NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW

Geimhreadh/Winter 2004

Contents 8:4 Clár Ábhair 8:4 michael cronin Babel Átha Cliath: The Languages of Dublin albert j. de giacomo and jonas friddle Ireland’s “Proclaimed” Dramatist: Frank J. Hugh O’Donnell, 1894–1976 maura stanton Filíocht Nua: New Poetry charles fanning Robert Emmet and Nineteenth-Century Irish America leeann lane Female Emigration and the Cooperative Movement in the Writings of George Russell kathleen a. heininge “Untiring Joys and Sorrows”: Yeats and the Sidhe rui carvalho homem Of Furies and Forgers: Ekphrasis, Re-vision, and Translation in Derek Mahon   A Backward Glance: Radharc ar gCúl james m. cahalan Mercier’s Irish Comic Tradition as a Touchstone of Irish Studies eiléan ní chuilleanáin, Vivian Mercier anthony roche Vivian Mercier’s Irish Comic Tradition: The Man and the Book patrick o’sullivan On First Looking into Mercier’s The Irish Comic Tradition Léirmheasanna: Reviews Cover: Clúdach

Clúdach: Cover With this issue, we complete a series of four historic photographs of Edwardian Dublin on our covers, offered in celebration of the Bloomsday Centennial this past June. Our final image shows a scene that would have been familiar to Joyce, but which had disappeared from the streets of Dublin by the time Ulysses appeared: a display of British military muscle in the heart of the city. Here, a group of Lancers parades past the front gates of Trinity College. Like the Viceregal Cavalcade that rolls past the front of Trinity in “The Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, this troop passes with an aura of aloofness, and an almost palpable ignorance of the people and the city that surrounds them. Later, in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus has firsthand experience of this British sense of imperviousness when he is assaulted by Private Carr outside Bella Cohen’s whorehouse in Nighttown. And in the final episode, “Penelope,”we find the Lancers cropping up in Molly Bloom’s erotic fantasies as her thoughts turn to military men. This year’s covers have all been drawn from the holdings of Ireland’s National Photographic Archive, and in this case from the Clarke Collection. Acquired by the library in 2000, the Clarke Collection comprise the 67 glass plates and 270 prints of street scenes around central Dublin near the turn of the twentieth century, taken by the medical student and amateur photographer J. J. Clarke. These photographs open a window on a vanished Dublin. Some of Clarke’s photographs were included in the archive’s important 2001 exhibition Dubliners. The photographic collections of the National Library of Ireland are housed in the National Photographic Archive in the Temple Bar area of Dublin. The archive incorporates a substantial storage area, controlled by an air plant system, together with darkrooms, and a conservation area. A useful on-line introduction to the National Library’s photographic holdings—including many digitized photographs—can be viewed at http://www.nli.ie/new_archive.htm.  We thank the National Photographic Archive/An tAircív Náisiúnta Grianghrafadóireachta, and especially its curator, Sara Smyth, for its kind permission to present this photograph to the readers of New Hibernia Review.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
In 1892, Douglas Hyde gave his seminal address on the “Necessity for De- Anglicizing Ireland,” and over the next century the discussion of Ireland’s linguistic identity was inevitably framed in terms of Gaeilge versus English. Today, asylum seekers and economic immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the former Eastern bloc—as well as from immigrants from within the European Union— have begun to restructure the Irish demographic, and in the process, have created a language environment that Hyde could never have envisioned. The Irish radio airwaves now carry broadcasts in Bosnian, Mandarin, and other languages; the needs of an ever-more-polyglot Ireland are reshaping the health, social service, and judicial systems—and these changes also spill into the familiar social laboratory of the classroom. As Dr. Cronin notes, a multilingual Ireland will necessarily invite a rethinking of the state’s official bilingualism. The director of Dublin City University’s Centre for Translation and Textual Studies,Michael Cronin’s many books include The Languages of Ireland (2003).

Familiar to students of post-Revival Irish drama for his biographical study T. C. Murray: Dramatist of Rural Ireland (2003), Albert De Giacomo (along with Jonas Friddle, an actor, theatrical technician, and student of drama) calls our attention in this issue to still another playwright deserving of renewed attention. That person is Frank J. Hugh O’Donnell (1894–1976), whose scripts were mainstays of the Irish amateur repertoire during his lifetime, and whose 1919 play The Dawn Mist gained special notoriety for attracting political censorship. In the first of a two-part article, De Giacomo and Friddle examine O’Donnell’s dramatic apprenticeship, a period in which his ambitions ran somewhat ahead of his talents. Even so, O’Donnell caught the attention of Yeats, Lennox Robinson, and other theatrical luminaries, and the memory of their encouragements may lie behind O’Donnell’s practical efforts in later life to assist young Irish writers and artists.

Irish-American poetry can claim a long heritage in American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Daniel Tobin reveals in New Hibernia Review (Winter, 1999). Irish Americans have been newspaper poets and balladeers in the Victorian mode, and radicals and experimenters in the Modernist mode.Now the Ruth Little Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Maura Stanton became a Yale Younger Poet in 1975 with her first collection Snow on Snow. Three collections followed: Tales of the Supernatural (1988), Cries of Swimmers (1991), and Life among the Trolls (1998). In this issue, she shows her range and subtlety in monologues that affectingly capture both nuances of individual voice and character and the regrets and elations of Irish Americans in the Midwest at midcentury. Plainly worded, simply lined out, these poems display a complex moral imagination.Maura Stanton’s other titles are The Country I Come From (1988), a set of short stories, and a novel, Molly Companion (1977).

For a full century after his execution, the memory of the youthful patriot Robert Emmet wove its way into the imaginations of Irish America, where—in oratory and verse, in lithography and melodrama—a veritable Emmet industry kept the hero’s memory alive. In this issue, Dr. Charles Fanning tracks the development of the Emmet cult in the United States, a story that Fanning tells with characteristic sensitivity to the overflowing range of Irish-American creativity. At times, this cult could be brazenly commercial, used to sell cigars and tourist trinkets; other times, particularly on stage, it played fast and loose with historical fact. Overall, though, the invocation of Emmet was positive: by providing both personal and community links to an heroic, thrilling figure, the patriot’s memory proved deeply ennobling. The preeminent scholar of Irish- American literature, Charles Fanning is the author of The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction From the 1760s to the 1980s (1999).

A leading figure of the Irish Revival, George Russell (Æ) claimed the distinction of being not only a poet and a painter, a polymath and a spiritualist, but also a commentator on social and economic practicalities. As Leeann Lane reminds us here, for more than forty years he wrote tirelessly for the revitalization of Irish rural life in the Irish Homestead.All the while affirming role of the Anglo- Irish—on the model of Sir Horace Plunkett—as rural leaders of reform, Russell wrote on the side of the small landholder against the strong farmer. Dr. Lane scrutinizes Russell’s views in the Irish Homestead on improving the lives of rural women in Ireland by means of the Irish Country Woman’s Association, which espoused what seem today to be conventional, limited roles for women living on the land. Leeann Lane helped compile the groundbreaking Directory of Sources for Women’s History in Ireland (2000), and her articles have appeared in such journals as Irish Archives (2003).

The wit of Ireland’s contemporary poets—allusive, colloquial, deceptive—is easy to enjoy, admire, and describe, but often difficult to explicate and analyze. Consequently, Derek Mahon’s poetry, dating from the late 1950s, has always been a pleasure and a puzzle. In this rich essay, Rui Carvalho Homem teases out the associations and connotations lying behind Mahon’s exemplary poem “Courtyards in Delft” (1981) by exploring the pictorial and moral relations between the Delft genre paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch painters de Hooch, van Baburen, and Vermeer. Prof. Homem displays a fine eye for detail, a true ear for tone, and patience for the Calvinist history of Northern Europe—including Delft and, of course, Mahon’s Belfast. Through Mahon’s impersonation of the twentieth-century forger van Megeeren, Dr.Homem proceeds to the anodyne of carnivalesque riot that Mahon seeks in his translations— especially in his version of Racine’s stern Phèdre. Among Dr. Homem’s many European publications may be noted Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century (2004).

William Butler Yeats first learned Irish fairy-lore as a child in Sligo, and he gained early attention as a collector and popularizer of tales of an Irish otherworld. Never doubting the allure of these stories, Yeats nonetheless devoted years to sorting out what he truly believed about the Sidhhe and the daoine maithe, “the good people.” Here, Dr. Kathleen Heininge surveys Yeats’s onagain, off-again fascination with the Sidhe, particularly during the 1890s, the years of The Celtic Twilight and such poems as “Song of the Wandering Aengus.” Heininge finds that postcolonial theory proves useful in describing Yeat’s stance toward the fairies,which was one of—in Homi Bhabha’s phrase— “intertstitial intimacy.”Yeats’s dividedness on the matter of the Sidhe, she notes, is analogous to the riven political consciousness of subject peoples in a colonial situation. A frequent presenter at ACIS conferences, Kathleen Heininge contributed a chapter on Frank McGuinness to Stages of Mutability (2003).

We close this issue with “Radharc ar gCúl / A Backward Glance,” which welcomes four thankful reconsiderations of Vivian Mercier’s 1962 intertwining of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literatures, The Irish Comic Tradition. James M. Cahalan, author of the Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (1989), introduces these short essays by noting Mercier’s role in creating Irish Studies as we know it. Mercier’s study, he finds, “is a ‘secondary’ source that became primary.” Indeed, the 1962 book anticipated such later critical frameworks as Cultural Studies and the new historicism. Three accounts of Mercier’s lasting influence follow. In the first, the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin recalls the polymath Mercier—her stepfather—both as an intellectual presence and as a Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí 7 Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí 8 loving member of her family. She recalls Mercier as continually surrounded by books— volumes that bore witness not only to his scholarship, but also to his gracious, expansive nature. The most recent of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s collections is The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001). Next, Anthony Roche— who, before he was the author of such influential theater criticism as Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (1995), was Mercier’s doctoral student in California—notes the refreshing interdisciplinarity that The Irish Comic Tradition introduced to the study of Irish literature.Mercier’s work showed that Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literature had been in dialogue for centuries; and as Roche observes, later generations of Irish critics, himself included, are still in dialogue with Mercier’s foundational study. Finally, Patrick O’Sullivan, editor of The Irish World Wide series and a student of humor himself in his 1994 article “The Irish Joke,” gives a far-ranging autobiographical account of his own relationship to Mercier’s text—gratefully concluding that Mercier’s book taught him “that there were ways of being Irish that were intelligent, secular, nonsectarian, kindly, warm, human, and fun.”
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