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Irish
Poetry and Anglo-Irish
Paul
Volsik (Université Paris 7)
Briefly, and by way of introduction a few clarifications are perhaps necessary.
By Irish poetry is here meant twentieth century Irish poetry written in English,
and by Anglo-Irish is meant those dialects of English that are spoken in
Ireland, North and South – generally known by linguists as Hiberno-English,
But the discussion is envisaged as part of a more general issue – the
problem of "dialect poetry" – in other words any poetry that does not
systematically use Standard English as its major linguistic resource, an
area which needs, one feels, much more cross-genre and historical study.
It has been calculated that only 3-5% of the population of the British Isles
uses Standard English (and Received Pronunciation) in all circumstances.
Yet Standard English dominates written twentieth century canonical poetry.
If the voice of the poet were simply the voice of the poet one would expect
a greater incidence of poetry using non-Standard dialects than is actually
the case – particularly in post-colonial contexts like Ireland, where
the political pressure not to use what is perceived as the language of the
conqueror is great and where there has been a great deal of debate about
the specificity of Irish poetry, what justifies its autonomy, wherein lies
its Irishness – a general if sometimes diffuse desire, in Douglas Hyde's
words. to "de-Anglicize" the culture.
But it is important to remember that analogous problems of dialect occur
on mainland Great Britain (crossed, as always, by problems of class) –
as we shall show in the case of the English poet William Barnes. And the
Irish experience is interestingly different from that of, for example, the
Caribbean where poets have recently been radically experimental in their
use of creoles, pidgins and dialects, Nevertheless Hiberno-English is a useful
test case in that there has been considerable – though incomplete –
study of its grammar, lexicon, and phonetics.
I will proceed as follows: I will first briefly mention a few characteristics
of dialects generally and Hiberno-English more particularly. I will then
look at three poets and poems: William Barnes, the Dorset poet whom I take
as a representative of 19th century, late-
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Romantic use of dialect; then J.M. Synge, and then finally Patrick Kavanagh.
We will look in each case at one aspect of their respective uses of dialect:
phonetics with Barnes, syntax with Synge and lexis with Kavanagh.
Hiberno-English, then, is a dialect of English. The word dialect (itself
difficult to define in relation to other categories such as language or acrolect
etc.) is triple-edged and it is aesthetically important that it should be
triple-edged. It can be taken to mean the variants of a language group {Polish,
Czech, Slovak etc. are “dialects” within the family of Slav languages).
Or it can mean a “subordinate" (OED) form of a particular language (say
"Picard" for French) - a form which is governed by par1icular rules of
pronunciation, lexis and syntax (all three being necessary for the word dialect
to be totally appropriate). At this level, and from a linguistic point of
view, a dialect should not be the object of value judgments. As linguists
say, structural differences between varieties of language are neutral and
arbitrary (no language, no variety of language is “superior” to
another, more “aesthetic” , more apt to produce literature or high
art etc.).
On the other hand dialects are endemically stigmatized. that is to say they
are the object both within and especially without the community of value
judgments that are often extreme and frequently – especially perhaps
among the educated – markedly prejudiced. For many users of standard
varieties – teachers are, alas, often a good example of this –
dialects are perceived as careless versions of standard ("literary" says
the 1961 OED) forms, the mark of an absence of intellectual finesse. They
are, at worst, “ugly” or laughable or both. They have to be taught
out of schoolchildren.
From a linguistic point of view it is possible to dismiss these judgments
out of hand but poets who use dialects have to negotiate a stigmatization
that has important aesthetic consequences. This is not in itself an impossible
task, the transformation of the stigmatized (the non-aesthetic} into the
aesthetically admirable is a constant of. the modern period notably in the
twentieth century. Moreover a poet can be encouraged to use dialect because
there also is a possible positive evaluation. Dialect can be seen to be the
voice of a particular community to which the poet belongs and to which he
or she is attached. whose world he works within – it becomes in some
sense a bonding device. This is the case of most popular poetry from the
ballad down to contemporary Dub and Rapp poetry. Thus dialect can be –-
and generally is – used at the same time tactically against the outside
world (this is often the case of comic dialect poetry). Dialects, like slang,
are used against those who belong to what is perceived as the threatening
dominant group. In this sense the use of dialect takes on a
“political” dimension. Every dialect, like so-called
“minority” languages, is an ambivalent space – as Rachel Ertel
writes of Yiddish in her excellent introduction to Yiddish poetry, Dans la
langue de personne: “Langue instrumentale, dominée,
minorée,
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langue de I'opprobre, jargon, mais aussi langue d'élection" (1). Where
a dialect is seen as a "langue d'élection" it can become the cement
of a group that desires separation, that senses itself to be in some sense
threatened (by "them" as opposed to "uz"). Thus, in one of its configurations,
and at a more personal level, dialect is a type of poetry that roots in a
sense of the "home," of the intensely personal; it can express and perpetuate
– at a very serious level – the rhythm, the texture, and the semantic
space of one's mother's tongue (2), It is worth remembering in this respect
that Barnes brought out a collection in 1858 called Hwomely Rhymes. Dialect
can often be – and was particularly in the late nineteenth century –
a crossroads, haunted by the past, by utopias of a Romantic sort, utopias
of unity and purity, the figures of childhood, the family, the clan, the
tribe, the village, the community, the class, the old abolished political
unit. As such, like the Regionalism or the Nationalism of which it is often
– though not always (3) – a part it can be conservative in all
senses (conservative of a dying language or culture, a threatened type of
ceremony, conservative of personal memory and abandoned inheritance). It
is thus often in the 19th century strongly elegiac (4). But like all
conservatisms an interest in dialect can find itself in certain particular
contexts (notably struggles for national liberation) the vector of a future
that has to be constructed, It can be the cornerstone (as Gaelic and the
Gaeltacht was in Ireland) of a projected utopia, the mortar of a society
that remains to be built – that would be better because more authentic,
because deeper rooted, because more democratically shared than the one that
they (the colonizer for example ) propose.
_______________
1. Paris: Seuil. coll. « La Librairie du XXème
siècle », 1993, p. 13.
2. Hardy talking of William Barnes made the sensible point: "For some reason
or none, many persons suppose that when anything is penned in the tongue
of the country-side, the primary intent is burlesque or ridicule .... But
to a person to whom a dialect is native its sounds are as consonant with
moods of sorrow as moods of mirth: there is not grotesqueness in it as such.
Nor was there to Barnes. In Select Poems of William Barnes. London:
Humphry Milford, 1908, p. vii.
3. The Belgian poet Jean-Pierre Verheggen writes, for example, in Artaud
Rimbur (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1990, p. 39-40):
« Michaux y a son Grand Combat! / Fail de reptations de mots
vernaculaires, bassement namurois! – Qu'on me croie! Qu’on me croie!
– Le premier Michaux a dans son trou d'effroi, sous arpions, du
macérat et bon puat de sous-langage wallon! / Comme Artaud son pochon
d'sous marseillon! Et Rimbaud, ses refrains idiots d'aoûterons et
chiffortons rochois! / (Mais tout ça hors religion de leur région!
Et hors smala! – Hors régionalisme quel qu'il soit, étroit
ou non! – Hors frontières cela va de soi! Engagés, comme
qui dirait langagés, dans la seule région étrangère!
- Hors relirégion, quoi !)."
4 .This is not necessarily true in the twentieth century where dialect is
often used for its asperity. See for example the use of Ulster dialect words
in the poetry of Torn Paulin. But even in Paulin there is an elegiac streak,
perhaps in part for the past glories of the dissenting tradition to which
Ulster Protestantism belongs.
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Mention of the Gaeltacht brings one back to Hiberno-English. There are perhaps
two or three things that it is important to stress here, Firstly Hiberno-English
is a very particular dialect in that unlike, say, American or Australian
or Nigerian English it is a dialect that is strongly influenced by one other
language system: Irish Gaelic. Many of the syntactic particularities of
Hiberno-English (though not all) come from a process of transposing directly
from Irish Gaelic. Other particularities come from the type of English with
which the native Irish population came into contact when they learnt English:
lowland Scots or West Midlands, for example, in Ulster, But certain
particularities of Hiberno-English depend – as with other dialects like
Americans – on historical factors (dialects tend to preserve forms that
die out in the more standard forms). Finally, from a political point of view
Hiberno-English has found itself crucially (unlike, for instance, American
English) in ideological competition with a pre-existent language – Gaelic
– for the role of unifying national language." Before looking at a few
examples of Hiberno-English it is perhaps important to recall one last
particularity of dialects: their internal frontiers are often not clear or
systematic. Indeed to talk, for example, of a Dorset dialect is, as the
linguistic maps show, an artificial and even an ideological construct, to
talk of Hiberno-English a simplification. for there are two major forms of
Hiberno-English: North and South (which do not correspond to the political
frontiers), "regional" variations, and innumerable individual mixes. Since
the frontiers of any given dialect are irregular their grammars are difficult
to stabilize, their past is hazy and often little-known (how old is cockney
for example?). and their lexicon fluctuates (there is no good Anglo-Irish
dictionary – the last attempt was recently abandoned for economic reasons)
(7). Dialects have little in the way of written records. Consequently they
have none of the "legislature" – the academies, the normative teaching,
even the letters to the papers complaining about falling standards –
all the policing that surrounds, protects and ennobles national languages.
They are thus constitutively more variable. But, by the same occasion, they
are a space of freedom and the energy of freedom. Dialects are also paradoxically
infinitely resistant. Indeed one of the most fascinating subjects of study
in the field of the socio-linguistics of dialect is why individuals
and
_______________
5. What is known as Standard British English is here taken
to be one dialect among others – a dialect which is itself stigmatized
by those who do not speak it and who may feel, for example, that RP is "snobbish,
affected, condescending ..."
6. This is important in that many poets feel obliged to make a choice between
Gaelic and English and not between their dialect and Standard English (as
is often the case in the Caribbean).
7. PAULIN Torn. "A New Look at the Language Question" in Ireland and the
English Crisis. Newcastle:Bloodaxe Books, 1987, p.
186.
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communities go to such lengths and over such periods of time to preserve
such a universally stigmatized part of their inheritance against the manifest
wishes of, for example, the almost entire educational system.
Basically, however – and this is equally important – despite
preconceptions, dialects, if they are not policed, are nevertheless
rule-governed. We will consider phonetics and lexicon later. Here I would
like to take three examples of syntactic characteristics of Hiberno-English
that distinguish it from Standard English.
Firstly there is the pronoun system. In Hiberno-English there is a categorial
opposition of the tu/vous kind which is purely an opposition of singular
and plural (unlike the tu/vous opposition in French). This is the opposition
one finds strikingly illustrated in: "So I said to our Trish and our Sandra:
‘Yous wash the dishes,’ I might as well have said: ‘You wash
the dishes,’ for our Trish just got up and put her coat on and went
out," (8) (Source: recording of a woman from Belfast.)
Secondly Hiberno-English, like other dialects, makes a distinction between
punctual and habitual by using the auxiliary "to be" differently: "She's
very well at the minute" (punctual/actualized), / "She biz middlin' in the
evenings" (habitual) (9).
Thirdly there is the construction that is literally translated from Irish
Gaelic: ‘I’m after spending seven hours in Dublin airport.’
This form has been much studied and it seems to express the idea that the
process has recently been completed, My examples are extremely simple but
could be extended into more delicate areas such as the stylistic (10).
These and many other syntactic features give that peculiar flavour that marks
off Anglo-Irish texts as "strange" for speakers used to Standard English,
But as Milroy remarks in his excellent study Authority in Language, non-native
speakers of dialects (for example poets like Kipling when he uses cockney
personae or even a novelist like Joyce when he uses English dialects) plainly
frequently have no notion of the fact that there is a grammar at work in
the dialects they use (11). These writers constantly make mistakes. Native
dialect speakers may not know that a grammar exists nor how exactly it functions
but they do not make mistakes – and they recognize problematic utterances
in
_______________
8. MILROY James and MILROY Lesley, Authority in Language,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p.25.
9. TODD Loreto, The Language of Irish Literature, London: Macmillan
Educational, 1989, p. 42.
10. For example the reticence (as in Irish Gaelic) over using "no" or "yes"
in a reply as in (examples from Patrick Kavanagh's The Green Fool): "But
will every man stick out?" I asked. "Indeed they won't," he said.
“I’ll give ye the facts, and you'll make the ballad," he said.
"I’ll make the ballad," I assured him / or the statistically
abnormal use (from the point of view of Standard English) of cleft constructions
like "No, no," he said, "it's too dacent ye
are."
11. Op.
cit., p. 85.
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people (or characters in a novel) trying to use their mother tongue. One
final remark before we move on to look at poems. Few people speak only one
dialect; most have access to a series of contiguous dialects and can move
in and out of them depending on context (they will use dialect forms in
situations of intimacy like talking to their own children and use more standard
forms in situations of formality like university symposia). And since the
frontiers between dialects within a system are relatively small, any speaker
can selectively downplay or foreground aspects of any one dialect (the double
negative or the glottal stop for a cockney for example). Given this fact,
there is one interesting consequence: that people lower down the social scale
have access – even if only limited – to more standard dialects
while those at the top of the social scale (and thus by implication middle-class
poets or writers) have an extremely impoverished access to dialects further
"down," I would now like to turn my attention to a corpus of poems, beginning
outside of Ireland with the poet William Barnes.
William Barnes (1801-1886) is an extremely touching poet – if little
known in France. Indeed I personally had the awesome privilege of cutting
the pages of the original edition of a collection of his poems in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, He has always been highly regarded by fellow
poets from contemporaries like Tennyson, Hardy or Gerard Manley Hopkins (who
was very influenced by his linguistic theories) down to W.H. Auden. Valuations
of him vary. E.M, Forster said of him: "He is truly, sweetly, affectionately,
a Yes-Man," (12)
Larkin, on the other hand – altogether a tougher character (a No-man)
and a poet who excluded all dialect poetry from his Oxford Book of Twentieth
Century English Verse, a politically startling move – said that: “the
imaginative delicacy of his conception (‘Woak Hill’) at times was
superior to Hardy's, though if his work has a deficiency, it is in lacking
Hardy's bitter and ironical despair: Barnes is almost too gentle, too submissive
and forgiving," (13)
It is in some ways difficult for us to read him now as we tend to see him
through the ironic, urban, internationalist dark glass of modernism, to classify
him as an example – to express it with current prejudice – of an
abolished parsonage pastoralism. Christopher Ricks, however, in his New Oxford
Book of Victorian Verse (1987) – gives him more pages than either Arnold
or Meredith (23 poems and 18 pages) staking quite rightly, one feels, his
central place in Victorian sensibility.
He was born in a poor farmling in Dorset (not far from Eliot's East Coker)
and became by dint of immense hard work, school-teaching and rectoring all
the while. a great
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12. In BARNES William, One Hundred Poems, Blandford
Former: The Dorset Bookshop Ltd, 1971 . p. xi.
13. “The Poetry of William Barnes” in Required Writing:
Miscellaneous Pieces 1955- 1982, London: Faber & Faber, 1983, p.
151.
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example of the 19th century polymath scholar, acquiring an acquaintance with
70 odd languages ranging from Fidjian to Farsi, from Friesian to Hindustani.
He wrote his diary in Italian and learnt French from an ex-Napoleonic prisoner
of war called Martin (pure Hardy !) – though he fought all his life
against the "invasion" of French words, which he saw as corrupting the pure
Saxon stock.
Here I would like to concentrate on only one aspect of his work, and one
aesthetic problem, and that is phonetics – the phonetics of dialects,
Barnes did not have the international phonetic alphabet at his disposal so
had to improvise his own transcription and his type of transcription is
notoriously problematic (14), I would like to look at the last stanza of
the poem "The Vaïces that be gone":
Vor all the maïdens an ' the bwoys
But I be married off all woys,
Or dead an' gone; but I do bide
At hwom, alwone, at mother's zide,
An often, at the evenèn-tide,
I still do saunter out, wi' tears,
Down drough the orcha'd, where my ears
Do miss the vaïces gone. (15)
The first thing that
strikes most non-Dorset readers is a sense of exclusion. Most readers find
themselves stumbling at each word. In this respect reading dialect poetry
is a little like reading poetry in a language one is only just beginning
to learn. One is constantly uncertain of crucial structures and frontiers
– one is forced to a certain linguistic modesty. However, we do understand
quickly that, unlike in Standard English, in Dorset dialect "boys" and "ways"
["woys"] are homophones – for they are in a rhyme position. The distribution
of vowels is thus different in Dorset dialect from that of Standard English.
This is an important aesthetic parameter, To take another example this time
from Anglo-Irish: whereas in Standard English the words hit:/hot/hat are
in phonetic opposition in Hiberno-English they can be homophones (and thus
potentially rhyme-words) (16).
_______________
14. It is interesting to note, however, that, to my knowledge,
no poet has ever tried to write systematically in the International Phonetic
Alphabet.
15 Select Poems of William Barnes, op. cit., p
122.
16. Indeed Anglo-Irish has fewer vowel sounds (fifteen compared to RP's 20)
but more consonants (28 compared to RP's 24) than Standard
English.
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In Barnes' poem, though we pick out the rhyme
quickly, we remain uncertain about the exact nature of the vowel sound and
whether it is the same as in hwome, and alwone as Barnes' transcription would
seem to suggest. This is crucial in that constellations of sound in a stanza
and poem are major structuring devices, articulating elements not simply
acoustically but also – crucially – semantically. Repetition of
sound creates the possibility (though only the possibility) of the articulation
of meaning. Rhyme is an obvious example of this phenomenon but in this particular
example it is semantically important to know in addition whether hwome and
alwone are also articulated to mother or to "bwoys" and perhaps even to ''I''
– or to all three. A contrario this example of dialect poetry raises
interesting more general problems about standard spelling and standard written
English. Spelling, as we know, does not reflect any particular
pronunciation-system. The text is a phonetically indeterminate space, a no
man 's land, that is filled by the reader with his or her own phonetic system.
A woman from Alabama can read a Shakespeare sonnet but the sound pattern
she will generate is radically different from that of a Welshman. And it
is statistically probable if not certain that the system the reader imposes
(the "voice" he or she actually hears – if he or she chooses to hear)
will not correspond to that of the poet (Did Shakespeare have a 16th century
Warwickshire accent, for example, and what sort of Warwickshire accent?).
Thus the reader is permanently in a situation of misreading. He or she is
constantly constellating sounds that should not (from the author's point
of view) be constellated and not constellating sounds that should so be
constellated (17), missing semantic links or creating them. This is perhaps
particularly significant in types of poetry such as contemporary Irish poetry
which often uses assonantal devices, This is true not only of individual
sounds but also of word stress, which is important in poetry in that it modifies
metre. For example, in Hiberno-English the stress on the word "lamentable"
is on the second syllable where in Standard English it is on the first This
could alter a foot boundary, itself an important structuring element in poetry
(18) and also a sort of minimal semantic boundary.
I say this not to regret a situation which could theoretically be remedied.
One day, who knows, we may have a virtual Shakespeare reading his own poetry
in his own dialect.
_______________
17. Inversely one's experience of listening to a poet reading
in a “dialect” that is not one's own is a usefully disconcerting
experience. Listening to the Irish poet Desmond Egan reading a poem about
Mandelstam, the text and its possible meaning opened up disconcertingly when
my ignorance of Hiberno-English made me unsure of whether he had said "field"
or "failed.' at a crucial moment of the poem.
18. In "Valediction" Louis Macneice called Northern Ireland a "Country of
callous lava cooled to stone,/Of minute sodden haycocks, of ship-sirens'
moan,/Of falling intonations" in Collected Poems. London: Faber &
Faber, 1966, p. 52.
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What is more important is that this indetermination, is, to my mind, one
of the aspects of language that makes aesthetic reading an ever-renewable
activity, that means that a text can transcend particular historical (19)
and geographical contexts, that the poet's is not the only reading, that
Irish poetry can not only be read by Irish readers – all things
reader-response theoreticians have long claimed. Readers rework the meaning
of the text by reworking it phonetically, by ignoring the phonetic specificities
of its source, by working against the horizon of their own speech habits.
A contrario, dialect reminds the reader constantly that there is potentially
a privileged reading (a unique space, a Paradise Lost) to which he or she
can have no or only problematic access, Before we leave Barnes, I would like
to insist on the fact – though I do not have space to develop the idea
here – that his linguistic, aesthetic and political culture is very
similar to that of the contemporary Nationalists in Ireland, Barnes belonged,
I feel, to a European movement of ideas and aesthetic priorities, a form
of cultural nationalism where Anglo-Saxon purists and Gaelic leaguers shared
much with, for example, pan-Slavists in the East of Europe (one thinks of
Janacek's philological work in Moravia, for example), One must never, I feel,
ghettoize the phenomenon which is being analyzed here (20)), A writer who
was deeply rooted in an analoguous linguistic culture was, of course, J.M,
Synge who, as we know, had studied in Paris under the great Celtic linguist
de Jubainville and who moved in the same circles as Douglas Hyde. If one
replaced the word Celtic with the word Anglo-Saxon, and made the language
less violent, we could hear Barnes in Hyde's famous appeal for the
de-Anglicisation of Irish culture: "In a word, we must strive to cultivate
everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most
Irish, because in spite of the little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east
corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic to the core."
(21)
_______________
19. It is a well-known fact that in the eighteenth century
tea rhymed with "say," that the word was pronounced, as it is in contemporary
Hiberno-English, as “lay."
20. The publishing history of Barnes is itself fascinating. Macmillan, for
example, was very reticent about dialect. In the 2nd edition of his Poems
in the Dorset Dialect however (mdcccxlviii) there is (in the Bibliothèque
Nationale) a publisher's flyer that lists a series of publications in what
constitutes a field: philology and Early English Literature (the publisher
also offered The Anglo.Saxon version of the Life of St Guthlac) and
dialect texts like Exmoor Scolding and Courtship in the Propriety and
Decency of Exmoor, Jan Cladpole's Trip to Merricur in Search for Dollar
Trees written in Sussex Doggerell & John Noakes and May Styles,
a Poem, exhibiting some of the most striking lingual localisms peculiar to
Essex.
21. HYDE Douglas, Language. Lore and Lyrics Essays and Lectures,
Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1986, p. 169.
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It was, however, the same Hyde who in 1891 learnt Anglo-Saxon and in his
journal noted: "that was the best thing I did," (22)
Barnes, Synge and Hyde belong to the same nineteenth century philological
tradition, a tradition strongly articulated to nationalism (and racism).
There are other things that draw Barnes close to Synge, and one is their
common focalisation on "that which smacks most of the soil": on the peasantry
(23), The first use of Anglo-Irish as a literary medium, however, is later
than in England. It is generally thought that what instituted the tradition
was Douglas Hyde's translation of Gaelic tales: Beside the Fire ( 1890).
As an emblematic example of the literary use of Hiberno-English in poetry
one could perhaps best look at the first two stanzas of Synge's translation
of a part of Villon's "Les regrets de la belle
Heaulmière”:
LI
An
Old Woman's Lamentations
Or il est mort, passe trente ans,
The man I had a love for – great rascal would
Et je remains vieille, chenue.
kick me in the gutter - is dead thirty years and
Quand je pense, lasse! au bon temps,
over it, and it is I am left behind, grey and aged.
Quel fus, quelle devenue;
When I do be minding the good days I had,
Quand je me regarde toute nue,
minding what I was one time, and what it is I'm
Et je me vois si très changée,
come to, and when I do look on my own self,
Pauvre, sèche, mègre, menue,
poor and dry, and pinched together, it wouldn't
Je suis presque toute enragée.
be much would set me raging in the streets.
Qu'est devenu ce front
poli,
Where is the round forehead I had, and
the
Ces cheveux blonds, sourcils voutis,
fine hair, and the two eyebrows,
and the eyes
Grand entroeil, le regard joli,
with a big gay look out of them would bring
Dont prenoie les plus
soutis;
folly from a great scholar ? Where is my straight
Ce beau nez droit, grand ne petis,
shapely nose, and two ears, and my chin with a
Ces petites jointes oreilles,
valley in it, and my lips were red and open ? (25)
Menton fourchu, clair vis traitis,
Et ces belles lèvres vermeilles? (24)
_______________
22. Ibid., p.44, Barnes wrote one of the first school primers
of Anglo-Saxon.
23. But here one begins to see differences grow, for where Barnes' peasantry
– if sprightly – is innocent, childlike, Wordsworthian and submissive,
Synge's is vigorous, stoical and artistic (just as Kavanagh's will be stumbling,
victimised but also cunning and often humorous). I do not have time to develop
this here but of course the overlapping between dialect and stereotype is
important and complex.
24. OEuvres, Paris: Garnier, 1962, p.40-41.
25, Synge edited the poem at the beginning introducing material from the
preceding stanza, Collected Works. vol. 1, Poems, Oxford: OUP,
1962, p. 80.
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Here we see both an example of the aesthetic use of Hiberno-English and a
number of the characteristics of the language that have already been mentioned
(the particular use of the auxiliary "do" in ''I do be,” the cleft
construction "it is I am left behind," the absence of relative pronouns for
example). This text shows that Hiberno-English can indisputably be used to
great artistic effect, that it is not reduced to expressing the quaint, the
picturesque, and the rural. Here indeed there is an echo of the great ninth
century Gaelic text "The Old Woman of Beare" (26). However, despite its generous
use of Hiberno-English syntax and lexis, from the linguistic point of view
Synge's language is interesting above all because it is not simply an attempt
to reconstitute an existing dialect. It is in fact an artificial construct.
That this construct should be deeply rooted in the actual syntax and
speech-rhythms of the Irish peasantry is a fact, that it should be produced
in a situation of translation emblematic, for much of Synge's thinking about
language, as Declan Kiberd has shown, comes out of reading and practising
translation (27) just as much of Hiberno-English itself was generated by
the "translation" of structures and lexemes from the Gaelic. Nevertheless
"great scholars" have shown that much of Synge's Hiberno-English is inexact
or invented. For one thing the density of occurrence of certain forms is
"unnatural" and the lexis is uncertain, Alan Bliss remarks for example: "The
word 'honey' is used as a form of address in many English dialects but it
is rare in Ireland, and the combination 'Mister honey,' which recurs again
and again in The Playboy is incredible." (28) Perhaps the simplest litmus
test of its "foreignness" was that the Irish actors of the Abbey Theatre
found it difficult to learn and speak, which they would not have done, had
it been a "natural" Anglo-Irish. But critics like Bliss have remarked –
quite rightly to my mind – that the problem of the "realism" of Synge's
Hiberno-English is trivial, Synge was creating something. As Yeats rightly
says, as always centering on the essential,
Whenever [Synge] tried to write drama without dialect*
he wrote badly, and he made several attempts, because only through dialect
could he escape self-expression, see all
_______________
26. “I loved the wine / That thrilled me to my fingertips;
Now the mean wind / Stitches salt into my lips./ The coward sea / Slouches
away from me. / Fear brings back the tide / That made me stretch at the side
/ Of him who'd take me briefly for his bride. / The sea grows smaller, smaller
now / Farther, farther it goes / leaving me here where the foam dries / On
the deserted land, / Dry as my shrunken thighs, / As the tongue that presses
my lips, / As the veins that break through my hands " (Extract from the text
translated by Brendan Kennelly in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse,
B. Kennelly ed., 2nd edition, London: Penguin Books. 1981, p.64.
27. KIBERD Declan, Synge and the Irish Language, London: Macmillan,
1979.
28. "The Language of Synge" in J.M. Synge: Centenary Papers, M. Harmon ed.,
1971 , p. 436.
* [and I would add poetry]
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12
that he did from without, allow his intellect to judge the images of his
mind as if they had been created by some other mind, His objectivity was,
however, technical only, for in those images paraded all the desires of his
heart. (29)
It is here that seems
to lie the mastery of Synge. His use of dialect resembles in some ways Milton
's use of Latinate diction or, closer to home, Gerard Manley Hopkins' use
of English, In this both Synge and Hopkins, like Janacek, were a gateway
to a potential of modernism – access to a medium that was neither "pure"
self-expression nor the outward "realistic" trappings of a particular community
– but gave access to both, Certainly what Synge does I think produce,
is a language that is distilled, condensed, massed and refracted to achieve
that state of incandescent density – the fire i' the flint – that
ordinary language rarely achieves over any length of time. Moreover, by using
Hiberno-English, Synge is using a formal device in some ways not unlike the
choice of a rhyme scheme or a particular stanzaic pattern (say the sonnet).
But this artefact – Synge's Hiberno-English – was really the last
hesitant flowering of an attempt to create in poetry that worked out of
Hiberno-English. From then on poets have been extremely hesitant and even
critical of Synge himself. Bliss ended his article in 1971 by quoting Boyd:
"The language of his plays, the most tangible of his debts to the peasantry,
has awakened no important echoes in the work of those who came after him"
and then Bliss himself concluded: "Perhaps Synge's talent was unique; but
perhaps some Irish dramatist or poet may yet come who will build upon the
foundation he laid so well a structure of poetic prose finer than anything
that has yet been seen." (30) What Boyd said is still true: Hiberno-English
has still in 1994 "awakened no important echoes." To show this I would like
to look at one last poem before concluding the sonnet "Epic" by Patrick Kavanagh
(1904-1967),
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
_______________
29. "The Tragic Generation" in Autobiographies, London:
Macmillan, 1955, p.345.
30. Op. cit., p. 55.
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13
'Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother, Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance. (31)
Kavanagh probably knew Hiberno-English better than Synge, indeed had spoken
it in County Monaghan in a background not unlike that of Barnes' beloved
Dorset, and uses it to fine effect in his prose. He nevertheless maintained
that Synge's emphasis on tangy rural speech retarded his own appreciation
of the actual flavour of ordinary country talk. (32) Thus when one looks
at Kavanagh 's poetry there is little trace of Hiberno-English –even
though he claimed that it was out of the parochial (of which dialect is a
part) that great poetry grew and was certainly aware of the poetic potential
of Anglo-Irish, writing: "From the lips of simple women I heard phrases of
whimsical prophecy and exciting twists of language that would delight the
heart of a wheelbarrow or a modernist poet. (33) If this poem is representative,
it is representative I feel both of Kavanagh's production and the extreme
limits of the use of Hiberno-English in Irish poetry generally since the
War. Here we see – typically I think – that Irish poetry, though
manifestly Irish in theme and intertext (Yeats here perhaps), opens only
small vestigial windows onto the majority language of the country. (34) If
Hiberno-English delights the heart of modernist Irish poets it does not
seem
_______________
31. Collected Poems. London: Martin Brian & 0' Keefe.
1972. p. 136.
32. QUINN Antoinette. Patrick Kavanagh: Born-Again Romantic, Dublin:
Gill & Macmillan, 1991, p.64.
33. The Green Fool, London: Penguin Books 197 I , p. 10.
34 It is interesting that Seamus Heaney should express his uncertainty about
Synge in an article called .'The Sense of Place" in which he insists on the
subtlety of Kavanagh's use of dialect. He says of the first line of Kavanagh's
"Inniskeen Road, July Evening" ("The bicycles go by in twos and threes”):
"They do not 'pass by' or 'go past,' as they would in a more standard English
voice or place, and in that little touch Kavanagh touches what I am circling.
He is letting the very life blood of the place in that one minute incision."
(Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968- 1978, London: Faber & Faber, 1980,
p. 138.) The very use of the word ‘little’ and ‘minute’
suggests the quality of this type of poetry’s use of Hiberno-English.
Indeed one could argue that to ‘go by’ is not at all particular
to Ireland – it is frequent in many mainland British dialects –
to the point where I feel it is standard. One senses nevertheless here the
extremely conflictual nature of Heaney's attitude on the one hand to what
he calls the "programmatic" use of Hiberno-English by the Revival writers
and on the other to Standard English.
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14
much to influence their linguistic practice (in the way that it has been
used by a novelist like Roddy Doyle or the way that Lallans has been and
still is used by Scottish poets (35)). Indeed I think it is possible to read
this sonnet without any knowledge of Hiberno-English or not much more knowledge
of Hiberno-English than it takes to recognize Beckett's idiom (36). In "Epic"
there are subtle traces of dialect in words like "bother" or ''I inclined."
And these traces are important because they establish (like the use of the
"our" in line four) a subtle relationship of proximity-with-distance between
the "I" of the poem and the Duffys and the McCabes. But the clearest case
of the aesthetic potential of dialect, and I would suggest this is no accident,
is in the direct speech of the central line: "Here is the march along these
iron stones."
The poem in some ways pivots around the word "march." The word resonates
of course outward to the verb "to march" (the war in Europe and war generally);
to the expression "to steal a march on someone," to the noble Norman use
of march, as in "The Welsh Marches" – or, for an English reader, to
the older Anglo-Saxon Mercia. More subtly – and I think people underestimate
Kavanagh's great intelligence, as they underestimate Barnes' – the reference
to "iron stones" links – despite the explicit denegation – this
boundary dispute with "the Munich bother," for at the heart of Munich, and
thus a source of the epic European conflagration, were the disputed marches
of the Reich, the Northern frontier of Czechoslovakia, a territory that included
the iron mountains to the North West, mountains that are known in German
as the Erzgebirge and in Czech the Krusno Hori ("les monts metallifères").
But march is here a perfect word because it is at root a dialect word. In
Ulster dialect the word – probably of Scottish origin – is used
ordinarily to mean a boundary between two farms and has a verbal form: "His
land marches with mine." March here is used as the locus of a typical knotting
together of the text. The word unites past and present, Ireland and Europe,
high and low, the comic and the tragic. It is also the space where ambivalence
can surface – ambivalence, perhaps, about Ireland's neutrality during
the Second World War and the Republic's own experience of the endemically
violent Ulster Border, only a few miles to the north of Ballyrush. Clearly
the word "march" is not used for mere local colour or picturesqueness or
"un effet de reel," a guarantor of authenticity – though at some superficial
level it does this as well – the dialect word gives access to the world
of the dialect. It is an essential and it is essentially an aesthetic nexus.
Poets, as Homer tells us in the poem, make their own importance, not merely
of events but also of any lexical element – including dialect
ones.
_______________
35. See for example
W.N. HERBERT's recent Forked Tongue, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe
Books,
1994.
36. Of course Beckett's idiom in English is more
complex and has another linguistic hinterland:
French.
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15
However, while it is clear that one's reading of the poem may be enriched
by knowledge of the dialect use of "marches" it is nowhere as linguistically
marked as the translation by Synge. Had I taken other poets like Heaney or
more urban poets (like Mahon or Muldoon) the presence of Hiberno-English
would have been even less marked. (37) This is a general tendency –
as any reading of any anthology will show – and indeed is particularly
striking in a poet like Paul Durcan who uses monologues and personae who
should or could, by class and education, be using Hiberno-English.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest: firstly that, of course, dialect
is not essentially incompatible with poetry, that it is only an accident
of history that Standard English is the literary language (as the OED tells
us). Secondly, there is in Ireland a manifest discrepancy between much critical
discourse on the Irishness of Irish poetry and the linguistic practice of
Irish poets and much uncertainty about the categories and their aesthetic
implications. To take one small example, Seamus Deane, an excellent if –
or and – committed critic and poet, wrote in 1985. "The linguistic
virtuosity of Irish writers and the linguistic quaintness, to English ears,
of the Irish mode of speech in English are the product of a long political
struggle – and still audible in the poetry of John Montague and of Seamus
Heaney." (38)
This text is problematic because languages do not result from political struggles
in the rather simple ways that Deane seems to suggest. If they did it would
indeed be possible to argue that the reverse is true: that the Irish have
"abandoned" the political struggle and accepted England's cultural domination
– something events in Northern Ireland (amongst other things) suggest
is not true. In some ways Irish critics seem to be foregrounding a difference
in an area (language) which is (relatively) marginal, in what one could perhaps
analyze as an attempt to radicalize an opposition. A third point is that
generalisations such as the idea that we are living in a period characterised
by the disappearance of regional differences in English in favour of one
central non-geographically located Ur-English are manifestly not true at
the level of actual everyday language use. If poets wish to use a neutral,
non-nationally or non-regionally based language it is a free choice on their
part and
_______________
37.
Where it does
exist it is largely lexical, rarely syntactical, and it is in syntax that
the most radical differences between Standard and Hiberno-English manifest
themselves.
38. Deane Seamus. Celtic Revivals, London: Faber & Faber,
1985, p. 13. This is not an isolated example. In his introduction to a 1986
anthology: The Inherited Boundaries: The younger Poets of the Republic of
Ireland (Mountrath: The Dolmen Press, 1986. p. 17), Sebastian Barry talks
of the present situation as one where "the spoken language [is] Hiberno-English
(which has a history of at least seven hundred years in the country, a
respectable length of time, no matter how much it smacks of empire to speak
it. After all, the French speak a sort of Franco-Latin, and they feel little
shame about it at this distance to Rome. Is Hiberno-English what we will
someday call more simply Irish?)." Barry's linguistic parallel is extremely
doubtful and not a little voluntarist and one feels a real uncertainty about
its validity in the style
itself.
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16
obviously one which I would not wish, indeed it would be absurd of me, to
attempt to gainsay. But this choice is a "free choice" (in so far as any
aesthetic choice is "free") and cannot be transformed into a form of aesthetic
destiny.
If Irish poetry then is in some ways less linguistically autonomous than
other traditions (like the Scottish, for example – a fact that Yeats
complained about a hundred years ago) and indeed less linguistically autonomous
in some ways than it was at the beginning of the century and despite many
years of political independence, I do not feel that the explanation for this
can lie in purely political factors (a lessening of the desire to de-Anglicize,
a turning away from the rural space associated by Synge with Anglo-Irish)
or personal factors (reticence about the dangers of exoticism – "stage
Irishness" –, ignorance of the idiom, ambivalence about its value) etc.,
though these factors are probably real enough in individual cases. For the
phenomenon to be so general in poetry but not in other genres like the short
story I feel that the central answer has to lie in the internal history of
poetry itself, it must lie in the poetics of Ireland's post-Modernism (a
post-Modernist reticence about polyglot texts and the regular use of personae
for instance). But all conclusions, I feel, have to be extremely tentative
until. as I have already suggested. We have a clearer sense of the history
of the use of dialect in the British Isles and a more synthetic, sophisticated,
cross-genre and aesthetic sense of dialect's potential.
|
(réf. Etudes Britanniques
Contemporaines n° 7. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de Montpellier,
1995)