Nova Southeastern University NSUWorks CAHSS Faculty Articles Faculty Scholarship 2001 Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs James E. Doan Nova Southeastern University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/shss_facarticles Part of the English Language and Literature Commons NSUWorks Citation Doan, J. E. (2001). Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs. Irish Studies Review, 9 (1), 81-86. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670880020032717 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at NSUWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in CAHSS Faculty Articles by an authorized administrator of NSUWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Irish Studies Review ISSN: 0967-0882 (Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20 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 Published online: 21 Jul 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 150 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cisr20 Irish Studies Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2001 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.