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. | White 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 Irish Literature | White.indd 117 2/24/2008, 3:58 PM Creating disciplines that move beyond this centralization of the cul- tural 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).