NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 1999

Brian Ferran
Breaking Out of the Field: The Paintings of Basil Blackshaw
Ray Cashman
Letter from Ireland: Litir ó Éirinn
The News from Ballymongan
Richard Haslam
Neil Jordan and the ABC of Narratology:
"Stories to do with Love are Mathematical"
Michael Longley
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Paul F. Power
Republicanism, Revisionism, and the Belfast Agreement, 1998
Karen Steele
Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud Gonne and the United Irishman
Brian Liddy
State and Church: Darkness in the Fiction of John McGahern

Translation: Aistríuchán
Mark Harman
Rough Magic: Translating Buile Suibhne
Kaarina Hollo
From the Irish: On The Astrakhan Cloak
Maribel Butler de Foley
Irish Novels into Spanish

James J. Blake
The Irish Language Today: An Teanga Inniu
Irish-Language Theater in the 1990s: Slógadh to Teilifís na Gaeilge

Reviews: Léirmheasanna
Clúdach: Cover
News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Údair

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
To mark the Center for Irish Studies’ sponsorship of the Basil Blackshaw Touring Exhibition’s stay in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March, 1998, the center asked the painter Brian Ferran to open the show with a talk on Blackshaw (b. 1932). This brief article, "Breaking out of the Field," is a neater version of the very personal hommage that Ferran paid Blackshaw on that evening. Readers interested in a well-illustrated survey of the Northern artist’s life and work should consult Basil Blackshaw—Painter (1995). Likewise, readers will recall that four paintings by Blackshaw were featured on covers of the issues of the inaugural volume of New Hibernia Review in 1997. An inventive painter, Brian Ferran is also the energetic head of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in Belfast.

And from the North comes New Hibernia Review’s second "Letter from Ireland," by Ray Cashman, our advisory editor for Irish folklore. Arriving in County Tyrone just after the bombing in Omagh, Cashman recounts his wanderings in the fall of 1998 west near to the border to find site and a source for his ethnographic fieldwork. He found his site in Ballymongan, past Killeter, and then his source in a neighbor, John Mongan, proprietor of the "Ballymongan Museum," where Mongan had collected and refurbished rural implements and bye-gone farm machinery. As the North begins to shed bloody days, so in its townlands the North sheds old ways that had been preserved by remoteness and now are preserved by such elders as John Mongan. And even they pass away, with their lore, as Cashman discovers in the sudden death of John Mongan and the parish’s mourning for the steward of its rural traditions.

In Prof. Richard Haslam’s article on the 1990s films of Neil Jordan, his analysis of The Crying Game, among other films, indirectly analyzes the "Troubles." To reveal the signifying patternings of Jordan’s films and prose fictions, Dr. Haslam applies narratology. The consequent ABC pattern—usually a love triangle of some sort—characterizes Jordan’s artistry from his first film Angel / Johnny Boy (1982) on through Interview with a Vampire (1994), Michael Collins (1996), and The Butcher Boy (1997). The persistence of this formulaic pattern in Jordan’s artistry expresses Jordan’s continuing interest in the dynamics of personal and political betrayal. A native of Belfast, Prof. Haslam now is a visiting scholar at St. Joesph’s University, Philadelphia. His essays on nineteenth-century Irish writing have been widely published and his essay "Irish Film: Screening the Republic" will appear in Writing the Republic (1999), a collection of critical essays.

Restraint and consequent power—those are the qualities of Michael Longley’s poetry, and they are displayed here in "Cenotaph of Snow: Thirteen War Poems." In this sequence Longley melds the present verities of the Iliad with his familial connections to Ulster’s role in the Great War and to the Italian campaign of World War II into the present "Troubles." Classics—Homer and Ovid—anchor Longley’s renewed powers of invention to articulate the comic and tragic perspectives on the harried details of our lives, and in offering those yet living perspectives, Longley offers also wisdom, as his collections Gorse Fires (1991) and The Ghost Orchid (1995) attest. Wake Forest University Press just issued Michael Longley’s compact and elegant Selected Poems.

According to the terms of the Belfast or "Good Friday" Agreement of 1998, devolved, power-sharing government in the North comes into its force in June, 1999, just at the start of the marching season. Justifiably acclaimed—and encouraged by Nobel recognition—those accords articulate not only changes in relations between Britain and Ireland, and in relations between the North and the South, but also significant changes in the South’s republican traditions, as Prof. Paul F. Power discerns in some detail. As his delineation of recent developments shows, constitutional republicanism in the South has altered some of its own tenets—as reflected in the rewording of the 1937 constitution—while physical force republicanism in the North has come to accept the constitutionality implied in the majority consent doctrine. Among Dr. Power’s recent articles is "Revisionist Natoinalism’ Consolidation, Republicanism’s Marginalization, and the Peace Process," in Éire-Ireland (1996).

One of the many famous contributors to the republican tradition in Ireland was, of course, Maud Gonne. Contemporary and feminist activists in the North—like Daisy Mules Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Nell McCafferty, or Daisy Mules—can count her among their models. Gonne’s character and example, her political agitation and her writings shaped both Irish literary culture and Irish political culture, as Dr. Karen M. Steele sets out here. Noting Gonne’s founding of Inghinidhe na hÉireann or L’Ireland Libre, Steele also anatomizes her regular contributions to the United Irishman and, especially, her one-act play Dawn (1904). Prof. Steele’s two-part interview with Daisy Mules, the Sinn Féin representative from Derry, appears in (sub)Text and Jouvert, while her study of Maud Gonne’s biography will soon appear in Cultural Studies.

The novelist John McGahern earned notoriety in 1965 when The Dark was banned in the South, and the dominance of state and church in the lives of individuals has preoccupied McGahern ever since. The contours of such preoccupation are the object of Brian Liddy’s explication here, an explication that begins with McGahern’s archetypal story "Korea" and ends with an acute reading of Amongst Women. McGahern’s fiction reveals that the Joycean "nets" that limited the life of the individual in the South right through the 1970s are no less stunting or cruel than the more formal, more visible absence of civil liberties in the North. A native of Limerick, Brian Liddy will soon publish a short story "The Kill" in The Recorder, the journal of The American Irish Historical Society.

The third renaissance of the Irish arts has a marked European dimension, and for writers this entails translation—the translation of works from Irish and Bearla into some twenty-eight world languages. That effort has, since 1994, been managed by the arts councils North and South through ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange: Idirmhalartán Litríocht Éireann)—and by that organization’s Micheal O’Siadhail and Marc Cabal. And perhaps the most charged issue concerning translation—apart from the export commodification of Irish writing—has been the transfer of poetry in Gaeilge into English in bilingual editions, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems being a chief example. Since the publication of Michael Cronin’s Translating Ireland (1996), the practice of translation has become an occasion ripe with critical controversy. To further that discourse, New Hibernia Review offers three short essays under the title "Aistríuchán: Translation."

Mark Harman scrutinizes Seamus Heaney’s making of Sweeney Astray (1983) out of the famous At Swim-Two-Birds romance of Buile Suibhne. Posing Heaney’s versions of stanzas of the Mad Sweeney’s verse against each other, Harman’s comparisons reveal Heaney’s changing assumptions about the just intentions and effects of translating this renowned Middle Irish tale. A prolific scholar and translator from the German—notably, a new setting of Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1998)—Dr. Harman has published in such journals as Sinn und Form, Translation Review, Comparative Criticism, and The Sewanee Review.

After Dermot Bolger’s An Tonn Gheal / The Bright Wave (1986), the most famous bilingual setting of Gaelic poetry in North America is Paul Muldoon’s version of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Feis (1991), published by Wake Forest University Press under the punning title The Astrakhan Cloak (1998). Here, Kaarina Hollo interrogates the tactics of Muldoon’s selection and his Americanizing translations in respect to recent debates in Poetry Ireland Review, Graph, and Krino about rendering Irish poetry into English, to which debate Ní Dhomhnaill has herself often contributed. A specialist in Old and Middle Irish poetry, Dr. Kaarina Hollo has published widely in such journals as Ériu and Celtic Studies and in such collections of essays as Ulidia (1992) and Nua-Léamha: Gnéithe de Chultúir, Stair, agus Polaitíocht na hÉireann (1996).

We close our survey of translators and translations with an informal memoir from Maribel de Butler Foley, an translator into Spanish of Irish fiction in English. Foley has brought prose by Patrick McCabe, Kate O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, William Trevor. Translating English works into Spanish is less fraught with the postcolonial issues of translating Irish, but more subject to easy and unsatisfying commodification, as Foley reveals in her comments about Joyce’s The Dead. A Spanish descendant of a "Wild Geese" clan, Maribel de Butler Foley formerly lectured in Spanish at University College, Dublin.

To close this summer issue, Prof. James J. Blake offers a survey of recent developments in the several worlds of Irish-language theater. Like Irish drama in English, work in the Irish-language for the amharclann has gone through its cycles of vital invention and torpor ever since the first performance of Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin. Like other modes of writing in Irish, that for the stage can often unveil themes forbidden in English, as in the case of Mairéad Ní Ghráda’s An Triail, staged at An Damer in 1964. Performance arts in Irish have lately been rjuvenated by the regional and national Slogadh competitions, sponsored by Gael-Linn. Tellingly, the foundation of Conemara’s Teilifís na Gaeilge, whose regular production of television broadcasts—from script and score straight through the studio airing—now offers professional and semiprofessional employment for Irish speakers skilled in all forms of theater work.

Clúdach: Cover
The cover of this second issue of New Hibernia Review for 1999 presents a second painting from the McGrath Bequest to the Crawford Municipal Gallery in Cork. This is The Tea Estate by the modernist Barrie Cooke (b. 1931), who lives in County Sligo. Raised in Bermuda and educated at Harvard University, Cooke studied painting in Skowhegan, Maine, and then he moved to the Burren in County Clare in 1953. After studying with the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg, Cooke went on to represent Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1963. Consistently represented in such national exhibitions as ROSC, Cooke has had several one-man shows in Dublin, including a restrospective exhibition in Trinity College’s Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1989. The Tea Estate, measuring 103 cm square, is a late oil on canvas that recalls, in its deep greens, Cooke’s monumental Lough Derg Pike (1980), which displays veils of black-green washes and drips. Likewise, thin spirit washes underlie the Cooke’s dripping lines, and that technique may be found in an early painting—a square one, again—The Crouching Nude (c. 1962), as well as in Cooke’s portraits, like that of the poet John Montague (1990). We thank Director Peter Murray and his staff at the Crawford for the opportunity to publish paintings from the 1998 McGrath Bequest.
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