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Introduction
Children’s literature. Many of us who spend days dealing with books and
burning our midnight oil working on intricate papers normally forget to
turn to the basics of reading: those elemental and fascinating first pages
when the world was unknown. Parents should have a say on what children
read. Whether they take notice or not of what we say is a different matter
altogether. When you are a teenager it is perhaps a question of
independence, and even good taste, not to read what your parents
recommend. But still, done in an indirect way, a book carelessly left on a
table, a passing remark at lunch, can ignite the interest of the boy or
girl in a worthwhile read.
The monopoly of children’s literature in the English-speaking world, and
far beyond those limits, must be granted to the indisputable force of the
Harry Potter series. Since the publication of the first novel in 1997,
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J. K. Rowling has managed to
create a symbol of our times whose influence has been multiplied by the
cinema. Suddenly it seems as if Harry Potter has always been there, like
any Disney cartoon character (he is Warner’s, actually). Whatever may be
said against the Harry Potter phenomenon, it has promoted reading amongst
children and teenagers to unbelievable limits, and this is something not
to be taken lightly. J. K. Rowling tapped into the world of magic, which
is a fertile ground for the imagination, and despite its bland texture her
books also deal with death and incomprehension, with alienation and
segregation in the muggle world, something kids may empathize with.
It is true what American short story writer Dave Eggers says, we tend to
dismiss the enjoyment and capacity of today’s children for literature,
turning to stale phrases like “children do not read today as we used to”
or “books are being destroyed by a digital conspiracy”. Children do
respond positively to good books, sometimes with more interest than
adults, which is why I believe attractive material should be provided to
them.
If someone is interested in finding an alternative to Harry Potter,
perhaps you would like to make the acquaintance of Artemis Fowl. Artemis,
sometimes dubbed as the dark side of Harry Potter, is the creation of
Irish writer Eoin Colfer. He was born in Wexford, the birthplace of the
most prodigious craftsman of English writing in Ireland today, John
Banville, and was a primary school teacher (he was also the son of
teachers: children simply had to come up in his books). The Artemis Fowl
series shares with Harry Potter the existence of a parallel universe of
fantasy. In the stories created by Colfer, it is a whole civilization of
fairies who live in the centre of the earth, unknown to the humans who
inhabit the surface. Artemis, a child prodigy who is keen on recovering
his family fortune, has discovered their existence and strives to get the
gold from the magic creatures.
There is another important difference between Harry Potter and Artemis
Fowl. The latter is the son of an Irish mafioso and his activities
are known to be legally dubious. Artemis is cool, arrogant and deftly uses
new technologies. He is accompanied by Butler, his bodyguard, who is
heavily armed. Another interesting feature of the books is that Colfer
introduces the rhythm and tension of detective thrillers into the realm of
magic. Holly Short, an elf who is the first female admitted to the special
police force of the fairies, the Lower Elements Police (yes, the LEPrecon),
owes much of her style and jargon to the American cop series we have seen
on TV hundreds of times. Artemis and Holly will be the point of connection
between both worlds and their adventures are hectic and nerve racking.
Although Artemis becomes more humane as the series progresses, Colfer
avoids presenting the world of adults in a decaffeinated way: the picture
of Artemis’s mother, a neurotic woman confined to her bed, who hears
voices and suffers from lapses of memory, is quite disturbing.
Additionally, as regards the protagonist’s
distinctive qualities, he is Irish, and Colfer does not offer any
resistance to interiorize some stereotypes of Ireland in his books, as the
following examples prove: “Por fortuna, el resto del mundo daba por
sentado que los irlandeses estaban todos chiflados, una teoría que los
propios irlandeses no hacían nada por rebatir” / “Pero a pesar de todo
eso, si existía una raza por la cual las Criaturas sentían cierta
afinidad, esa era la irlandesa (…) si las Criaturas estaban en verdad
emparentadas con los humanos, tal como sostenía otra teoría, lo más
probable es que hubiese sido en la isla Esmeralda donde había comenzado su
historia” (Artemis Fowl, 2001: 79).
Nevertheless it has also to be said that Fowl’s ultra cool personality,
surrounded by high tech gadgetry in his Dublin mansion and with CNN
permanently switched on in his study, offers a modern image of a young
Irish lad of our times that offsets any clichés about the Irish that the
author may introduce elsewhere. Five of the six Artemis Fowl novels that
Colfer has written so far have been translated into Spanish. All of them,
from Artemis Fowl (2001) to Artemis Fowl V- La cuenta atrás
(2007) are published by Montena and translated by Ana Alcaina.
The year 2008 also saw the publication of a book for children set in
Ireland written by a Spanish author, something quite unusual. Laura
Andújar Lorca’s first novel, El trébol de Kinsale (Madrid: Anaya,
2007) concerns the adventures of a young Spanish woman who, before
starting her degree in Filología Inglesa, spends the summer
holidays working at a B&B in Kinsale in order to improve her English and
relax after her University entrance exams. Inevitably she will meet a
handsome young Irishman, and will discover the mysterious disappearance of
her landlady’s husband. Despite a somewhat unsatisfying end, it is a good
book for teenagers, the boiling concoction of feelings and emotions
typical of that age is well treated and the plot is intriguing, having at
its centre a clover-shaped jewel which was taken to Spain after the battle
of Kinsale in 1602. It presents a picturesque, mild, humorous and
sympathetic view of Ireland: “Estos irlandeses están como cabras” (19),
says the owner of the B&B at one point. The protagonist also does a bit of
travelling, so it can be a nice introduction to Ireland for young readers.
Who knows, when they grow up they might eagerly write the kind of books
that are presented below.
PS. — Irish topics appear in the most unexpected places, which is always a
symbol of the dynamic nature of Irish literature. Two highly commendable
articles, by David Clark and Carmen M. Fernández Rodríguez, which connect
Irish and Australian literature, were published in the monograph of the
journal Antípodas (2008), which aptly bears the title Australia
and Galicia: Defeating the Tyranny of Distance. But other compelling
works were published last year: Pilar Villar-Argáiz’s The Poetry of
Eavan Boland. A Postcolonial Reading (Dublin: Maunsel and Company) is
an accomplished book; Nórdica Libros completed its project of editing all
of Flann O’Brien’s forgotten fictions with La boca pobre, the
publishing house Sexto Piso produced an amusing booklet with Jonathan
Swift’s Instrucciones a los sirvientes, Brendan Behan’s Mi Nueva
York was published by Marbot, and John Banville’s Imágenes de Praga
by Herce. So many things, so very many things.
Alberro, Manuel (ed. and trans).
2007. Lebor Gabála. Gijón: Trea. ISBN: 978-84-9704-329-8.
Leabhar Gabhála
or The Book of the Invasions has been translated for the first
time into Spanish and this by itself is a major event, an outstanding
circumstance in the field of Irish publications. It is sad to remark
that it has not attracted the attention it deserves.
The book is a medieval compilation written by monks in the 12th
century which tells the story of the different groups of people who
arrived on the Irish shores in ancient times. It is based on myth and
legends passed from generation to generation, but as editor and translator
Manuel Alberro says in the introduction, one should not underestimate the
importance of mythology in understanding the beliefs of a nation: “Los
mitos son una forma de formular explicaciones válidas, pero no
necesariamente realistas, de condiciones humanas fundamentales” (10). The
editor thus vindicates the power of legends to explain what history cannot
really handle: the realm of fantasy and dream, the universe of images and
visions which ruled the lives of mankind in times which have fallen into
oblivion. Manuel Alberro is probably right when he claims in the
introduction that no other nation in the world can compare with Ireland as
to the interest displayed by scholars and writers in the recovery of old
tales and folklore, and he mentions the tradition of the seanchaí, the
archives of the Irish Folklore Commission, and the impulse given by W. B.
Yeats to the recovery of old legends. The introduction to the actual
translation itself is complete and instructive, informing on the origins
of Celtic mythology, its relation to similar sources of ancient wisdom in
Wales or in continental Europe, and on the four main cycles of the Irish
Celtic sagas, The Book of the Invasions belonging to the first one.
There is also precise information on the several manuscripts in which the
Lebor Gabála can be found.
The chronicle itself tells the story of the five groups of invaders of
Ireland in ancient times: Cessair, Partholon, Nemed, Fir Bolg and Tuatha
Dé Danánn, which arrived in Ireland before the last and definite wave –
the Gaels or Milesians, the sons of Mil – who completely conquered the
island and established themselves there from the coast of present-day
Galicia. The narration of the invasions reproduces in Spanish the style of
ancient annals, with long genealogical lists that reach back to Noah. It
is a tale strewn with primary instincts, sins committed fighting for the
land, and there are echoes of the Ancient Scriptures and even of the
journeys of Odysseus. The story is engaging in several parts, particularly
in everything connected with the voyages of ships loaded with warriors,
travelling from distant lands such as Greece, Scythia, Egypt or Spain,
towers that are built and later destroyed, epidemics that kill invaders,
battles that are won and later lost. According to the Lebor Gabála
the first invasion was commanded by Cesair, daughter of Noah, the first
woman who attempted the conquest of Ireland “forty days before the Flood”,
in an expedition with 50 women and 3 men (one of the males, the text
reads, died from “the excess of women”).
The book provides a fascinating account of an evil race, the Fomorians, a
caste of half-monsters, always lurking in the margins who engage in
battles with the successive groups of invaders, until they are finally
defeated by the Tuatha Dé Danánn. As is usual in other medieval
manuscripts, the scribes introduced references to Christianity in what is
basically an account of heathen myths.
The episode concerning the Milesians and their definitive conquest of
Ireland demonstrates the existing connections between the northwest corner
of the Iberian peninsula and the Celtic tribes of the North Atlantic
regions. From the town of Brigantia, Ith, the son of Breoghan saw a
solitary island in the mist, and impelled his tribe to travel there.
Subsequent battles are narrated in detail and the presence of Aimirgin,
the Milesians’ druid, adds a prophetic tone to the narration. The book
ends with a list of notes provided by the editor which connect the legends
in the book with proper names, festivities and geographic locations of
today’s Ireland. Lebor Gabála, in short, is a valuable and
necessary contribution to Celtic mythology and Irish legends for Spanish
scholars.
Altuna, Asier and Cristina Andreu (eds.). 2007.
Re-Writing Boundaries. Critical Approaches in Irish Studies.
Barcelona: PPU. ISBN: 978-84-477-0996-0
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The book of proceedings of the V International Conference of the
Spanish Association of Irish Studies, held at the Universitat Rovira
i Virgili in Tarragona in May 2005, has become, thanks to the
efforts of Asier Altuna and Cristina Andreu, a varied and
well-informed collection of articles on Irish studies. It is
enjoyable and thoroughly academic at the same time.
The general topic of the Tarragona conference was “Re-writing
Boundaries”, which is an adequate theme for a conference on Ireland.
Northern Ireland, as will be seen, has an important presence in many
of the articles. The book opens with an excellent paper by Christine
St. Peter on the work of three contemporary Irish writers, Éilis Ní
Dhuibhne, Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright, whose ambitions to travel
inside and outside Ireland testify to the international quality of
Irish writing today. New maps are being drawn by these authors in
their own way, transgressing boundaries that are not only physical,
but mental as well. Tóibín’s travelogue, A Walk Along the Irish
Border (1990, 1987) is given a full and complete account, set
together with the narratives by Enright and Dhuibhne in its adequate
context: “They [the young people of Ireland] ran away because the
old maps were suffocating and they needed to make new ones,
experimenting with their bodies in often dangerous but sometimes
liberating ways” (24).
Novels which deal with the Troubles in Northern Ireland have an
ample representation in Re-writing Boundaries. Esther Aliaga
Rodrigo writes about Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle
(1989), a pessimistic narrative about the effects that place can
exert upon the individual. Belfast, as it appears in other similar
novels, will represent the territory of violence where no ambivalent
attitudes are possible. Hatred and guilt will be the consequences of
a malignant spirit spawned by the condemned geography of the city.
The Troubles are also a threatening presence in Jennifer Johnston’s
The Gingerbread Woman (2000), a novel that is the subject of
an article by María Losada and Bendición Olivares. As Jennifer
Johnston once said, “We are all burdened by the past, by our own
history, by our culture (…) for all sorts of historical reasons we
handle the past very badly, and maybe in the next millennium (…) we
will have learned”. Perhaps this is the reason why Losada and
Olivares stress the aspects of Johnston’s novel that point towards
regeneration and the therapeutic power of literature.
Another writer who was bound to appear in a book dealing with
boundaries is Brian Moore. Although he spent most of his life in
Canada and in the US, he evocatively remembered the streets of
Belfast in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) or in
the thriller belonging to his last period Lies of Silence
(1990). Andrés Palacios Pablos analyzes the exhaustive political
radiography of the city that Moore sketches in this novel. “The
Irish border”, writes Palacios, “rarely prevents the territory from
making an enormous impression on its inhabitants, often caught up
between rejection and adherence, thus creating a new psychological
frontier, a new dilemma added to their specific identity” (71).
In dealing with the territory of violence in Northern Ireland the
most gripping and sharpest fiction that has probably been written on
sectarian murders could not be far away. Eoin McNamee’s
Resurrection Man (1994) is the main topic in two central
articles of the book: Stephanie Schwerter relates McNamee’s fiction
to Daniel Mornin’s All Our Fault (1996) and Glenn Patterson’s
That Which Was (2004). Karen Yanuba Lezama, on her part,
connects the story of Victor Kelly with Bernard Mac Laverty’s novel
Cal
(1983). While Schwerter focuses on Belfast’s topography of division
in her selected versions of the city, Karen Yanuba stresses the
medical, mostly pathological dimension of the murderers, the
appalling human drama depicted in the novels under study. Again, the
tragedy provoked by the conflict, particularly in the story of Cal,
prevents any escape from the boundaries of violence. In the case of
Victor Kelly’s story McNamee points to the dangers involved in
overstepping physical and psychological landmarks.
Not all the protagonists of the fictions concerned with The Troubles
are male. Laura Filardo and Ana María Iglesias conduct an analysis
of three short stories by Brenda Murphy, who was personally involved
in Republican activism during the late 1970s. Using the tools of
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) Filardo and Iglesias establish the
links between the conscience of the protagonist in Murphy’s stories,
a female republican prisoner, and the wider power relationships in
this highly politicised environment.
Apart from the question of Northern Ireland, other rich and
up-to-date articles are on offer in the selection made by Altuna and
Andreu. Aída Rosende Pérez writes about recent artistic projects in
Ireland made by women artists who react in various ways against the
silences imposed on the female body. Eibhear Walshe writes an
intelligent article on two fine novels published in 2004, Colm
Tóibín’s The Master and Emma Donoghue’s Lifemask. Of
the two, Tóibín’s book has grown in stature with the passing of
time, so it is very adequate to examine Walshe’s article (probably
one of the first critical assessments made on this novel) which
explores past discourses of sexual repression.
María José Carrera immerses herself in the complex territory of
Samuel Beckett’s biography (or “autography”, as Porter Abbott
suggests) as regards to a volatile and fragile piece of writing of
Beckett’s middle period as section XI of Texts for Nothing
(1950-51). In her discussion of this text, Carrera establishes
connections with eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley,
Dante’s Divina Commedia and Beckett’s own film script of
1963.
What is particularly interesting, I feel, in a volume of essays, is
the research done on neglected works, the display of hidden
connections, the discovery of unknown documents. Here Jordi Lamarca
Margalef reveals the story of the “Cartas Irlandesas” that
politician José María Lizana published in El Noticiero Bilbaíno
between April 1880 and October 1881. At a moment when the Basque
people were concerned about the suppression of their “fueros”, José
María Lizana looked towards Ireland in an attempt to explain to the
readers of the newspaper the situation in Ireland as regards Home
Rule. It is a pity that no details on Lizana’s connection with
Ireland are provided by the author of this revealing article.
Likewise, María Teresa Calderón Quindós examines a poem that Seamus
Heaney wrote for Amnesty International in 1985, “From the Republic
of Conscience”.
The book is completed by other solid and specialist articles by Juan
Francisco Elices Agudo, Pilar Villar Argáiz, Constanza del Río
Álvaro, Mª Yolanda Fernández Suárez, Asier Altuna and Carolina
Amador Moreno, among others contributors.
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Behan, Brendan. 2008. Delincuente juvenil. Sonia Fernández
Ordás (trans).
Coruña: Ediciones del Viento. ISBN: 978-84-96964-35-8.
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Brendan Behan’s most famous novel, Borstal Boy, has at last
been translated into Spanish, fifty years after it was first
published. It was high time somebody carried out the project of making
a Spanish version of this fascinating autobiographical book, and the
merit should go to Ediciones del Viento, a Galician press that is
adamant in recovering forgotten classics in the English language,
including Los días de Birmania, by George Orwell, or Viaje a
una guerra, by C. Isherwood and W.H. Auden.
Behan was arrested in Liverpool in 1939 for carrying explosives into
England. He was a member of the IRA and that would only be the first
of a series of different offences for which he was to be sent to
prison. Borstal Boy is an account of his temporary stay in
prison waiting for trial and his subsequent sentence to three years’
borstal detention. He could not be sent to jail for a longer sentence
as he was not yet 17.
What stands out in the narration of his period of detention is,
undoubtedly, the protagonist’s narrative voice, the fluent current of
memories from a young conscience. Behan tells everything from the
point of view of a 16-year-old who is receptive to the warmth of
friendship, idealistic, naive, resentful of the screws or jailers who
treat him badly (curiously enough, those of his own persuasion: “Los
celadores católicos eran los peores.
Y los católicos
irlandeses, los peores de los peores”, 81), almost grateful to those
who are kind.
His happiness when he is given a particularly good meal, or when he is
allowed to read a good book, or simply when he is warm in his cell
makes the reader tune in with a flow of empathy towards the
protagonist.
He is shown to be a truly convinced and fanatical member of the IRA,
who has learnt by heart from an early age, and without questioning,
the creed of Irish Nationalism, which enables him to deliver a
political speech to the judge who sends him to borstal. But at the
same time he can’t help being friends with all kinds of people,
regardless of their nationality: “It seemed a bit disloyal to me that
I should prefer to be with boys from English cities than with my own
countrymen and comrades from Ireland’s hills and glens”/“Me parecía un
poco desleal querer estar con chicos de ciudades inglesas antes que
con mis propios paisanos y camaradas de las montañas y los valles de
Irlanda” (193).
He learns to be tough in prison, to fend for himself and to get in
trouble only when it is absolutely necessary. He tells with candour
that he reads books avidly and finds comfort in the rituals of the
Catholic Mass.
Reading Borstal Boy in Spanish makes one reflect on the
impossibility of translation in general. There is nothing particularly
wrong with this much needed version. In Sonia Fernández Ordás’s text
the reading is fluent and easy (with occasional mistakes: it hurts
the eye to read a reference to “W.B. Yates” on page 42). I do not know
if there is any other option for the title than Delincuente juvenil,
although this one leaves to one side the idea of confinement and
reclusion associated with borstal or “correccional de menores”.
Something similar happens with the slang, swear words and the peculiar
accents of the prisoners that appear in the novel. It is simply not
possible to convey the expressive force and wit of many expressions.
The phrase “I’m after using it” must be “acabo de usarlo”, but it
misses all the colour of Hiberno-English. “Fugh off” is not simply “jódete”,
there is a lilt and a grimace that goes with that expletive, but there
is no possible way of putting it in a different form.
Fernández Ordás gives an updated and modern version of the dialogues
in colloquial Spanish, most of the time presenting a more literal
interpretation when in the original the narrator employs a euphemism
or an idiom. The interested readers can check for themselves how the
expressions “pull your wire” (p. 133 in the translation) or “not worth
a light” (p. 211) are turned into Spanish to see this particular
point. In any case, the optimism of Behan’s personality shines through
in the Spanish translation as it probably would in any language. The
small linguistic adjustments do not distract readers from the many
rewards of reading this book.
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Carrera, María José, Anunciación Carrera, Enrique Cámara and Celsa
Dapía (eds.). 2008.
The Irish Knot.
Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. ISBN: 978-84-8448-455-4.
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No less than 37 articles, plus an introduction on the conceptual image
of the Celtic Knot, are presented in this book of proceedings of the
VI International AEDEI Conference, which took place at the University
of Valladolid in May 2006. It was a fruitful academic gathering and
naturally it was bound to produce a complete and exhaustive volume
which, in many ways, is a state-of-the-art book on Irish studies
today. The editors have taken pains to include a wide selection of
papers presented at Valladolid and as is common in any AEDEI
conference, the reader will find articles on the Irish economy,
politics, history, film, media, etc. as well as a significant number
of articles on literary criticism.
The Irish Knot
is comprised of seven sections, but instead of classifying the papers
according to their discipline (linguistics, history, literature, etc.)
the editors have gathered the different groups of articles around an
idea expressed in the heading, so that in each chapter we can find
articles on various topics but subtly joined together. It is a daring
approach and the editors must be credited for the original
distribution of the contents. The arrangement may give the initial
impression of disorder, but as they make clear in the introduction,
the editors want to reflect on the influence of the Celtic Knot, that
evocative symbol of interwoven lines whose meanings are part of an
ever-evolving flux. The arrangement of the essays is made “in
imitation of Irish plaitwork, of its tying and untying, to allow for
the freest and most abundant associations” (19). The titles of the
headings, taken from the lexical field of manuscript culture, are also
an indication of the editors’ intention not to get trapped by rigid
systems of thought, to liberate ideas and to give pre-eminence to the
imagination in their view of Irish culture. “Historiated Capitals”,
“Illuminations”, “Palimpsests”, “Matrix Lingua” are some of the
headings of the different sections. Under the title of “Variance”
(Chapter 5), for example, we can find an article on the influence on
recent literature due to the influx of immigrants into Ireland, an
analysis on the dichotomy rural Gaeltacht/urban Ireland in Éilís Ní
Dhuibnne’s The Dancers Dancing, a Lacanian approach to James
Joyce’s “The Dead” and two articles on the Ulster-Scots contribution
to cultural hybridity in Northern Ireland. “Variance” refers to the
multiplicity of variations of a normally absent original, as in
medieval manuscripts. It therefore becomes an appropriate title for a
section dealing with multiple identities in Irish society.
All the articles collected in this publication really deserve a
comment: in the first piece we find a survey of Irish economy in the
20th century by an economist, John Bradley, who is
sympathetic to the workings of the imagination. It is worth reading.
His reader-friendly approach to economic matters is really welcome.
Bradley explains that both failures and successes in Irish economy
depend on long-term policies made by those in positions of influence,
and insists on the importance of conceptual frameworks that underpin
policy actions.
Alfred Markey deals with the 90th anniversary of the 1916
Rising, which had taken place in 2006, a short time before the
conference. At the beginning of that year the President, Mary McAleese,
had delivered a speech which provoked a heated debate in Irish
cultural circles on the nature of the celebration itself. Each
anniversary of the Rising in recent decades had been somewhat of an
assessment of the current thinking which prevailed at the time, and in
2006 the demonstrative and effusive celebrations in the streets of
Dublin indicated that the Revisionists’ discourse was at a low ebb.
Alfred Markey gives voice to everyone in the debate and exposes each
point of view with ironic detachment. He also points out the most
striking paradox related to the celebrations: the more those inspired
by 1916 move away from its example, the more the Rising is honoured.
David Clark writes wisely on a much neglected genre, the Irish
historical novel, and examines the problems raised by its relation to
“true”, historical events. He takes up James Cahalan’s argument that
Irish historical narrative should deal with political events that the
authors themselves did not personally experience, and the problems
that this definition conveys.
Rod Stoneman, who was Chief Executive of the Irish Film Board in the
1990s, in an interesting article, tells of his period as the head of
this institution, as well as the successes and failures of Irish
cinema. He believes that the Irish Film Board had to promote those
projects which represented the diversity of Irish society. It was a
period of dynamic change in the economy and it triggered a
renegotiation of both gender and class structures. In his opinion, the
policies of the Board had to move away from inauthentic and
stereotyped images of Ireland and to support initiatives which grew
from contemporary experience. Although plenty of work is being done
nowadays in this direction, his general view is pessimistic: “But
overall film work that demands a more active spectator is currently
confined to the thin cultural margins of society” (95), he writes.
Rosa González Casademont writes on contemporary Irish cinema too, and
focuses her contribution on a number of documentary and feature films
which take up painful events and personal stories from Ireland’s
recent past. González Casademont explores the revisionist impulse in
contemporary Irish cinema, including a series of films from Northern
Ireland which have revisited the Troubles as a first step towards
reconciliation. She reveals the shortcomings of contemporary Irish
cinema, how financial or health scandals have not found an echo on the
big screen, or how recent films on traumatic events related to the
Catholic Church have not made a proper analysis of the conditions that
allowed those events to take place. For Rosa González, a documentary
such as The Rocky Road to Dublin (1968) provides much more
serious criticism on the dark aspects of Irish society than many more
recent films.
With the passing of time, more and more articles in recent volumes of
Irish Studies examine the consequences of the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
The two contributions in The Irish Knot dealing with
post-agreement Northern Ireland do so in a competent and efficient
way. Chris Gilligan writes on the use of images of children in the
photographic portrayals of the peace process. At the outset Gilligan
notes that images of children are used in newspaper articles and front
covers of books to transmit the concepts of hope, innocence and
vulnerability. These are certainly adequate and well-accepted ideas
that reflect the hopes and fears that many people feel regarding the
Peace Process. Gilligan goes further in his interpretation of the
pictures and reveals that in many cases there is an essential fiction
in the production of images: these photographs of children are seldom
natural, nor are they the product of a casual glance. There is
normally a preconceived intention behind them as well as the work in
setting up the shot before the photos are taken. Gilligan insists on
analysing the “interpretative framework” that surrounds the images,
including the ideological position of the viewer, and urges us to be
critical and alert to any attempt towards manipulation. Meaning is not
inherent in the images, but arises from our relationship with them.
Laura Filardo, on her part, applies tools from the area of Cognitive
Linguistics to interpret the words of the main political leaders of
Northern Ireland after the signing of the Belfast Agreement. She draws
heavily on the Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), devised by Jonathan
Charteris-Black, to unearth the conceptual metaphors behind the
speeches of political leaders Gerry Adams (SF), John Hume (SDLP),
David Trimble (UUP) and Ian Paisley (DUP). The article provides an
exercise in searching for clarity behind the muddled political
discourse. Laura Filardo sheds light on the ambiguity used by
politicians and the way they employ a metaphor-loaded language to
legitimise their position and delegitimise that of their adversaries’.
It is revealing to learn who makes more use of metaphors in their
speeches.
In a book on Irish culture such as this, it is not surprising that a
number of authors receive special attention, and in The Irish Knot
there are some relevant contributions on Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats and
Flann O’Brien, but I would like to make a final comment on an erudite
piece on Samuel Beckett by David Pattie, from the University of
Chester. Pattie starts off with a reflection on the inner voice heard
by many Beckettian characters, a voice that does not help to clarify
anything in the narrative. The characters usually end up mirroring the
ramblings of the voice while they confront the ruins of a broken
world. It is no wonder that the search for silence becomes a constant
longing in all Beckettian texts: “Quietism has always exercised a
compelling hold over the Beckett protagonist from Belacqua on” (162).
Beckett’s reaction to a ruined world is compared by Pattie to Walter
Benjamin’s writings which deal with a new paradigm for art after the 1st
World War. Benjamin famously defined modern urban life as a series of
shock experiences and he theorised on the need of the artist to
develop a protective coating that could filter out the impact of city
life. Pattie conducts a comparative analysis of Benjamin’s critical
writings in order to explore how Beckett delved even further,
presenting a world in which the individual is so shocked by experience
that he only envisages complete decay, which would explain the
dream-like quality of many of his texts. With articles like this,
The Irish Knot pays readers the compliment of some fine
interpretations of the work of relevant writers.
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O’Flaherty, Liam. 2007. El delator. Gabriela Bustelo
(trans).
Barcelona: Libros del Asteroide. ISBN: 978-84-935448-8-1.
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In recent years some independent publishing houses are leading the way
in the publication of Irish authors in Spain. While major companies
show little interest, as it is not considered profitable enough, these
small presses are offering emblematic books of Irish literature to
readers, minor classics such as The Informer (1925) by Liam
O’Flaherty, but also all the lesser-known novels by Flann O’Brien (a
commendable work initiated by Nórdica Libros) or Brendan Behan’s
autobiographical novel Borstal Boy (1958), published by
Ediciones del Viento (see above). Editorial Alfama, from Málaga, will
be soon publishing Aidan Higgins’s fine novel Langrishe, Go Down
(1966) (Langrishe. El declive) another milestone of
contemporary Irish literature that remained to be translated into
Spanish, and which will see the light thanks to the determination of
imaginative editor Antonio García Maldonado. The main drawback is that
these presses cannot normally afford to print large quantities and
they quickly sell out. In any case, it would not be adventurous to say
that thanks to these initiatives a growing interest in Irish authors
is taking place in Spain.
There had been some previous translations of The Informer into
Spanish, but an updated version was necessary. Many of us first knew
of the existence of this novel thanks to the mesmerising film
adaptation by John Ford in 1935, a back and white masterpiece in which
the subtle use of light seemed to accuse Gypo Nolan of his felony. The
novel should be seen in the context of the historical and political
climate when it was published, when authors like O’Flaherty made their
heroes the testimony of disenchantment with the recently created Free
State.
It is difficult to understand why the name of the prologuist, Antonio
Rivero Taravillo, who writes a witty and well-informed introduction,
appears alone on the front page, without any mention of the person
responsible for this translation, novelist Gabriela Bustelo, whose
name is found in the inner pages. Gabriela Bustelo tackles the text
with energy and gusto, and she is able to offer quite a few exciting
paragraphs. It is always difficult to translate colloquial language,
particularly slang belonging to Hiberno-English, and Bustelo
consistently maintains an adequate register of vulgar Spanish in the
transcription of the characters’ speech. In this new version the
different men that take part in the action sometimes seem to speak “castizo”,
in the style of the idealized talk of working-class youths from
Madrid, but the threatening atmosphere of O’Flaherty’s novel is
perfectly rendered: down-trodden individuals from neglected
neighbourhoods, shabby streets, and broken people.
The novel has a basic structure, unilinear and with hardly any
digressions, which makes it fast-paced and powerful. The figure of
Gypo Nolan, the brute giant, member of a revolutionary organization
who informs on a friend, is a character who deserves to be on the list
of great archetypes of world literature.
The way he
is presented, driven by impulse, his incapability of producing a
coherent alibi or how he squanders the reward money makes this a
gripping story of treason, guilt and remorse: “Desde el instante
infernal en que había abierto de una patada la puerta de la comisaría
de policía, su vida entera se había sumergido en una impenetrable nube
negra de la que no parecía poder escapar” (83).
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Palacios González, Manuela and Helena González Fernández (eds.). 2008.
Palabras extremas: Escritoras gallegas e irlandesas de hoy.
Coruña: Netbiblo.
ISBN: 978-84-9745-198-7.
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Palabras extremas,
the title being taken from a poem by Ana Romaní, is a comparative
study of contemporary Galician and Irish women poets, or more
precisely, a volume of articles in which the visions presented by both
literatures are juxtaposed, set one next to the other, revealing
threads of connection and divergences. The book is, in part, the
result of a research project, “Poesía y género: Poetas irlandesas y
gallegas contemporáneas” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education
(most of the members of the research group are contributors to the
volume) and it is published as part of the Irish Studies Series,
already its seventh volume, by Netbiblo and the University Institute
of Research in Irish Studies, dependent on the University of A Coruña.
In the introduction, written by Manuela Palacios and Helena González,
the object of study is placed in its context: from the historical
connections of both lands, Ireland and Galicia, to the outstanding
participation of women from both literary traditions in the last
decades. There is a clear interest on the part of the editors in going
beyond blurred definitions of their subject matter and in this sense
the book offers a fair account of what has been happening in Galician
and Irish writing with regard to women, such as the immersion made by
Irish women poets in their physical and emotional experiences,
resulting in the corporeal quality of many recent poems, or the
cultural activism of Galician women poets, contributing to a
redefinition of themselves in a specific social frame: “Son años de
democracia bajo un gobierno gallego conservador que quiere momificar
lo gallego como folklore y en este contexto la poesía de autoría
femenina, que se multiplica en varias tendencias estéticas e
ideológicas, representa un camino de normalización, renovación y
modernización” (xxiv).
The book’s structure serves the interested reader extremely well: it
consists of two parts, the first being devoted to academic essays and
the second offering a more flexible approach, with creative essays and
interviews. Furthermore, the six chapters of criticism are presented
in an attractive form, complementing each other in many ways. In the
first one, María Xesús Nogueira writes about landscape in Galician
female poetry, while in the second one Manuela Palacios delves into
the presence of nature in Irish women poets. Similarly, chapter five,
written by María Xesús Lama, is concerned with the rewriting of myths
by Galician women poets, while in the following chapter Luz Mar
González Arias connects Irish poetry with classic Greek archetypes. In
the chapters dealing with Galician writing, Rosalía de Castro, the
founding figure of Galician poetry, is frequently mentioned, as well
as how contemporary women have handled her legacy.
In her article María Xesús Nogueira explains the metaphors hidden in
landscape as presented by Galician poets. Rural views are still
markers of identity but women poets draw a picture of life in the
country that is far from idealized. The sea, informs Nogueira, is
frequently related to intimate experiences by women writers and it is
interesting to know that many of them took part in collective
publications in response to the infamous sinking of the oil tanker
Prestige in November 2002 and its subsequent ecologic disaster on
Galician shores.
Manuela Palacios examines the conceptualization of nature by Irish
women poets from an ecofeminist perspective. She convincingly
persuades the reader that the poetic tradition in Ireland has been
blind to the real conditions of women regarding pain, labour, anguish
and emigration. Without imposing a homogeneous scheme on her topic,
she discusses the contradictory feelings towards nature in the poetry
of Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.
In the third chapter Helena González studies the peculiar use of
language characteristic of what she calls the “escritura violeta” or
literature influenced by feminist theories. Poetry in Galicia in
recent times, she claims, has become a rich and fertile ground for
experimentation. Emblematic poets such as Chus Pato, Xela Arias, María
do Cebreiro or Emma Conceiro have acted against conventional rhythm
and versification, constructing hybrid artefacts which break the
boundaries between genres.
Laura Lojo, in the fourth chapter, successfully explains a varied
range of modes of writing in a non-reductive way. Her topic is the
female body in contemporary Irish poetry and she offers a wide
panoramic view of the different subjectivities that have explored this
theme. There has indeed been a reaction against an idealized woman
being the poetic muse of the male writer who identified her with a
subjected nation; women poets have superseded such views with complex
incursions around the body: sexuality, the rewriting of maternity, the
relationship between mothers and daughters or biological processes
such as menstruation.
In the fifth chapter María Xesús Lama pays attention to the presence
of myths in Galician poetry. Luz Pozo, she explains, grounds some of
the poems in her book As arpas de Iwerddon (2004) on legends
connected to The Book of the Invasions or Leabhar
Gabhála (see above), with poems dedicated to Breogan, Ith or
Amirgin, reinforcing her longing for a union with Ireland, “a terra
segregada de nós como unha xesta”.
Luz Mar González Arias, in the last chapter of the first part, reveals
that in contemporary Irish poetry women writers recover female
classical figures: Penelope, Cassandra, Helen of Troy, Medusa,
Philomela… in a liberating attempt to express their multifaceted
gender identities.
The second part of the volume begins with an essay by poet and
academic María do Cebreiro which presents an insider’s view of the
Galician world of letters. In her view, Galician poetry during the
1990s presented the female body in an accommodated way, not being
belligerent enough, and María do Cebreiro admits that her opinions on
this matter have created controversy with other women poets. Irish
artist Anne le Marquand Hartigan explains her reasons for writing in a
splendid essay translated into Spanish by Manuela Palacios. She writes
about the joys of writing, the artist’s need for support, the activity
of literature as an act of love and liberation. In a text interwoven
with her own poems she speaks of Ireland as a place where words are
important, respected, taken care of.
The book ends with four short talks with some relevant women poets
from both shores. María Xesús Nogueira speaks with Chus Pato and Ana
Romaní.
Luz Mar González
Arias interviews Mary O’Donnell and Delia de Fréine.
Do read these interviews; they contain spirited comments and deal with
important issues concerning contemporary poetry.
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