhfuil an file Béarla ag teacht i mo dhiaidh le cúpla scéal grin a chuirfidh réiteach ar an snag seo san oíche Sometimes, you get tired of talking to lazy Irish ears. Tired of self-satisfied monoglots who say —It sounds lovely. I wish I had the Irish. Don’t you do translations? ere they are, gawping at me, wide-eyed, like I’m some kind of odd-ball just rolled out of lingo-land, making them all uneasy. And how glad they are when it’s over glad the ‘English’ poet is up next with a few jokes to smooth over the slight hitch in the evening (–) (Translated by Frankie Sewell and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn)  Translation is actually a very interesting issue in this poem. e lines in Irish lines read “mar a stánfadh ar éan corr a chuireann / míchompord de chinéal orthu”, a literal version of which would be something close to “as one would stare at an odd bird, who’s putting / a kind of discomfort upon them.” Sewell and Mac Lochlainn, however, transpose this to “like I’m some kind of odd-ball / just rolled out of lingo-land, / making them all uneasy.” e English version, then, emphasizes the degree to which monoglot Anglos consider Irish to be weird and vaguely annoying and seems to be speaking directly to the monoglots in a

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White.indd 117 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM Creating disciplines that move beyond this centralization of the cultural assumptions of a monoglot Anglophone elite is not an easy task, as Mac Lochlainn, Kiberd, and Spivak know all too well. “Such work is not encouraged by a system which ignores the fact that writers of Irish and English live on the same small island and share the same experiences” (: ), Kiberd writes; his essay, like Spivak’s book, emits ambition and frustration in equal measure. It scarcely bears recounting that Kiberd has since emerged as Ireland’s most esteemed literary critic, having lived up to his idealism in this Crane Bag essay with books in both English (Synge and the Irish Language, Imagining Ireland, Irish Classics) and Irish (Idir Dhá Chultúr) that deal with both of the primary linguistic traditions of Ireland. But what I want to do here overall is explain why the comparative model, although highly useful in some ways, is finally not right for studies of post- Irish literature. e crucial difference between the problems of, say, Canadian and Irish bilingualism is that the former has a sort of evil twin in the form of a separatist movement of long standing, while the latter is a crucial if largely symbolic part of Irish identity. Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta [the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement], after all, was a civil rights movement; it was not seeking to establish a Connemara Republic, any more than the American civil rights movement after which it was partially modeled was seeking to establish a separate country for

bitter, angry way. But the Irish version, which lacks any equivalent of the epithet “lingo-land,” stresses the unspoken Anglo confusion; the Anglos in the audience are made uncomfortable by what their inability to understand the language, in a classic Irish grammatical construction, is putting upon them (“tá brón orm,” for instance, means “I am sad,” but it literally means “sadness is upon me”). Mac Lochlainn, then, is bitter in English; he sounds more understanding in Irish.  An anonymous reader pointed out that if I was dealing with a more histori- cally broad period of literary history, I would surely need to address Norman French and Latin in addition to Irish. Indeed, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s play Milseog an tSamhraidh (Baile Átha Cliath: Cois Life, ), set during the Famine, ends with the line “Mór: Pater noster, que es in caelis … go dtaga do ríocht, go ndéan- tar do thoil ar an talamh mar a dhéantar ar neamh. Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniu … agus ná lig sin i gcathú … Sed libera nos a malo. Sed libera nos a malo. Amen” (). Furthermore, Kinsella writes about the Norman presence in Ireland as well, noting that “Within a hundred years of their arrival [in the th century] great walls were being built around New Ross, a town that now seemed to rival Dublin in status, and a long lively poem in Norman French survives to celebrate the event. Within another hundred years the transitional French-speaking period had passed, and there are the first traces of Irish poetry in the English language: pious, comic, delicate, powerful” (: xxiv).

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White.indd 118 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM African Americans. But the degree to which Comparative Canadian Lit- erature has taken up this cultural and arguably national difference between English-Canadian and Québec literature varies somewhat. Acknowledging that works in both English and French dealt with alienation and frustration in the s and s, Sutherland writes that: It can safely be said, therefore, that French-Canadian and Eng- lish-Canadian novels of the twentieth century have traced a single basic line of ideological development, creating a whole spectrum of common images, attitudes and ideas. ey have done so for the most part independently, each in its own solitude, but obviously we have twin solitudes. In effect, recalling Marius Bewley’s statement that writers define nationality, it becomes evident that French Canadians and English Cana- dians are much more alike than many spokesmen have ever dared to suspect. Aside from language, it is quite probable that there are at the moment no fundamental cultural differences between the two major ethnic groups of Canada. (: ) Blodgett is more pessimistic about this separation than Sutherland, writing that: If it is true that the present effort to unify Canada could in fact leave it in pieces, we should cultivate a co-operative separatism that would prevent the kinds of ideological unity that the international and centrist schools seek. Good fences, I believe, do indeed make good neighbours. In rhetorical terms, then, any model that implies similarity through metaphorical con- junction is exactly the model that obscures those distinctions

 e term “Gaeltacht” refers to regions in the Republic of Ireland that have been identified as being at least  percent Irish-speaking and which are subsidized by the government with the aim of keeping them that way. e largest Gaeltacht is in County Galway, with other Gaeltacht areas existing in Counties Donegal, Mayo, Kerry, and Meath. e working assumption is that Irish is the community language in these areas; the degree to which this is actually the case varies widely. ere are no official Gaeltacht areas in Northern Ireland, other than an informal “Urban Gaeltacht” in West Belfast. As for the matter of an independent Gaeltacht, Desmond Fennell has argued for a radically decentralized Irish government; part of his argument included proposals for a sort of “home rule” for Gaeltacht areas. See especially his essay “Gaeltacht agus Impiriúlachas,” Comhar . (), – (translated as “e Gaeltacht and Imperialism,” in his book Beyond Nationalism [Dublin: Ward River Press, ], –). See also his pamphlets Iarchonnact Began (Dublin: Iarchonnachta , ) and Take the Faroes for Example: e argument for self-government in the provinces and the gaeltacht (Dublin: Pobal Teoranta, ) for more detailed proposals for Gaeltacht government.

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White.indd 119 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM that are necessary to the elaboration of both the francophone and anglophone literatures. (: –) Moisan is more pessimistic still, writing that: The degree to Quoi qu’il en soit des nombreuses querelles autour de leur which these existence ou de leur inexistence, on peut affirmer au départ qu’il y a deux littératures canadiennes, l’une d’expression française, l’autre d’expression anglaise. Il faut dire également sorts of que dans la pratique ces deux littératures se sont ignorées à la fois au niveau de la critique, de l’histoire et de la création differences are elle-même. () not completely [Although there are numerous arguments as to their existence or inexistence, one can confirm off the top that there are two Canadian literatures, one French and the other English. It’s absent, and to necessary also to say that in practice these two literatures ignore each other, at the level of criticism, history, and of which the Irish creation itself.]

model really is Blodgett and Moisan, I believe, are closer to the mark than Sutherland; indeed, Blodgett seems to be explicitly responding to Sutherland’s desire different from to downplay the cultural differences between Anglophones and Franco- phones. For while such differences between English- and French-speak- the Canadian ing Canadians may appear minor in comparison to the those they have with American, British, or French writers, they are not absent. Sutherland one, can be seen knows this, although clearly he wishes that it was not the case, in a way that recalls Kiberd’s desire for a more bilingual Irish Studies; Blodgett via the matter of and Moisan are more resigned to the fact of separation and see it as a means to become aware of differences between literary traditions, a path bilingual which is just as potentially fruitful as a desire to find similarities between traditions. writers. e degree to which these sorts of differences are not completely absent, and to which the Irish model really is different from the Canadian one, can be seen via the matter of bilingual writers. Canadian literature has few figures whose work in both French and English is equally distinguished. ere are some exceptions. e Québécoise novelist and essayist Nicole Brossard has written essays in English and has also translated some of her own work into English (a collection of this work was recently published as the book Fluid Arguments). Despite these forays, though, Brossard is known mostly as part of Quebec’s French-language literature; her presence in English is through forays, not a part of her work equally central as her work in French. Novelist and essayist Nancy Huston is probably

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White.indd 120 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM the best-known example of someone who writes in French and English with equal renown. But Huston, based in Paris, is actually an example of the intermediary between the global and the local, a figure that Claudio Guillén writes “es una de las figuras tradicionales de comparatismo” () [is one of the traditional figures of comparatism]. Guillén writes of this figure that “Bilingües o multilingües fueron sin disputa, en tiempos anti- guos o modernos, numerosos entornos urbanos, en cuya existencia no hace falta insistir aquí—la Vilna en que creció y estudió Czaslaw Milosz, la Alejandria de Cavafis, la Praga de Kafka, o aquel Estrasburgo demasiado neoclásico que en  decepcionó un poco al joven Goethe” () [ose who are bilingual or multilingual were, without question, in both ancient and modern times, in numerous urban contexts, a reality whose existence we do not have to stress here—the Vilnius where Czeslaw Milosz grew up and studied, the Alexandria of Cavafis, the Prague of Kafka, or the formerly all-too-classical Strasbourg which in  was somewhat disap- pointing to a young Goethe.]. Beckett embodies this sort of bilingualism, an approach to language that helps to link a national literature to the world. Guillén mentions Beckett in his considerations of bilingualism, seeing him as a rare example of someone at home in two languages; he writes “[E]l « equilingüismo », o dominio idéntico de dos medios lingüísticos de comunicación, salvo excepciones, como Samuel Beckett, es rarísimo. Y es de notar que Beckett no es ante todo poeta” () [“[E]qui-lingualism” or identical command of two linguistic forms of communication, aside from exceptions like Samuel Beckett, is rare. And it is notable that Beckett is not primarily a poet.]. Indeed, such concerns echo Huston’s distinction between “les vrais et les faux” bilingual writers (she places herself in the second camp). In her essay Nord perdu, she writes that: Les vrais sont ceux qui, pour des raisons géographiques, his- toriques, politiques, voire biographiques, (rejetons de diplo- mates), apprennent dès l’enfance à maîtriser deux langues à la perfection et passent de l’une à l’autre sans état d’âme particulier. Il arrive, bien sûr, que les deux langues occupent dans leur esprit des places asymétriques : ils éprouvent par exemple un vague ressentiment envers l’une—langue du pouvoir ou de l’ancienne puissance colonial, langue imposée à l’école ou dans le monde du travail—et le l’attachement pour l’autre, langue familiale, intime, charnelle, souvent dissociée de l’écriture. ()

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White.indd 121 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM [e real ones are those who, for geographical, historical, or political, which is to say biographical reasons (let’s leave dip- lomats aside), perfectly learn from childhood two languages and move from one to the other without any soul-searching doubts. It can happen, of course, that the two languages occupy an asymmetrical place in their minds: they experience, for example, a tension between one—the language of power or of the former colonial regime, a language imposed at school or in the world of work—and the attachment to the other, a familial, intimate, carnal language often separate from writing.]

is is the sort of bilingualism that predominates in Irish literature. Decrying the separation of literature written in Irish and literature written in English, Kiberd asserts that “e absurdity of this division becomes acutely apparent in any attempt to study the work of such writers as Patrick Pearse, Brendan Behan, Flann O’Brien, or Liam O’Flaherty, all of whom wrote with facility and fame in both languages” (: ), presumably, as Houston would write, sans état d’âme particulier. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is an example of a younger writer who does likewise. e bilingual writer is, in short, simultaneously well-established in Irish literature and studiously ignored in Irish literary studies. Canadian literary traditions, on the other hand, really do, more or less, exist in the “quarantine” that Kiberd decries, joined from time to time (and even then tentatively) by a genuinely cosmo- politan figure like Huston. Canada and Québec do call for a comparative approach, as Blodgett and Moisan acknowledge explicitly and Sutherland basically accepts. But with Irish literature, such an approach would mean not just splitting apart a single if bilingual tradition but sometimes splitting apart the oeuvres of individual authors. Do we really need a “Comparative Studies of Liam O’Flaherty” in order to deal with the relationship between the Irish-language short stories of Dúil and novels like Famine? Of course this is not what happens, or what should. e ever-present possibility, though, is that material written in Irish by an author is simply ignored, or dealt with in translation as though it had been written in English (this is actually less true of the work of O’Flaherty, on which one can quite easily find articles by scholars such as William Daniels, Tómas de Bhaldraithe, or Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, that deal with both the Irish- and the English-language elements of his work). In this way, Irish literary studies are lamentably close to Blodgett’s sense that “e expression ‘Canadian literature’ does not seem to cover the literatures of Canada but only the anglophone part of those literatures” (: ) or Moisan’s sense that

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White.indd 122 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM “On n’a pas encore dissipé l’équivoque et la confusion du terme littérature canadienne lui-même, qui désigne la plupart du temps la littérature d’un seul groupe ethnique” () [We still haven’t gotten past the ambiguity and confusion of the term Canadian Literature itself, which most of the time refers to the literature of a single ethnic group]. Good fences, Much the same is true of the expression “British Literature,” and it might seem tempting to offer that as a better analogy than Canada; I for Bassnett, would finally, though, resist that temptation. Susan Bassnett, in her book Comparative Literature, has a chapter on “Comparing the Literatures of make good the British Isles” on the ways in which languages such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and even Manx and Cornish, make it difficult to speak of syllabi. British literature responsibly. She laments that the way in which “England” or “English” has become synonymous with “Britain” or “British,” writing that “e terminology of ‘English literature’ or ‘English Studies’ is used all-embracingly, so that Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writers are frequently included within a syllabus without any reference to their different point of origin and literary traditions” (). Again, the need here is to separate and then compare, in order to avoid the homogenizing ten- dencies of an artificially unified literary studies. Good fences, for Bassnett, make good syllabi. Indeed, such fences seem natural to many outsiders. Bassnett opens this chapter with an amusing anecdote about speaking with a Slovak colleague who asked her who was doing British Comparative Literature. Bassnett rattled off colleagues in Britain working on various European literatures, but her Slovak colleague was confused: “He simply wanted to know who was comparing the literatures of the British Isles, for that seemed to him and his colleagues to be the proper business of British comparatists. When I said there were no such programmes of research or teaching, and that the British Comparative Literature Association had never even considered the question, my statement was met with disbelief” (). Part of this, no doubt, is a linguistic problem similar to that of Irish Studies; there are simply not that many scholars who can deal with texts in Scottish Gaelic or Welsh (let alone Cornish). But part of it is a lingering ambiguity over the exact status of Wales and Scotland. Most citizens of the UK would be comfortable calling Wales or Scotland “countries” (and that is definitely not true of English Canadians and Québec), but at the same time skepticism about Welsh or Scottish separatism runs fairly high (and neither country has ever had a referendum on actual independence, while Québec has had two since ). So if Bassnett, when properly chided by an outsider, does see the project of British literature as comparative, I suspect that it is largely because of her ability to accept Scotland and Wales

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White.indd 123 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM as separate culturally or nationally, even while leaving aside the question of their future as independent nation-states. is is actually quite close to the case of Swiss literary studies, which is similarly fragmented. François Jost has written that “Nous préférions employer l’expression de «lettres suisses»” rather than the notion of a singular “Swiss literature” (). Man- fred Gsteiger has been more direct, writing that “the ‘nationalism,’ if it still exists, is rarely ‘Swiss,’ but cantonal, especially Vaudois, as in the works of Jacques Chessex, or ‘Jurassien,’ referring to the only newly created, but long since proposed Canton du Jura, as glorified in Alexandre Voisard’s Ode au pays qui ne veut pas mourir () or Romanch, as a linguistic and cultural defence” ().⁵ Will Kymlicka differs with this slightly, writing that “the Swiss have a strong sense of common loyalty, despite their cultural and linguistic divisions” (). But he also specifies that “in Switzerland, as in most multination states, national groups feel allegiance to the larger state only because the larger state recognizes and respects their distinct national existence” (). I do not think Irish speakers require a similarly explicit acknowledgement of difference in order to “feel allegiance to the larger state” or to identify as “Irish.” As with the Canadian case, this sense of very intense cultural separation is where a Swiss analogy with Irish literature breaks down. For while there are undoubtedly cultural differences between, say, the Connemara Gaeltacht and Dublin, they are not the same sort of differences that exist between Scotland and England, or even between the Swiss cantons of Ticino (Italian-speaking) and Zurich (German-speaking). omas Kinsella’s work in editing e New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, one of the most explicit and high-profile calls I know of for a multilingual approach to Irish literature, traces out just this sense of Irish literature as both linguistically diverse and basically unified (and thus not quite the same as “lettres suisses”). In the introduction to that work he famously wrote that “It should be clear at least that the Irish tradition is a matter of two linguistic entities in dynamic interaction, of two major bodies of poetry asking to be understood together as functions of a shared and painful history” (: xxvii; emphasis added). What I have been sidestepping so far, of course, is the very real national difference that exists in Ireland: that between those who identify as British and those who identify as Irish. at the conflict in Northern Ireland is essentially about national identity is practically inarguable; although it is popularly represented as a Catholic–Protestant binary, arguments about  Romansch, of course, is a linguistic and not cantonal identity (although Ro- mansch is spoken mostly in the canton of Graubünden, where  percent of the population speaks the language), but the point is well taken here.

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White.indd 124 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM the true nature of the Eucharist are not what sustain Northern violence. While I do not want to get into the back-and-forth of the debates among “nationalist” and “revisionist” historians in Irish Studies, it is worth noting that in literary studies, arguments from the Unionist (or anti-nationalist) side of the fence are often couched in the language of inclusion, not comparison. John Wilson Foster, a Belfast-born critic recently retired from a long career at the University of British Columbia, summed up the basics of such an analysis in a review essay on the Field Day Pamphlets, a series of seminal interventions sponsored by the theatre company founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea, that paved the way for the canon-creating, now five-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Foster ended up participating in the editorial work on this anthology, although he saw Field Day’s ideology generally as too narrow in its understanding of Irishness, and wrote that he accepted to do so “as long as the all-Ireland anthology reflected the strong Scottish and English dimensions of Northern literary culture” (). Resisting the conflation of Loyalist extremism with North- ern Protestant culture, he writes that: I echo Tom Paulin’s regard for the dialects and languages of Ireland [Paulin had written a Field Day pamphlet called A New Look at the Language Question, in support of serious consid- eration of the English spoken in Ireland], but suggest we study them without yoking them to a political prescription. I echo Declan Kiberd’s call for the study of unionist culture, but let its positive as well as negative guises be studied, and by Irish, indeed anti-unionist, students of culture. And I echo Seamus Deane’s summons to dissolve the mystique of Irishness, but I challenge him to initiate this necessary task by seeking to dissolve through understanding the negative mystique of Ulster Protestantism. In [philosopher Rihcard] Kearney’s otherwise illuminating pamphlet, unionist mythology receives one sentence, and whereas nationalism is a “tradition” unionism is a “camp” (whose tents he no doubt wishes were folded). If my own summons seems one-sided, that is because critics of non- nationalist background have reciprocated in advance to the extent that they are sympathetic students of that Anglo-Irish literature dominated since Joyce by “Catholic” and “nationalist” writers. ()

ere are fleeting echoes here of Moisan’s lament that the two Canadian literatures do not speak to each other. But like Kiberd’s assessment of the place of literature in Irish, Foster’s call here is for inclusion of Northern

Irish Literature | 

White.indd 125 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM Protestant/Unionist experience in all its complexity, not for its study alongside Irish literature. Like Kiberd, Foster sees Unionism as part of Irish culture, a part that is too often ignored by ill-equipped critics or historians. ese discussions of both Irish-language and Protestant/Unionist writing are very close, then, to what Joseph Pivato writes about in his essay “Minority Writing and Comparative Literature.” Pivato is mostly interested in the ambiguous place of Canadian writers who work in Italian, Icelandic, Ukranian, etc. Summing up his position he says that “It is a paradox of the ethnic writer that he or she has a central role in our culture by speaking from the margins” (–). e cultivation of this sort of paradox is one of the few things that Foster and Kiberd have in common in their understanding of Irish Studies. So rather than call for a “Comparative Irish Literature,” I think that it is time to honour Kiberd’s call for a bilingual Irish Studies, and Kinsella’s call for an attention to the “dual” nature of Irish writing. is Irish Studies could draw on the tools and methods of Comparative Literature; among the most important of these is multilingualism. is, of course, is a deal- breaker for Kiberd, who recalls that “As far back as  during a sym- posium at Trinity College Dublin Sean Lucy remarked with some gusto that he ‘would take no student of Anglo-Irish literature seriously unless that student were bilingual.’” Clearly, Kiberd doesn’t take monoglots very seriously either. Kinsella has been similarly adamant, writing in his short book e Dual Tradition, that “e Irish language is a difficult language to learn, and has little contemporary relevance.[…] A dual approach is none the less essential if the literature of the Irish tradition is to be fully understood” (: –). Comparative Literature has come to consider these sorts of approaches as essential in a way that both Kiberd and Kinsella would no doubt find satisfying. An ability to deal with texts in the original language remains a more or less non-negotiable cost of entry into the field; in their Qu’est-ce que c’est le littérature comparée? Pierre Brunel, Claude Pichois, and André-Michel Rousseau write simply that “Le plus sûr accès à des littératures étrangères est de les pratiquer dans leur langue originale” () [e most reliable access to foreign literatures is to approach them in their original language] and elsewhere write that “Il faut donc se résoudre à apprendre les langues de ceux dont on veut connaître les littératures, ce qui, grâce aux méthodes audiovisuelles et à la multiplication des contacts, devient une tâche moins redoutable que par le passé” () [It is therefore necessary to resolve to learn the languages of the literatures one wishes to know, which, thanks to audiovisual methods and the proliferation of contacts, is easier now than in the past]. Presumably, this maxim is also

 | White

White.indd 126 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM true of non-foreign languages, as Irish is for Irish Studies scholars. is breaks down at the undergraduate level, where professors must teach survey courses in “World Literature” that deal with texts in literally dozens of languages; command of all of these is not a reasonable expectation. But at the professional level, there is, in Comparative Literature, an expectation that in matters of one’s research, a true comparatist deals with that material in its original language. It is often remarked informally that in the absence of such command of the original, one is dealing not with a literary issue but a translation issue (I first heard this one-liner from Pivato during a lecture at the University of Alberta in ). e fundamental reason for an ability to deal with material in original languages is so that questions of linguistic form can be seriously dealt with; in literature, such questions are not exclusively linguistic, but language issues are certainly at the heart of most sustained formal analyses. In the absence of direct access to that language, formal discussion is frequently an inherently qualified undertaking. is may seem like old-school formalism along the lines of Robert Frost’s maxim that poetry is what is lost in translation, but Irish literature actually poses some interesting problems when it comes to important elements being lost in translation. Flann O’Brien, a name⁶ likely to be on any “Introduction to Irish Literature” syllabus, was famously playful when it came to language; although he wrote mostly in English (and his books At Swim-Two-Birds and e ird Policeman are practically canonical in Irish Studies), this linguistic playfulness is especially visible in the work he wrote in Irish. is passage from his classic An Béal Bocht (which he signed as Myles na gCopaleen) provides a good example of the way that he used the language itself to satirize the place that Irish held in the imagination of the metropolis: “A ghaela,” a dúirt sé, “cuireann sé gliondar ar mo chroí Gaelach a bheith anseo inniu ag caint Gaeilge libhse ar an bhfeis Ghaelach seo i lar na Gaeltachta. Ní miste dom a rá gur Gael mise. Táim Gaelach ó mo bhaithis go bonn mo choise —Gaelach thoir, thiar, thuas agus thíos. Tá sibhse go léir

 Flann O’Brien’s name is the proper topic of an essay unto itself. His real name is Brian O’Nolan or Brian Ó Nualláin, but because he was a member of the Irish civil service, he was not allowed to write under his own name. He signed his English-language novels as Flann O’Brien. He signed An Béal Bocht as Myles na gCopaleen. He signed his long-running Irish Times column, “e Cruiskeen Lawn” as both Myles na gCopaleen and Myles na Coppaleen. An eloquent and melancholy explanation of O’Brien’s nomenclatorial fluidity can be found in Kiberd : –.

Irish Literature | 

White.indd 127 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM fíor-Ghaelach mar an gcéanna. Gaeil Ghaelacha de shliocht Gaelach is ea an t-iomlán againn. An té atá Gaelach, beidh sé Gaelach feasta. Níor labhair mise, ach a oiread libh féin, aon Joking about fhocal ach Gaeilge ón lá a rugadh mé agus, rud eile, is faoin nGaeilge féin a bhí gach abairt dá ndúras riamh. Má táimid declensions, fíor-Ghaelach, ní foláir dúinn a bheith ag plé cheist na Gaeilge agus cheist an Ghaelachais le chéile i gcónaí. Ní haon mhaith- as anyone eas Gaeilge a bheith againn má bhíonn ár gcomhrá sa teanga sin ar nithe neamh-Ghaelacha. An té a bhíonn ag caint Gaeilge, ach gan a bheith ag plé cheist na teanga, níl sé fíor-Ghaelach who has read ina chroí: ní haon tairbhe don Ghaelachas a leithéid sin mar gur ag magadh faoin nGaeilge a bhíonn sé agus tabhairt masla O’Brien knows, do Ghaelaibh. Níl aon ní ar an domhan chomh deas ná chomh Gaelach le fíor-Ghaeil fhíor-Gaelacha a bhíonn ag caint fíor- is entirely in Ghaeilge Gaelaí i dtaobh na Gaeilge fíor-Ghaelaí. Fógraim an fheis seo anois ar Gael-oscailt. Suas le Gaeil! Go maire ár keeping with his nGaeilge slán!” () e point of the joke here is the multiple mutations and declensions of sensibilities. the noun-stem gael; this is quite a demanding grammatical exercise (as I can personally attest, having been in an Irish class at Donegal’s Oideas Gael where this passage was used). Joking about declensions, as anyone who has read O’Brien knows, is entirely in keeping with his sensibilities. Furthermore, such grammatical tomfoolery is consistent with the satire of the book overall; the prime targets here are the language puritans who travel to the Irish-speaking regions with the belief that they can indulge their famously obsessive and purity-oriented approach to grammar. While some of this satire is present in Patrick Power’s translation, its grammatical aspects are lost: “Gaels!” he said, “it delights my Gaelic heart to be here today speaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic feis in the centre of the Gaeltacht. May I state that I am a Gael. I’m Gaelic from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet—Gaelic front and back, above and below. Likewise, you are all truly Gaelic. We are all Gaelic Gaels of Gaelic lineage. He who is Gaelic, will be Gaelic evermore. I myself have spoken not a word except Gaelic since the day I was born—just like you—and every sentence I’ve ever uttered has been on the subject of Gaelic. If we’re truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question of the Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. ere is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelic topics. He who speaks Gaelic but fails to discuss the language

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White.indd 128 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM question is not truly Gaelic in his heart; such conduct is of no benefit to Gaelicism because he only jeers at Gaelic and reviles the Gaels. ere is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic and truly Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language. I hereby declare this feis to be Gaelically open! Up the Gaels! Long live the Gaelic tongue!” () Consider the use of the stem “Gael” in the two paragraphs. In the Power translation, we have Gaels, Gaelic, Gaeltacht, Gaelicism, and Gaelically. In the O’Brien original, we have Ghaela, Gaelach, Gaeilge, Ghaelach, Gael- tachta, Gael, Gaeil, Ghaelacha, nGaeilge, Ghaelachais, Gaelachas, Gaelaibh, Ghaeil, Ghaeilge, Gaelaí, and Ghaelaí. Even the word “truly” makes a mess of the speech, as we move from fíor-Ghaeil to fhíor-Galeacha and over to fíor-Ghaeilge, not to mention the fact that the baggage of the term fíor- ghael⁷ is lost when it is transposed to “truly Gaelic.” e translation uses language to make a joke about repetition; the original is actually a joke about minor differences, and the narcissism that goes along with them. is loss is not, of course, Power’s fault (he is a most distinguished translator of Irish, having also produced a renowned version of Brian Merriman’s Cuirt an Mheán-Oíche). English just isn’t an inflected language in the same way; there’s no way to get it to do the things that Irish does to nouns. To say that “truly Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic” is the equivalent of O’Brien’s “fíor-Ghaeil fhíor-Galeacha a bhíonn ag caint fíor-Ghaeilge Gaelaí i dtaobh na Gaeilge fíor-Ghaelaí” is true in the strict sense; the only thing missing is the joke. is bit of satire, then, is understood by a reader of the translation in broader terms than for the reader of the original; because the deeply eccentric obsession with grammar is lost, these psychotic language enforcers come across as unduly obsessed with flaunting ethnic purity, what with all their repetition of the word “Gaelic.” at is part of the story, and indeed an important part of the story, but it is not the entire story. Reading only through the dark glass of translation does indeed mean that some parts of the story will always be missing. It is up to the scholar to try to provide—either in the classroom or as part of scholarship, both of which are venues where, in all but a few highly advanced cases, command of a language other than that of instruction or of the book/article cannot be assumed—a sense of what has been lost and how that loss connects to the work overall.

 Fíor-ghael literally means “truly Gaelic,” although it has become a kind of short- hand for a native Irish as opposed to an Anglo-Irish identity.

Irish Literature | 

White.indd 129 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM is is not just a formal matter; to a great extent, linguistic questions determine very basic parts of any canon, including the canon of Irish Stud- ies. An ability to deal with material in the original language allows a scholar to bypass the industrial apparatus of translation; the simple question of what has and has not been made available in a published translation is not an obstacle to study. In Irish Studies the most pressing case of the canon being limited by the whims of translation is the longstanding unavailability of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s  novel Cré na Cille in an English translation, even though it has been translated into Norwegian (Jan Erik Rekdal’s Kirkegårdsjord appeared in ; see articles by Ó Háinle and Rekdal). Michael Cronin made an impassioned call for such a translation in a  Irish Times op-ed, writing that it “has been hailed by Declan Kiberd as an Irish classic [Kiberd’s book Irish Classics devotes a chapter to it]. Alan Titley has described it as a major achievement in writing, storytelling and imagination. It is commonly held to be one of the greatest Irish novels of the th century. And most Irish people have not read one line of it.” But Cronin’s call is also part of a larger project to redefine the use of translation away from the simple enabling of monolingual status, an enabling whose logical conclusion is the death of Irish. Indeed, in the Irish- language section of his bilingual⁸ booklet An Ghaeilge san Aois Nua / Irish in the New Century, he distinguished between internal and external translation (“aistriúchán inmheánach agus aistriúchán seachtrach”), writing that “Is é an t-aistriúchán seachtrach an t-aistriúchán atá dírithe ar lucht labhartha an Bhéarla agus an t-aistriúchán inmheánach an t-aistriúchán atá dírithe ar lucht labhartha na Gaeilge” (: ) [External translation is a translation directed at an English-speaking audience, and internal translation is directed an Irish-speaking audience]. is follows a line that Cronin had already developed in his seminal  history Translating Ire- land, and which is also developed by Maria Tymoczko in her work on the translation of Old-Irish and Middle-Irish texts. Tymoczko sees Kinsella’s translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge as a seminal example of an actively modernizing, discursive translation, writing that “his representation of

 Cronin’s book is part of a series of short books in Irish and English about the future of the language, published by the Dublin-based press Cois Life. e first was James McCloskey, Guthanna in Éag: An mairfidh an Ghaeilge beo? / Voices Silenced: Has Irish A Future? (); the Irish and English material in the book, while not identical, is quite similar. Not so with Cronin’s book, which has one essay in English, and then a very different one in Irish, albeit on the same topic; this is also true of Maolmhaodhóg Ó Ruairc’s recent entry in the series, a highly polemical work of linguistics called Ar óir Gramadach Nua / In Search of a Grammar ().

 | White

White.indd 130 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM Irish culture, however accurate it might be, challenges the tenets, values and goal of Irish cultural nationalism in many respects” (); clearly this is an example of aistriúchán inmheánach, internal translation, aimed at revising or challenging the cultural nationalism that emerged in the wake of the end of the War of Indepencence in  and seemed to calcify during the years of the Irish Free State ( to ). Both Cronin and Tymoczko also echo translation scholar Lawrence Venuti, who has written that “In the case of foreign texts that have achieved canonical status in an institution, a translation becomes the site of interpretive communities that may support or challenge current canons and interpretations, prevailing standards and ideologies” (). e crucial difference from the Venuti schema, of course, is that Cré na Cille and the Táin, like most other texts in Irish Gaelic, are not foreign in the context of Irish Studies.⁹ But Cronin and Tymoczko are clearly longing for a translation practice that creates just these sorts of interpretive communities, communities that challenge current canons in Ireland. Indeed, Tymoczko goes on to write that “In more recent theories of translation, writers have focused less on the function of translators as selectors/substituters, than on the function of translators as connectors/ creators” (). And Cronin points out in his Irish Times piece that the creation of these connections has happened with Irish-language poetry; he writes that “Whereas Irish-language poets through the medium of translation have enjoyed a certain public profile in recent years, Irish prose writers have remained almost wholly invisible to a large section of the Irish reading public.” He seems to be longing here for more of Guillén’s figuras tradicionales de comparatismo, the intermediary, only longing for it in a national rather than a really comparative context. Irish poetry has found its intermediary, in figures like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who pub- lishes monolingual editions but whose bilingual editions are often veritable symposia of playful translation practice. Her  collection Pharaoh’s Daughter was translated by thirteen leading Irish poets (including Seamus Heaney), and her  collection e Astrakhan Cloak (whose title is a

 at’s not true of every text, of course. Pádraig Ó Siadhail, for example, remains quite a prodigious writer of novels and essays from his home-base of Halifax (where he is the D’Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s Univer- sity). His most recent book, Idir Dhá ír: Sceitsí Ó Cheanada (Belfast: Lagan Press, ) is a collection of short pieces (many written for the Irish Times) about Canada, including one about the West Edmonton Mall; his novel Peaca an tSinsir (Indreabhán: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, ) is an academic satire set at the fictional “Ollscoil na mBunchnoc” (University of the Foothills) in Western Canada.

Irish Literature | 

White.indd 131 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM play on the Irish word for translation, aistriúchán) was a sort of translation exchange with Paul Muldoon, as was her  collection e Water Horse with poets Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. No compa- rable situation, with English-language writers fruitfully collaborating with Irish-language writers to join and expand their interpretive communities, currently exists with Irish-language prose. So the real problem here is that a major part of Irish literary culture has been left off the map; outsidersand insiders coming to Irish literature will tend to get an incomplete picture of the country’s prose. In her call for a new Comparative Literature, Spivak writes that “e new Comparative Literature makes visible the import of the translator’s choice” (). With only a few exceptions—such as high-profile translations like Kinsella’se Táin or Seamus Heaney’s Sweeny Astray (a version of the Middle-Irish epic Buile Suibhne) or Beowulf—this choice has been almost completely obscured in Irish Studies; the absence of Ó Cadhain from most discussions of twentieth-century Irish literature is a good example of this unthinking inattention to the ways that translation limits discourse. But if Irish Studies, as a discipline, is reliant entirely on the Irish-language texts that have been translated into English, it is difficult to see how it will ever move forward. e discovery of emergent voices and the recov- ery of unjustly neglected ones (such as Ó Cadhain) are important tasks for literary critics and historians; language would seem to be a crucial tool there. Furthermore, Irish historians, particularly those dealing with the pre-Famine era, need access to what was before the mid-s the majority language of the island. Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh made an impassioned call for his fellow Irish historians to put aside their neuroses about the Irish language and to accept that it is an indispensable historical research tool when he addressed the ird Galway Conference on Colonialism in . is was, of course, an echo of Kiberd’s own  argument. And Ó Tuathaigh’s call for students of Ireland to learn to use the island’s once-majority and now-subaltern language also shares a lot with Spivak’s analysis of the centrality of language to a revitalized Comparative Literature and to an Area Studies that seeks to move beyond complicity in cultural imperialism. Anticipating the protests of impracticality that she fears will follow an emphasis on the learning of non-imperialist languages, Spivak writes that “ere are a few hegemonic European languages and innumerable Southern Hemisphere languages. e only principled answer to that is: ‘too bad’” (). Just as Subaltern Studies needs attention to subaltern languages, Irish Studies simply needs attention to Irish, if for no other reason

 | White

White.indd 132 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM than without it, its canon will calcify, with generation after generation of scholars re-hashing the same set of translated texts. e matter of Comparative Literature’s expectation that scholars will deal with the reception of works by native speakers of the language of the text is also complex. is is a long-standing practice in Comparative Using a British Literature; an article that dealt with Strindberg and Ibsen and failed to deal with secondary sources in Swedish and Norwegian would likely be critic writing in considered suspect. Part of this expectation is to guarantee that scholars are paying due attention to the place that texts have in their culture of English when origin. Douwe Fokkema writes that “In order to draw up a typology of cultures, the literary scholar interested in cross-cultural studies could try dealing with to discover, if possible with the assistance of local experts, whether the texts in use in a certain culture are being differentiated according to form American and function by senders and recipients” (). Essentially, then, this is a matter of compelling scholars to ascertain any non-literary qualities (religious, literature folk, etc.) that texts may have in their original culture but which may not be immediately evident. Cronin writes along almost the exact same lines written in (although concerning translation as opposed to comparison), suggesting the necessity for “idirdhealú ar dtús idir aistriúchán i réimse an chultúir English serves agus aistriúchán i rémise na sochaí. Ciallaíonn cultúr sa chomhthéacs seo (agus sa chomhthéacs seo amháin) an oidhreacht liteartha, fhealsúnach, no inherent dhiaga, pholaitiúil atá ag pobal ar leith i bhfoirm téacsanna” (: ; emphases in original) [differentiation first of all betweentranslation in the purpose. realm of the culture and translation with respect to society. Culture, in this context (and in this context only), means the literary, philosophical, divine, and political heritage people have vis-à-vis textual forms]. Elsewhere he writes that the reason that language is more than just language, so to speak is, “[t]oisc nach bhfuil eolas ag gach uile dhuine ar gach uile theanga dá bhfuil ann is léir go bhuil ról ar leith ag an aistriúchán i bpolaitíocht an aitheantais sa tsochaí” (: ) [because not every single person knows every single language in existence, it’s clear that translation has a crucial role in the politics of identity within society]. For both Fokkema and Cro- nin, the imperative is clear: ask the people who speak the language what the texts in that language mean. But while the rule about using a scholar’s command of the native language to avoid over-reliance on translation may seem straightforward when dealing with Norwegian drama, it is clearly more complex when dealing with either linguistic traditions that span national borders. Using a British critic writing in English when dealing with American literature written in English serves no inherent purpose. e desire to keep one’s

Irish Literature | 

White.indd 133 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM scholarly feet close to the cultural ground is laudable; that such a goal is achieved through purely linguistic means is less clear. is is especially interesting when it comes to critical texts in Irish; Kiberd’s work, as applied to An Béal Bocht, illustrates this well. Writing in his  book Idir Dhá Chultúr, a work that examines the interaction between Irish and English in Irish literature, Kiberd argues for a strong connection between the way that Joyce, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien, in An Béal Bocht, represent the west of Ireland. Discussing first O’Brien’s and then Joyce’s portrait of middle-class nationalists who go to the Gaeltacht, he writes: Is dream ábharaíoch iad muintir na Gaeltachta sa leabhar seo, gur mó a dtóir ar charnadh an airgid ná ar shlánú na teanga —ar thalamh an tSeanduine a tógadh an Coláiste Gaelach i ndeireadh na dála, “talamh a bhí luachmhar i gceart an t-am a ceannaíodh uaidh í.” Arís eile tá Brian Ó Nualláin ag deanamh aithrise ar an méid a bhí le rá ag Stephen Dedalus faoi lucht na tuaithe: ey can spot a false coin but they represent no admirable type of culture. ey live a life of dull routine, the calculation of coppers, the weekly debauch and the weekly piety. (: ) [In this book, the people of the Gaeltacht are a materialistic set, more interested in accumulating money than in saving the language—after all, the Irish college was built on the old man’s land; furthermore, “the land was right costly at the time he bought it from him.” Once again, Brian O’Nolan was repeating what Stephen Dedalus had said about country folk: ey can spot a false coin but they represent no admirable type of culture. ey live a life of dull routine, the calculation of coppers, the weekly debauch and the weekly piety.] Kiberd deals with very similar issues in a chapter in his book Imagining Ireland, published in : Anti-pastoralists like O’Nolan and Kavanagh were, of course, following a lead which had been given by James Joyce, whose own views on the peasantry became even clearer with the publication in the s of Stephen Hero, in which the main protagonist says: “e glorified peasantry seem all to me as like one another as a peascod is to another peascod. ey can spot a false coin, but they represent no very admirable type

 | White

White.indd 134 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM of culture. ey live a life of dull routine, the calculation of coppers, the weekly debauch and the weekly piety.” is might have been an account of a townland where every man has the interchangeable name of Jams O’Donnell. For An Béal Bocht truly is the Irish version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book in which identities are fluid and interchangeable, as characters are trapped in repetitive cycles of time and rains that pelt down without mercy. (: )

An elucidation of a Portrait-Béal Bocht connection is accomplished in both passages, but in quite different ways. e analysis in English enters into an international comparison that is missing from the analysis in Irish, but the passage in Irish feels like more of an exercise in closely read comparison between Irish- and English-language novels. I want, then, to remove the connection between language and criticism that might exist in, as I said earlier, a study of Strindberg and Ibsen. Gearóid Denvir’s book Litríocht agus Pobal, for instance, is a work of literary history that deals with literature in Irish with close attention to the cultural context of the Connemara Gaeltacht; anyone wishing to understand literature in Irish would do well to consult it. But this is not a solely linguistic matter. Someone wanting to understand contemporary literature in Irish would do just as well to consult Kiberd’s Irish Classics, which deals, in English, with such crucial texts as Cré na Cille and the Blasket Island memoirs, both crucial influences on the poets and novelists that Denvir is dealing with. Furthermore, both authors devote an entire essay to Sean Ó Riordáin. e point of challenging this linguistic imperative around criticism, then, is to illustrate that while there may in Comparative Literature be a prima facie expectation that the language of secondary literature will, to some extent, match the language of the primary literature, such an expectation is indeed not borne out in Irish literary studies. Criticism in Irish is a rich and growing field, one that should surely be consulted because it is part of the field of Irish literary studies. But the consultation of criticism in Irish, even when dealing with texts in Irish, does not in itself fulfill Fokkema’s imperative to enlist “the assistance of local experts.” Indeed, one place that this connection between culture and language often breaks down is in North American Aboriginal culture, as well as the culture of recent immigrants. e degree to which a bilingual vision of Canadian identity writes out both immigrants and Aboriginal peoples has been widely noted, and Ireland is now facing a similar reality. Writing about the increased linguistic diversity that the recent surge of immigration to Ireland has brought, Cronin notes that that “if Irish is simply one

Irish Literature | 

White.indd 135 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM language among others, it follows that it is more difficult to argue for special status for the language within the Irish state, a point that under- lines the urgency of new thinking on the maintenance of Irish and the rethinking of state bilingualism in a multilingual polity” (: ). Simi- larly, Blodgett writes that “both immigrant and Native histories inscribe statements about the status of language because their histories have the problem of continuous linguistic erosion in a predominantly bilingual society” (: ). Does a scholar engaged with Irish Studies in the st century, then, have the same obligation to move beyond a simple bilingualism (by drawing on, say, Romanian, or Yoruba, the languages of the two largest immigrant groups to Ireland) that a Canadian Studies scholar has to draw upon Cree or Inuktitut? One mitigating factor in both cases is the relative paucity of written texts in either linguistic-cultural configuration; there are just not that many written texts in Cree, just as there are not that many written texts in Irish Yoruba (to coin a phrase). Immigrant literatures in Ireland exist almost entirely in English (and that is not true in the same way in Canada, where, as I have already mentioned vis-à-vis Pivato, writing in German, Icelandic, or Ukrainian is more part of the literary heritage); contemporary Aboriginal literature in Canada mostly exists in either Eng- lish or French. No doubt oral texts in Aboriginal languages are of crucial importance, and their histories of recording and translation make this a very complicated field indeed; much the same could be said of the legal narratives of immigration which are becoming more and more contentious in Irish political life. Indeed, these kinds of histories point once again to how much cultural information and historical narrative is contained in the relationships between languages; it is difficult to get a sense of the true nature of that relationship without some command of both languages of the “between.” So just as it makes perfect sense for someone interested in Canadian Studies and especially interested in Aboriginal literature to acquire some familiarity with, say, Inuktitut, or with Cree, it makes increasing sense for someone interested in Irish Studies, and especially in the narratives of recent immigrants, to acquire some familiarity with the languages of large immigrant groups. What it is absolutely essential to acknowledge, though, is that notwithstanding misplaced idealism about how because of globalization everyone speaks English now and doesn’t that just make everything easier for everyone, the increasingly open concept of national literatures that we see in both Canada and Ireland has increased and will likely continue to increase the need for linguistic expertise, and for the tools of comparatism. is increased need should not actually

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White.indd 136 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM represent as much of a shift for Irish Studies as some may think, for as Cronin writes, “An effect of the marked increase in multilingualism over the last decade has been to make visible elements of the Irish multilingual past so that language change is presented less as a threat to the founding languages of the nation (to borrow a Canadian term) and more as part of The languages an Irish multilingual tradition that has been largely overshadowed by the rivalry between English and Irish” (: ). of Ireland have Explaining just how split the four linguistic traditions of Switzerland are in their literary manifestations, Beatrice Stocker asserts that “there can co-existed in a and never will be any such thing as Swiss Literature” (); I wish to state emphatically that there is such a thing as Irish Literature. Declan Kiberd’s literary context now decades-old call for serious recognition of the reality that this Irish Literature exists in more than one language is still something that needs in a way that to be taken seriously. e tools of Comparative Literature—an attention to the original language, a close engagement with the cultural context of they really do that language, an ability to deal with relationships among languages—have an enormous amount to offer studies of this Irish Literature and to Irish not in Canada, Cultural Studies generally. But my proposal here is that these tools be used for a different task. I take Claudio Guillén’s point that “Prefiero no decir, or in con otros, sin más contemplaciones, que la Literatura Comparada consiste en el examen de las literaturas desde un punto de vista internacional.… Switzerland. Es fundamental la contribución palpable a la historia, o al concepto de literatura, de unas clases y categorías que no son meramente nacionales” () [I prefer not to say, as others have, without much contemplation, that Comparative Literature consists of the examination of literatures from an international point of view.[…] e palpable contribution to history, or to the concept of literature, of classes and categories that are not merely national, is fundamental]. Indeed, this call to get beyond an equation of “literature” and “nation-state” explains why there can be a Swiss identity without a Swiss literature; much the same could be argued to be true of Canada. But I do not believe it is true of Ireland. e languages of Ire- land have co-existed in a literary context in a way that they really do not in Canada, or in Switzerland. An Irish Studies worthy of the name will recognize this basic linguistic fact and will adjust its disciplinary expecta- tions accordingly.

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White.indd 137 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM Acknowledgements

Unless otherwise noted, the translations in this essay are my own. Many thanks to Albert Braz, Michael Cronin, Jason King, and Mary Haslam for valuable feedback on earlier drafts.

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