Джеймс Джойс.
https://buymeacoffee.com/valdeloir/mowowebowa

#ДжеймсДжойс #СвітоваЛітература #Модернізм #ЛітературнаІсторія #ІрландськаЛітература
#JamesJoyce #WorldLiterature #Modernism #LiteraryHistory #IrishLiterature

Flann O’Brien on translating Ulysses into Irish

I’ve been reading Flann O’Brien again, having picked up Hair of the Dogma (Paladin, 1989), a selection from his riotous Irish Times column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, which he wrote under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen. (Brian O’Nolan was the writer’s real name; he had many pseudonyms, of which Flann O’Brien is probably the best known.)

Because Myles excelled at satire and wore many masks, it is hard to tell sometimes just how serious or truthful he is being. But I believe this passage from his article ‘J.J. and Us’ (J.J. meaning James Joyce), about a plan to translate Ulysses into Irish, to be essentially on the level:

I suppose uncertainty is the handmaid of all grandiose literary projects. Many motives lay behind that 1951 decision of mine to translate Joyce’s Ulysses into Irish. If they won’t read it in English, I said to myself, bedamn but we’ll put them in the situation that they can boast they won’t read it in Irish aither.

It’s work, though. And black thoughts encloister me, like brooding buzzards. Is it worth being accurate if nobody will ever read the translation? What’s the Irish for Robert Emmet? And who will put Irish on this fearsome thing written by Joyce himself: Suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus, suil go cuin.

See the snares in this business, doom impending, heart-break?

Aither as a Hiberno-English rendition of either is something I’ll address in a future post. What Myles calls a ‘fearsome thing’ is already in Irish (that being the joke, I suppose), or a version of Irish without accent marks, and occurs in the Ithaca episode of Ulysses as follows:

What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts by guest to host and by host to guest?

By Stephen: suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus, suil go cuin (walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care).

By Bloom: Kifeloch, harimon rakatejch m’baad l’zamatejch (thy temple amid thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate).

Stephen’s verse is adapted from the Irish ballad ‘Siúil A Rún’ (‘Walk, my dear’, or ‘Go, my love’). It’s echoed in Finnegans Wake in the phrase ‘who goes cute goes siocur and shoos aroun’.

How far O’Nolan got in his efforts to translate Ulysses, I don’t know. He seems to have put his mind and pen to it to some extent, as the following text from the same ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ article suggests – though again it’s hard to know for sure how much it reflects reality and how much is dramatised for style and effect or even mischief. O’Brien scholars might know more about this abandoned project.

Recently a chap said to me: How’s it going? I told him it was going so-so. Slow of course. These things take time. . . . Uphill work when all decent Christians are in bed. The midnight oil. Drudgery of a special kind.

Told you. Bit off more than you could chaw. You and all that B. Comm. crowd is too smart.

No, no, no, I told him. The job COULD be done. There were, of course, difficulties – minute things of rhythm, luminance, impact. The acute difficulty in translation lay in the lucid conveyance of obscurity. Even the hidden thing was susceptible of diacrisis. Not in the same darkness were all dark things enwrapped.

His sceptical interlocutor tells him there’s no future in it, and that he’d be ‘a damn sight better off’ playing bagpipes in Bagenalstown. Myles presents him with a sample, reading first the text from Ulysses:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eye. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot . . .

And then his translation into Irish, which he reads ‘from my large manuscript’:

Mionshamhlíocht dosheachanta an tsofheicse; fiú an mhéid sin féin, intiniocht tré fháisnéis súl. Lorg an uile a bhfuil agam annso le sonnrú, scéag mara, leathach, an tuile i gcuaird, an bhróg úd mheirgeach . . .

My Irish is nowhere near good enough to judge the literary merits of this translation, but it sounds good to the ear, and I would tend to trust in O’Nolan’s competence: he was a native speaker who wrote often in Irish, and was an erudite polyglot receptive to puns and rarefied allusions alike.

I also read a very good illustrated biography of Flann, by Peters Costello and van de Kamp, which I’m told is out of print. There are a few excerpts in this string of tweets, and on my Tumblr quotes from Flann on literature being disgusting, on recasting classic characters in fiction, and, famously, on the thrill of waiting for the German verb.

Finally: anyone interested in the works of this uniquely talented and protean writer will find much to enjoy at the International Flann O’Brien Society, which publishes a terrific journal called The Parish Review, to which you can sign up by email.

#books #FlannOBrien #Ireland #Irish #IrishLanguage #irishLiterature #JamesJoyce #literature #MylesNaGopaleen #translation #Ulysses #writers #writing

Not many literature audiobooks that are sufficiently enthralling in 30 second walk-bys.

But Niall Williams' Faha books, "The History of the Rain", "This Is Happiness" and "Time of the Child" have this property for me.

#NiallWilliams #IrishLiterature #Bookstadon #Meaning #Narrative

Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland

From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):

let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”

I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.

Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?

Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)

Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)

Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.

How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:

a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.

An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.

This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.

[image source]

Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.

Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.

Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)

Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)

So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.

Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.

I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)

And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)

A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.

My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.

If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)

Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)

Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.

Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.

Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”

In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.

Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?

https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945

*

Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.

Updates:

Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):

“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]

The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”

Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.

At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”

I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:

#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing

𝙍𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬: "𝘼 𝙋𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘼𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝙖𝙨 𝙖 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙜 𝙈𝙖𝙣" 𝙗𝙮 𝙅𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙅𝙤𝙮𝙘𝙚 -

If we allow the novel to work on its own terms, and quit asking it to meet our expectations of a common coming-of-age story, we can find that the style itself reveals the experience we seek.

https://waywordsstudio.com/general/reviews/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/

#bookreviews #literature #books #bookworm #read #book #readreadread #jamesjoyce #fiction #autobiography #irishliterature #modernism #streamofconsciousness

I have compiled a list of Ulster Cycle materials, including prose narratives (mostly what is in the Ulidia 1994 list) but also dindshenchas articles, some poems, and items from Cóir Anmann. There were 75 titles on the original Ulidia list, and over 200 here, so I hope that it will help lead people to some of the lesser known stories, poems, and other bits and pieces. It's available on Knowledge Commons (a wonderful and non-profit alternative to academia.edu, you can follow them @hello). The titles all link directly to CODECS for information about editions, translations, etc. (Thank you to @codecs for being such a fantastic resource!) I hope people will find it useful. It's just a first version and there will certainly be many changes and additions needed in future, but I think it's in a state to be of some interest and use, at least. Corrections and suggestions are very welcome!

https://works.hcommons.org/records/bdb7a-50d66

#UlsterCycle #IrishLiterature #MedievalLiterature #MedievalIrishLiterature #CelticStudies