Attitudes of
Anglo-Irish Writers
to the Irish Language
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Gerdine van Essen 0152285
16 March 2006
Supervisor: Bart Jaski, 2nd supervisor: Roselinde Supheert
University of Utrecht, Doctoraal Celtic Studies
2
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my parents, who have had continuous faith in me
throughout the writing process of this thesis.
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“Ar bhealach agus ar bhealach eile bhíomar ag leigint an tsaoil dínn agus ag
fulaing na h-aindise, práta againn cor-uair agus cor-uair gan fair ‘nár
mbéalaibh acht milis-bhriathra na Gaeilge” (Myles Na gCopaleen, An
Béal Bocht 81).
“In one way or another, life was passing us by and we were suffering
misery, sometimes having a potato and at other times having
nothing in our mouths but sweet words of Gaelic” (tr. Patrick C.
Power, The Poor Mouth 99).

3
Contents
Acknowledgement
Contents
2
Preface
4
1. Introduction
7
3
1.1 The History of Irish Gaelic
7
1.2 Irish Literature
9
2. The Revivalists
15
2.1 Unraveling the Confusion
15
2.2 Translation
17
2.3 Dual Identity
21
2.4 The Irish Literary Revival
23
2.5 The Double Shift
26
2.6 Yeats and Synge
30
3. The Language Movement
39
3.1 The Necessity of Irish
39
3.2 The Gaelic League
43
3.3 Hyde and Pearse
46
4. Conclusion
52
Works Cited
58
Frontispiece: Cover of Abhráin Diadha Chúige Chonnacht or Religious Songs of
Connacht. Songs in Irish collected by Douglas Hyde. Published with translation
in 1906.1
1
http://www.askaboutireland.ie/show_image_gallery.do?institution_id=23&topic_id=7.
www.askaboutireland.ie. Path: Places>Galway County Library>Irish Language and Legends. Requested on
2 February 2006.
4
Preface
Many writers have dug into the period in which the Irish literary revival took
place, the nineteenth century; however, I aim to view this revival from a different
angle than usual. I want to combine the study of Anglo-Irish literature with the
study of the decline of the Irish language. Both processes coloured the nineteenth
century in Ireland and evolved at exactly the same time; thus, I expected much
research in this field to be carried out. However, it appeared that this was not the
case. Generally, the scholar who studies Anglo-Irish literature overlooks the role
of the language, whereas one who studies the course of the Irish language in the
nineteenth century forgets to link it to literature. Thankfully, there are a number
of books and essays that deal (partly) with the use of the Irish language in
literature, such as Declan Kiberd’s studies of Anglo-Irish writers and their use of
language. Often, authors like Kiberd ended up looking at their use of the
Hiberno-English dialect, linking this to the split position of the Anglo-Irish
writers. Many books with appropriate sounding titles, such as The Language of
Irish Literature (1989) by Loreto Todd, were in fact of no use for my thesis as
they focused on the use of the Hiberno-English dialect. In other words, in my
search for information on the Irish language in literature (or the lack of it) I have
stumbled upon, what I would call an obdurate denial of any connection between
the decline of the Irish language and the flourishing of Irish literature in English.
For instance, James Mac Killop is the only scholar (as far as I could find) who
critically studied W. B. Yeats’ competence in Irish and his use of that language in
his work. All in all, I have found it necessary to read and cite a large number of
studies as well as some primary works so as to give this thesis a solid basis.
In their search for common ground on which to be part of the Irish nation,
the Anglo-Irish have been of great benefit to the country. Irish patriots who
emerged between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries were
almost exclusively Anglo-Irish. The fact that Irish identity was construed and
5
promoted by many Anglo-Irish during the nineteenth century, like Thomas
Davis, who vigorously promoted the Irish language even before the Famine, is
telling in this respect. It shows Irish identity is not about blood but about the
willingness to be part of the nation.2 The typical Irish artist writing in English in
the nineteenth century would draw “his subject-matter from the myths, legends,
folklore and history of Ireland’s past rather than from contemporary Irish life”
(Mercier and Greene xvii). This split was recognised by some Anglo-Irish writers
in the late nineteenth century and they started to describe scenes from poor
peasant life in an attempt to heal the division. Yet, the Irish language as literary
mode and as vital segment of identity was overlooked.
Through this thesis I do not intend to heal the binary position of those
who have found or still find themselves in between two identities, i.e. English
and Irish. The contrast between the idea of the literary revival and the notion of
the rapid loss of the Irish language in the nineteenth century will remain.
Starting from the theory that the native language is essential in a nation’s sense
of identity, I will look at the Anglo-Irish writers in the nineteenth century and
their approach, in general and individually, to the Irish language which was
threatened by extinction, yet was still spoken widely among the poor. More often
than not, artists are part of the elites classes; however, due to the language
question, the Anglo-Irish were all the more “removed from the oppressed
peasantry which [attended] to the reservoir of national culture” (Mac Killop 139).
I will study a few Anglo-Irish writers alongside their contemporaries who,
although equal in their pioneer position, chose not to write in English but in the
Irish language. Furthermore, I intend to show the necessity of the Irish language
and the preservation of it. I think it is vital for the combined study of Irish
language and literature to be reminded of the sociolinguistic background that
caused the language to be taken over by English and that is why I have decided
to include a short history of Gaelic.
2
www.wikipedia.org.
6
This thesis will, then, try to answer the question “what was the attitude of
the Anglo-Irish writers to the Irish language”. In the nineteenth century, writers
and translators in Ireland have written mostly in English. This could be seen as a
rejection of the Irish language in itself, however; there is a range of different
relations to and views of the Irish language amongst these writers. With the
object to expose these attitudes and to find a reason for them I have written this
thesis.
In Chapter 1, I will give an outline of the history of the Irish language; the
lead-up to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Irish literature in the vernacular
before 1800 will be briefly discussed. Chapter 2 will deal with Anglo-Irish issues
in literature and with the way W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge approached the Irish
language. Chapter 3, then, will look at the attitudes towards the Irish language
within the language movement. In addition, Douglas Hyde and Patrick Pearse
will be examined to see how they viewed the Irish language in literature.
Chapter four will serve as a conclusion for this thesis.
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7
1. Introduction
1.1 The History of Irish Gaelic
Ireland’s past contains many encounters of Anglo-Irish people with the Irish
language. Gradually, Irish lost its dominance in the country and ended up in
need of restoration by the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter will briefly
explore the circumstances and factors that influenced the language in the past.
The state of the language in the nineteenth century will be examined as well as
the lead-up to it.
Anglo-Norman intervention in Ireland began in 1169, which brought
about a minor language shift to Anglo-Norman and English in urban centres of
Ireland. However, the indigenous society gained dominance soon and rural
Ireland was by the end of the fourteenth century universally Irish-speaking
because the Anglo-Norman aristocracy quickly adapted in language to the Irish
environment. There seem to have been some bi-lingual areas in Ireland in which
the aristocracy and better educated moved easily (Ó Murchú 23).
The end of this era was marked by the flight of the Earls by virtue of
English suppressions in the early 1600s. A new English-speaking landowning
class (the “planters”) took its place and Irish became the language of the rural
native population and of the labouring classes generally. Although “most
Protestants could speak (though not write) sufficient of the language to make
themselves clear to their labourers [and] were going the same way as the Old
Normans,” (Corkery, Fortunes 107) this was not enough competence to keep the
status of Irish from going into further decline. If these landlords had adopted the
Irish language, it would probably have preserved its high status.
The Penal Laws, eliminating the Irish-speaking aristocracy, were at the
heart of British policy imposed upon Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. With their restrictive effect in mind, the English politician Edmund
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Burk called the Penal Laws “a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as
well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and
the debasement, in them, of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the
perverted ingenuity of man,” in a speech held in 1792 (Burke 501). These laws
did not prohibit the Irish speak Irish, but they were laws against the practice of
the Catholic faith, limiting the Irish speaking ruling and learned classes.
In the eighteenth century, there were an estimated two million Irishspeakers, 1.5 million speaking both languages and 1.5 million English-speakers.
Of these, the two million included almost all of the poorest. Those of the Irishspeaking community who achieved prosperity began to adopt English as the
language associated with their new status.
However, although no exact figures are available, it is estimated that
between 1820 and 1835 the number of Irish-speakers increased by 500,000
because of the rapid growth of the rural poor population (Ó Murchú 26).
Unfortunately, Irish being the language of the most deprived in society, the
language was unprotected against economic disaster and was nearly wiped out
by the Great Hunger of 1846-9.
The 1851 Census was the first to include a question on language and
shows that the number of Irish speakers had declined to 1,524,286, just 25% of the
total population. The landowning class was almost purely English-speaking.
From this time onwards, outside the Gaeltacht areas it was largely the older
people who spoke Irish. Douglas Hyde illustrates this by saying in a note to The
Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland (1892) that “there are thousands upon
thousands of houses all over Ireland today [1880/90’s] where the old people
invariably use Irish in addressing the children, and the children […] answer in
English, the children understanding Irish but not speaking it” (Hyde, Necessity
35). Interestingly, from another example Hyde mentions in the same note, it
appears that even for small children in this period it was an obvious sign of low
status to speak Irish. When overheard, they changed to English (35-6). The
9
“widespread denial” (De Fréine 73) of knowledge of Irish which is shown in the
results of the 1851 Census, not only reflects the low status of the language at the
time but it also assumes a vast amount of native speakers, trying to convince the
language inspectors from the government that they had a good command of
English. Charles McGlinchey, born in 1861, in his autobiography recalls:
Down to my young days there was nothing spoken in this parish at fair or
chapel or gathering of any kind but Irish. A lot of the people in my
father’s time had some English and a few of them could read it. The
English language came in greatly in my own time and in the one
generation Irish went away like the snow off the ditches. But with the old
people it was all Irish you could hear spoken (7).
This is an account of the period shortly after the Great Famine (1845-49).
Accounts from daily life in the nineteenth century reinforce the idea that the Irish
language had reached the level of bilingualism. Thus, the English language had
settled in some people’s daily lives but there was no serious decline of Irish until
the days after the Famine.
1.2 Irish Literature
Now that we have looked at the general course of the vernacular until the end of
the nineteenth century, we may study the death of Ireland’s tradition of written
transmission. What was left was oral transmission of folk-lore, closely
intertwined with illiteracy. This paragraph will explore what precipitated the
downfall of Irish as language for literature in the nineteenth century.
As is commonly known, Irish “literature” was purely oral before the sixth
century. From this time onwards, Ireland had had two modes of transmission:
The oral and the written, but unlike other countries, it continued to use the oral
mode extensively. Even during the post-Norman period, the Irish refused to give
10
up their oral tradition, “what is termed seanchas, traditional lore of the country
side” (Ó Súilleabháin 55). This oral mode and what it produced, in this thesis, is
called “native tradition”. The native tradition existed alongside the new tradition
(i.e. the Anglo-Irish). However, literature in Irish (the written mode) fell into
disuse after the flight of the Earls in 1608 and the coming in of the English
speaking landowners.
From the flight of the Earls and the beginning of the plantations in Ireland
directly after that, poets or storytellers carrying on the Gaelic tradition lost their
former status. The Gaelic order that had fostered literary tradition disappeared.
Geoffrey Keating (c. 1569-c. 1644) was the last great writer in the Irish language.
His well known work The History of Ireland was completed in 1634. One of his
motives to write this History, says Aodh de Blácam, was the “anxiety, following
the overthrow of the Gaelic order, to rescue from oblivion the memory of the
great men of the nation, though the nation (as men feared) must die” (De Blácam
226). In addition, he wrote poems and elegies as well as some theological studies.
De Blácam explains the situation during the Penal Age:
It is true that the folk poets, with artless verse and sweet innocence of
spirit, often gave us songs of the purest inspiration; but we must not
confuse with them the more scholarly composers of the Courts of Poetry.
These latter worked upon an existing literary tradition (284).
As a result, the nineteenth century was “almost silent, having at long last been
pauperized into virtual illiteracy, and therefore the interaction between Ireland’s
two languages after the Union, and certainly after the Famine, becomes far more
one-sided than in previous centuries” (Leerssen 1). By the nineteenth century,
Ireland had been drained from its language as well as cultural expression by
English colonialism to a large extent. Before 1800, there had been two spoken
languages in Ireland, whereas the Union brought about the predominance of
English culture and language use. The “material [of this culture] reflects, by and
large, the attitudes of metropolitan intellectuals and their brand of national
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thought, rather than the attitudes of those whose first language was Irish”
(Leerssen 2). The “metropolitan intellectual” was Anglo-Irish or belonged to the
land owning class and their literary works replaced the efforts of the traditional
bardic poets.
During the Penal Age up until the end of the nineteenth century, no great
writer of Keating’s stature emerged. As we have seen in the §1.1, English gained
influence rapidly in this period. As the old literary tradition was no longer
continued by the bardic poets, the Irish language became largely the language of
the rural population. Explaining how text studies almost ceased to be carried out
in the seventeenth century, Heinrich Zimmer states: “Durch den Druch der
englischen Fremdherrscher verlor das Neuirische mit grosser Schnelligkeit an
Boden; es zog sich ganz in die Hütten derer zurück, die nicht lesen und nicht
schreiben können“ (96). Illiteracy in Ireland, which remained widespread until
the twentieth century, is a complex phenomenon. Certainly, lack of schooling in
general as well as reading and writing Irish in particular played a large role.
Douglas Hyde bitterly attacked the so-called “National Schools”3 that destroyed
the pupils’ Irish and replaced it with incorrect, “broken English” (Ó Súilleabháin
55). Also, there was the more concrete threat of starvation in the 1840s and
migration was the only option for many. This left the country with very few
native Irish people who could read at all. Ó Háinle puts it thus: “It is impossible
to imagine that in those circumstances the effort to literature in Irish could have
been maintained” (“The Novel Frustrated” 151).
Furthermore, scholars have suggested that Irish was unfit for literary
purposes for several reasons. Seán Ó Faoláin, in the 1970s, looking for a reason
why there had not been written in Irish more, puts this idea thus: “Irish seems to
me a splendid vehicle for certain subjects and excellent for what I call the hard
3
National Schools were to provide education for all children between the ages of 6 and 12 years by a
system of secular education. They reduced the illiteracy percentage but the children were taught to write
and speak English only. To ensure this, the “tally stick” was used: a piece of wood that was notched every
time a child spoke Irish. The tally stick determined the degree of punishment.
12
stuff. When it comes to more subtle intimations I wonder if there is enough
verbal variety available for the artist” (118). The Irish people of the nineteenth
century seemed to agree with this as they kept their traditional lore safe inside
the houses and rarely made any attempt to have it written down and published.
The vast majority produced material of a more intangible nature: orally
transmitted folklore. However, I do not believe that the Irish language was unfit
for use in literature. Ireland had produced a vast amount of writing in Irish
during the centuries before 1600. Furthermore, as will be argued in this thesis,
there were some who understood the necessity of cultural expression in the
vernacular. These people published for only a small audience but this audience
might have grown had it been supplied with more to read in Irish.
Anglo-Irish writers translated Gaelic literature and drew upon its heritage
in their own work. These works would become the representation of Ireland
from the nineteenth century onwards, the period which is discussed in this
thesis. Still, Ireland found itself in a socially demoralised situation, and these
Anglo-Irish translations contributed little to the improvement of the
circumstances of the Irish people. A vigorous promotion of creative writing in
Irish might have provided the people with a sense of cultural distinction or at
least the amongst the elites.
It has to be said that no works of Irish fiction were published in print
during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries (the “Penal Age”). Patrons
such as the State and the Churches had no interest in funding the printing of
fiction. Partly, this caused the number of literary works in Irish to be very small
and not a single novel or anything like it emerged (Ó Háinle, “The Novel
Frustrated” 138). Despite this situation, a small number of literary writings in
Irish did occur in manuscript form during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. An example may be given of one of the most realist works of the
eighteenth century, Cathal Ó Háinle argues, the allegory Stair Éamainn Uí
Chléirigh (The History of Éamann Ó Cléirigh) by Seán Ó Neachtain (d. 1729). He
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says Ó Neachtain gives “a true portrayal of the behaviour of many of his
contemporaries who were abandoning a good command of Irish and acquiring in
its stead an unsure competence in threadbare and inaccurate, baboon English”
(“The Novel Frustrated” 142). Having been written in the first quarter of the
eighteenth century,4 the allegory about Ó Cléirigh could have been the start of an
extensive written literature in Irish if only the circumstances had been
favourable. A very small amount of (unpublished) creative prose was produced
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries although a fairly significant amount of
interesting Irish verse continued to be written over the same period (“The Novel
Frustrated” 150).
The fact remains; however, that those who knew Irish and could write it
did not do so. The literary revival was constituted by writers who either chose to
use the medium of English or were brought up without the Irish language. It was
not until the days of Patrick Pearse (1879-1916) and Liam O’Flaherty (1896-1984),
whose successors were Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) and Brendan Behan (19231964), that some writers stepped out of the tradition of the revival and wrote in
Irish, supported by the Gaelic League. By then, writing in Irish had become
somewhat associated with bitter nationalism and anti-Englishness. However, no
publications in Irish emerged when the language was still spoken widely in
Ireland, that is, in the first half of the nineteenth century. William Carleton (17941869), having been born to an Irish-speaking family, wrote on the subject of poor
Ireland, as opposed to the popular “Big House-theme” (describing Ireland from
the view of landlords) yet decided to produce only literature in English.5 He was
a frequent contributor to “The Nation”, a weekly nationalist newspaper that used
prose and verse to promote national unity but failed to recognise the need for the
Irish language in literature. Carleton could have been a powerful promoter of the
language but it would not be until the time of Yeats that some writers awakened
4
5
The History of Eamann Ó Cléirigh was not printed and published until 1918 (Ó Háinle 141, n. 39).
In fact, the language Carleton uses is the Hiberno-English dialect.
14
to the thought that Irish literature in English was undermining all efforts to keep
the native language alive.
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15
2. The Revivalists
2.1 Unraveling the Confusion
In the introduction we have seen what tradition comprised in Ireland and to
which language it was connected; now we may look at the way this tradition was
approached and used. In the nineteenth century, ancient Ireland had become an
interest for many Anglo-Irish. Celtic medieval myths and legends were
rediscovered and admired. This new interest tended to confuse the heroic past
with the nineteenth century present. Even today, scholars overlook the difference
between the old Irish literature, oral folklore and Anglo-Irish literature.
For example, when A. C. Partridge discusses myth and legend in early
Irish literature in the vernacular, he refers to certain medieval pieces of writing
like the voyage of Máel Duin and the Táin.6 7 However, he switches easily to the
work of Samuel Ferguson (1810-86) who paraphrased the Lament of Deirdre8 in
the mid 1800s. As we shall see in §2.2, the Anglo-Irish antiquarian interest in the
Gaelic past was born at the time when the Middle-Irish manuscripts were being
rediscovered, translated and published. Of this movement Ferguson was part.
The poetry that it produced is unfit for use when studying early Irish poetry
because they are far from literal translations. By blending in these
sentimentalised and adapted poems with his discussion about early Irish
literature, Partridge confuses the Gaelic past with the Gaelic revival.
Furthermore, nineteenth century Anglo-Irish literature is not the same
thing as oral folklore. In the same discussion about the early literature in Gaelic,
Partridge includes the following ambiguous statement: “When the national poets
were driven underground, they invariably personified Ireland under secret
feminine names, such as Kathleen Ni Houlahan or Dark Rosaleen” (23). Every
Unfortunately, Partridge uses Lady Gregory’s inconsistent translation of the particular part of the Táin.
A.C. Partridge, Language and Society in Anglo-Irish Literature, 31, 37
8
Idem, 50.
6
7
16
scholar of nineteenth century Irish literature will recognise the image of “Dark
Rosaleen”. It is used by J. C. Mangan (1803-49) in his poem “My Dark Rosaleen”.
However, traditionally, the name personifying Ireland was Róisín, like in the
traditional poem “Mo Róisin Dubh”. This poem was freely translated by Mangan.
Additionally, W. B. Yeats was inspired to use the rose as a symbol for Ireland,
especially in his early poetry.9 Here, Partridge creates confusion between the
traditional Róisín and the popular Anglo-Irish poem by Mangan. The same goes
for Cathleen Ni Houlihan, which has become a famous figure in Anglo-Irish
literature. No poet was “driven underground” but the one who composed in
Irish. Partridge blends him and the Anglo-Irish poet seamlessly by simply
referring to “national poets”.
To write an accessible study about early Irish writing in the vernacular,
translation in certain cases cannot be avoided while occasional rewording is
equally unavoidable in translation. However, Whitley Stokes and John Strachan10
had a different attitude to the texts in the old manuscripts: they translated as
literal as possible and to include the original text in the edition, reducing the act
of paraphrasing to a minimum.
It is important to recognise the difference between early Irish literature and
the works the revivalists produced. However much connection there seems to be
between the two at first sight, they are ultimately each others opposites when it
comes to language, circumstance and audience. It was the intention of the AngloIrish writers to obscure any difference between English and Irish culture. From
Anglo-Irish point of view, this was a positive development. Declan Kiberd
describes the development thus:
What had been billed as the Battle of Two Civilisations11 was really, and
more subtly, the interpenetration of each by the other: and this led to the
9
See notes to p. 12 in W. B. Yeats, The Major Works.
Partridge includes one of their translations on p. 51.
11
This is the title of D. P. Moran’s contribution to Ideals in Ireland, ed. Lady Gregory.
10
17
generation of a new species of man and woman, who felt exalted by rather
than ashamed of such hybridity (Inventing Ireland 162).
Rather than neutral interpenetration, I would say, English influence was
eclipsing Irish tradition. First and foremost, Irish tradition was lost because of the
exclusive use of the English language and the abandoning of Irish in nineteenth
century literature.
Gaelic literature, in this thesis, is used to describe writing in the vernacular
whether published or in manuscript form. Irish literature is to describe the same
as Gaelic literature, Old-Irish or early Irish literature being its early variant.
Anglo-Irish literature is used to name the works in English, by Anglo-Irish
writers (a description of whom will be given in §2.3), including their translations
of early Irish writing, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
2.2 Translation
“Irish literature in the vernacular is less well known than it ought to be, mainly
because the bulk remained too long in manuscript form,” A. C. Partridge admits
(23). When these manuscripts had been recovered and published at long last in
the nineteenth century, it was not in Irish but chiefly in English as well as some
in French and German.
By virtue of his Irish Melodies, Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was a popular
writer in his own time. He composed many songs by himself whereas others he
collected and translated from Irish speaking minstrels. All his compositions are
in English. In the early nineteenth century, his songs were welcomed with great
enthusiasm by Irish and English audiences. This was for two reasons. Firstly, in
educated bourgeois Ireland there was a strong need for a heroic history of which
to be proud, as well as artistic representation. And Moore’s antiquarianism
provided for this need. The public was longing for something apolitical (or at
18
least something not explicitly political) that would distinguish it from the English
bourgeoisie. Consequently, “Moore was quickly recruited by Irish nationalism as
its most representative poet” (Deane I: 1055). Secondly, the sentimental, elegant
style and “banal rhythms” (Deane I: 1054) he used, appealed to the public ear of
his time.
The fact that these Irish songs in English were met with so much
enthusiasm can be seen as a good development and indeed, “the Ireland his
work popularised became part of the English consciousness” (Deane I: 1053).
Robert Welch, in A History of Verse Translation, also takes note of this by saying
that “in acknowledging that there was such a thing as Gaelic verse [the
translator] was signaling the existence of a separate Irish culture” (5). Yet, while
the public’s keenness and the support to cultural nationalism seemed to be
exactly what Ireland needed, the original version of the songs was lost and
replaced by English translation only. The benefit of growing awareness in
England combined with the rising national confidence in Ireland was unable to
provide any relief for the damage. Additionally, Moore, besides publishing the
Irish melodies in English, left out the music in his edition. Douglas Hyde, nearly
a century later, observes that the reluctant treatment of the Gaelic language and
the traditional music had had great negative influence throughout the nineteenth
century: “they [the English speaking] have taken away his [the Gael] language,
and with the language has gone the music, for they were bound together, and
with his music has gone his light heart” (“What Ireland Is Asking for” 56).
Furthermore, as we have seen above, a translation that is not literal is liable to
conceal the characteristics that make the original Irish.
Charlotte Brooke (c. 1755-1793) was an Anglo-Irish woman who grew up
in the Gaeltacht and learned Irish by herself. Her book Reliques of Irish Poetry
(1789) was the first printed anthology of Irish verse. It contains bardic poems no
older than the sixteenth century, as well as songs from the people (seanchas).
However, although she had an excellent knowledge of Irish, she sometimes
19
scattered Irish quatrains over twelve lines in English. To express the exact
meaning of the original she often had to paraphrase (Welch 39). Brooke herself
says several times in the preface that she did not succeed in fully capturing the
Irishness of the poems in the English language. We may look at the example of Ó
Gearáin’s “Elegy”:
Daughter of Owen! Behold my grief
Look soft pity’s dear relief!
Oh! Let the beams of those life-giving eyes
Bid my fainting heart arise,
And, from the now opening grave,
The faithful lover save!
Snatch from death his dire decree!
What is impossible to thee?
Star of my life’s soul cheering light!
Beam of mildness, soft as bright!
Do not, like others of thy sex,
Delight the wounded heart to vex! (Brooke 445)
In this thesis it is not necessary to give Ó Gearáin’s original in the Irish language
because it will not have many Irish-speaking readers; therefore a literal
translation, by Robert Welch, will be sufficient: “Look on me, daughter of Owen,
Resurrect me from the dead, Though it’s a difficult thing for you to do, O free,
joyful, regal star” (39). Although difference of nuances and tones can never be
avoided between original and translated rendition, this literal version indicates
clearly enough that Brooke’s abundance of words does not bear a proper
proportion to the directness of the appeal made in Ó Gearáin’s version, because
apart from language and meaning, rhythm and rhyme are factors that need to be
considered. As Welch puts it: “her paraphrases often [deck] out the directness,
the witty point” of the original, “despite her undeniable intelligence and
20
sensitivity, […] she could not ‘carry over’ (translate) from Irish into English, the
impression Ó Gearáin’s poem left on her mind” (Welch 39).
Larger than any other issue in Irish literature may be the morality of
translation, although not many translators seem to have been aware of this.
Moore, Brooke, as well as the translators of the late nineteenth century claimed to
have little political intention. Their only true intention was to be “to give Ireland
a general awareness of the splendor and riches of Gaelic literary antiquity and of
the residual fires of the Celtic way of life” (this is Deane’s description of Lady
Gregory and her fellow revivalists’ motivation, II: 516). Brooke’s preface to her
Reliques of Irish Poetry also speaks of a genuine motivation: “I trust I am doing
an acceptable service to my country [Ireland]” (vii).
Meanwhile, the Anglo-Irish were not liberated from the political
situation of the nineteenth century. In fact, from our present vantage point of
view, Brooke, Moore and later Lady Gregory’s choice to translate Gaelic poetry
and prose into English is an obvious political one. In the same way, I argue, it is a
political and moral decision for Partridge to use a paraphrase by writers like
Gregory or Ferguson (as briefly discussed in §2.1) where a more literal or even a
rendition of the original (i.e. in Irish) would have been possible. The works of the
Middle Irish period cannot be substituted by Anglo-Irish romantic
interpretations. Also, for a long time, translations were the only form of
published Gaelic writing, since the originals (for instance the ones Brooke
“rescued”) had never been printed in their original before or after translation. In
addition, no new works in Irish were being produced, the reasons for which have
been studied above. Anglo-Irish translations and subsequently the works of the
Anglo-Irish literary revival (to a great extent drawing upon those translations)
were the predominant literature of Ireland, and one could say that, by the end of
the nineteenth century, Gaelic literature (oral or in manuscript form) had been
replaced by Anglo Irish fictional writing. Although aiming to preserve Ireland’s
21
ancient past, Anglo-Irish literature suffocated it by becoming the new national
representation.
However, despite the binary relationship between the Irish and English
language, translation is not necessarily destructive of the original work. An
example of prolific literary translation from Irish into English may be taken from
the twentieth century. Patrick C. Power translated An Béal Bocht (1941) by Flann
O’Brien (pseud. Myles na gCopaleen12) in 1974. In the preface, Power, praising
the underlying aim of the satirical novel, expresses the need for English
translation to help this aim to be understood properly.
For too long An Béal Bocht has been inaccessible to those who were
ignorant of Gaelic or whose knowledge of the old language of Ireland was
inadequate for a proper understanding of Myles’s satirical work. It is time
that this book, which should have acted as a cauterisation of the wounds
inflicted on Gaelic Ireland by its official friends, might do its work in the
second official language of Ireland (Na gCopaleen 7).
In this way, the English language does not threaten the Irish but exists alongside
it because the first edition was in Irish. Additionally, in the case of a writer with
no knowledge of Irish, translation can be favourable. George Moore, had his
volume of short stories, The Untilled Field (1903), translated into Irish. Rather
than a necessity, it was a gesture of recognition of the language.
2.3 Dual Identity
The Irish culture and history provides a complex barrier to translation
than the Irish. During the centuries after 1600 Irish had been the language of an
oral literary tradition and Gaelic literature was scarce. If (folk) literature was
written down, it remained in the form of manuscript, even after the arrival of the
12
In fact, both names are pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan/Uí Nualláin.
22
printing press in the sixteenth century. The fact that Irish was the medium of an
oral tradition and culture means the language conflicted with the English
language, which exclusively reflected a literate culture. Therefore, as Welch has
pointed out, it was and is nearly impossible to capture in translation the
directness and witty point and other characteristics of native Irish poetry and
prose.
Not only did the literary cultures of Ireland and England oppose each
other, their political situation caused the two cultures to be in an unequal
relationship. It was this colonial relationship that resulted in a language shift
from Irish to English. The colonial and moral aspect of translation of Irish
literature causes it to be different from translations from other languages. To
some degree translation was used as a mode of reconciliation between the Irish
and the British. However, the fact that “undertakers” such as Edmund Spenser,
who mentions in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1633)13 that he had
poems translated for him, rescued the Irish literature from obscurity has an
underlying irony. After all, it had been the arrival of the planters that had
announced the death of the Gaelic order. There would have been no need for the
culture to be vindicated if it had not been taken over by the English culture in the
first place.
During the time they had been in Ireland (often centuries), the Anglo Irish
found themselves in between two cultures: the Irish and the English. Although
they developed certain distinctiveness, the Anglo-Irish identity was
characterised by duality. Joep Leerssen describes the Anglo-Irish people as:
a group of men whose historical presence is, again traditionally, situated
between two momentous English-Irish conflicts, the Battle of the Boyne
and the United Irish uprisings; whose very name invokes their status as
the hyphenated English-Irish hybrid or middle nation; and who are
therefore usually seen in a binary polarity of England versus Ireland –
13
Referred to by Welch, p. 11.
23
between, on the one hand, pro-English/anti-native-Irish Ascendancy
interests and, on the other hand, anti-English/pro-Irish national interests
(13).
Leerssen says this description depicts the Anglo-Irish in the way they are seen
traditionally (13). This thesis does not aim to study in detail how this group
viewed themselves in the nineteenth century. Also, Leerssen restricts his
definition to the time before the United Irish uprisings (1798) whereas I would
expand the period with another century; up until the 1916 Easter Rising in
Dublin Irish history had drifted upon the waves of duality. After this rebellion,
the conflict escalated and at long last the Irish Republic came into being. In the
century leading up to independence, the Anglo-Irish began to object to English
domination, but this meant they found themselves in a dual position: caught
between two histories, the English and the Irish.
2.4 The Irish Literary Revival
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Brooke and Moore started
what was then called the “Gaelic literary revival” and it was based upon
antiquarian interest. The Irish literary revival was the continuance of this,
marking, at the same time, the beginning of that large body of fiction and poetry
called Anglo-Irish literature. The term “revival” is somewhat misguiding for
what it produced was completely new: a body of Irish literature in English.
Naturally, there was a revival of interest in old Irish poetry and stories that had
long been forgotten, which resulted in the appearance of scholars of Celtic
literature. Alongside this, there was an increase of interest regarding traditional
oral tales (folk-lore), captured first hand from the native Irish by well-to-do
people like Lady Wild.
24
A number of nineteenth century Anglo-Irish writers attempted to capture
daily life of the Irish landlords and their tenants in prose. They did this by
drawing on Irish daily life, giving a realist impression. Furthermore, such writers
often made use of the Hiberno-English dialect spoken in Ireland. We may take
Maria Edgeworth’s (1767-1849) Castle Rackrent as an example. Published in
1800, it is generally seen as the start of Anglo-Irish fiction. In the voice of Thady
Quirk she writes:
‘Well, since your honour’s honour’s so bent upon it,’ says I, not willing to
cross him, and he in trouble, ‘we must see what we can do.’ So he fell into a
sort of a sham disorder, which was easy done, as he kept his bed, and no
one to see him; and I got my shister, who was an old woman very handy
about the sick (112, my italics).
Edgeworth made use of dialectical phrases and vocabulary only in the text of the
story, not in the “informing notes” which Edgeworth included herself.
Occasionally, in the text she made use of Anglicised Irish words, such as
shebean-house, from séibín, literally small mug, bad ale. In these instances there
is an explanation of the word in her notes. These are instances of subtle and
careful use of the dialect. In addition, an example of the language Carleton uses
in his tale and the scenes portrayed may be given: “But as good fiddlers, molshy,
eh? Here’s to you both, and long may ye live to shake the toe! Whoo! Bedad
that’s great stuff. Come now sit down, Jack, till I give you your ould favourite,
‘Cannie Soogah’”, William Carleton recalls Mickey McRorey speak (Irish Tales
134).
In addition to the meaning employed throughout this thesis, “AngloIrish” has been used by scholars to describe the particular brand of English
spoken in rural Ireland. Even nowadays, the term is sometimes used in that
manner. For example, Declan Kiberd has done so in his study Synge and the Irish
Language. Although Kiberd acknowledges that the correct term for this would
be Hiberno-English, “since the basic language in question is English” he decides
25
to use the term Anglo-Irish “because Synge himself and subsequent scholars of
his work have used it in this way” (Synge x). The difficulty, however, employing
the word Anglo-Irish for the English spoken in rural Ireland is that the term is
also used to describe a certain group of people, descending from Britain, who
were of the land owning or clerical class. Therefore, although historically the
terms Anglo-Irish and Hiberno-English could be exchanged as they have both
been used to denote the same thing, it would be more serving the cause of clarity
to use the word Anglo-Irish to denote the group of people only. In addition,
there is a large contrast between the social situation of the writers of the Irish
Literary Revival in the nineteenth century (the Anglo-Irish) and that of the
people who abandoned their native Irish language, and replaced it with Hiberno
English in that same period. This being so, the term Anglo-Irish is felt by the
present writer to be inappropriate for the meaning of the dialect.14
However, the use of neither the Irish dialect of English nor the Irish
“colloquial directness” (MacDonagh 34) is the focus of this thesis. My main
objective is to study the persistent lack of the Irish language in Irish literature
and more importantly the reason for this. As has been emphasised in §2.1, a
clear-cut line between the Gaelic, and even the Celtic, past and Anglo-Irish
attempts to revive it must be made. The reason for this is that the two traditions
(the Gaelic and the Anglo-Irish) have been in an uneasy relationship in the
nineteenth century. This relationship was characterised by the Anglo-Irish
tradition absorbing the Gaelic. Now that the confusion between the two
literatures has been cleared, we may look closely at Anglo-Irish intentions.
14
The majority of the people in Northern Ireland spoke an English dialect closely connected to Scots, as
they still do.
26
2.5 The Double Shift
We have established that the Anglo-Irish have been essential in bringing back the
awareness of some sort of Gaelic past within and outside Ireland. The awareness
of Ireland’s rich history was a positive contribution to the rebuilding of Ireland
as a nation and it certainly was a thankful subject for literary purposes. More
than anything, Gaelic history provided for Anglo-Irish intellectuals themselves
an identity which they could share with all other classes in Ireland, regardless of
decent or creed and which would relieve the Anglo-Irish from the split position
they had been in: their double identity. Despite Brooke’s appealing motivation
for translation from Irish into English, it is convincingly argued by Leerssen that
the underlying motive for the revived interest in the “pre-Conquest Gaelic past”
was for it to provide for the Anglo-Irish class safe auspices (11).15
However, the past could not constitute a base firm enough to provide
auspices for the millions of severely poor peasants. The illiterate and uneducated
experienced no benefit from the literary revival. In the early nineteenth century,
folk rhymes and corresponding melodies were still commonly heard in the huts
of rural Ireland but this tradition was gradually abandoned under the influence
of the dominant English language.
The two shifts that took place during the nineteenth century, i.e. the shift
from the Irish to the English language and the shift from Gaelic oral tradition to
written and printed literature in English are rarely studied together. However,
they influenced one another to such an extent that they are often inseparably
intertwined. It is often thought that the Irish literary revival was written in
English because of the low status of the Irish language in that period. However,
the dying language was not so much the reason for the literary revival as the
direct result of it. Although the Irish language found itself in a precarious state
On p. 12, Leerssen argues that this Gaelic past was “distorted by faulty scholarship and a romantic
idealization,” but not “an invention or deliberate fake”.
15
27
after the Famine, mid nineteenth century, it was still very much the language
spoken the larger part of Ireland before the Famine and provided enough reason
to be used as the medium for a written literature. In stead, the printed literature
that grew to be a large body during the nineteenth century was in English.
Furthermore, it is generally thought is that Anglo-Irish literature was
written in English because this created the largest audience at publication, i.e.
Irish, English, and possibly American. However, this is a one-sided view, since it
is not legitimate to call the reception of work of literature the reason why it was
written initially. In the same way, the wide reception of Anglo-Irish literature
cannot be the only reason why W. B. Yeats and his fellow initiators of the revival
wrote their literature in English. The Anglo-Irish writers generally spoke English
and they wrote in that same language, it is true, but what then are the motives
underlying this tendency? Is it a matter of choice or inevitability? The conclusion
of this thesis will attempt to answer these questions.
Presumably, the choice to write in English was not intrinsically
economical. To show this, I will look briefly at the notion of “choice”, as
Partridge calls it (156). Firstly, the alternative possibility overlooked here is to
write in Irish and have it translated into English to create a large audience in
England and America. As has been shown in §2.2 and elsewhere in this thesis, an
English translation can be published along with the original bardic poem. The
same goes for prose and poetry in the nineteenth century. In this way, Irish being
the native language of the island would have retained its dominant literary
status whereas English would have received a secondary position along with, for
example, French or German in which the originals would be translated.
Secondly, if the Anglo-Irish writers really had had to make the “choice” between
writing in Irish or English, they would have had to be equally fluent in both
languages. This subject will be looked at more closely when a number of authors
are studied individually. Here, it is sufficient to mention that some could not
even read Irish, while many others had received a certain amount of education in
28
the vernacular. Only the small remainder, we may take William Carleton as an
example, knew Irish as their mother tongue and yet chose to write in English.
This suggests that Anglo-Irish literature was not written in English because Irish
was almost dead, but because the Anglo-Irish knew too little of Irish to use it as
literary medium.
The Anglo-Irish, in the nineteenth century, invariably identified
themselves as Irish but they were viewed by the peasants as being from the
wrong class. Partridge simplifies the identity problem of the Anglo-Irish:
Those who wrote for the Abbey Theatre were of the Anglo-Irish class,
with the wrong political background. That a writer was of Irish birth
added nothing to his caste acceptability; he had to be a Catholic and a
republican, who nourished his rancour by recalling the Penal Laws. This
is the reason that Anglo-Irish authors, who wrote between 1890 and 1920,
became an isolated group, even if they identified themselves with the
Corkery16 desideratum of ‘Irishness’’ (158).
I do not wish to question the authors’ Irishness by examining the way they were
viewed by Irish peasants or nationalists nor by looking at the way they viewed
themselves but rather would I take into serious account their attitude to the Irish
language. The Irish language was an important element in the Irish demoralised
situation in the nineteenth century and the revival of literature in English
suggests there is a connection between the lack of Irish in literature and the
gradual decline of the language. The function of the Irish language will be
discussed further in chapter three.
The cleavage between the Anglo-Irish class and the peasants in Ireland
was felt by the Anglo-Irish writers and they realised they were isolated in their
position. During the larger part of the nineteenth century, no significant creative
literary work was produced in Ireland, except translations. By the end of this
“silent century” the Anglo-Irish had a monopoly position in the Irish literary
16
Daniel Corkery coined this term in his book Synge and Anglo Irish Literature.
29
world. There existed no Gaelic literature (i.e. literature in Irish) in this period.
The fact that they regarded themselves as isolated was because they were a
group of constant double vision. This double vision consisted of on the one hand,
focus on Gaelic past/heroism, which connected them to Ireland, and on the other
their breed and class, which distanced them from Ireland. In his essay “Double
Vision in Anglo-Irish Literature”, Andrew Carpenter equals Anglo-Irish to doubt
and questioning:
Only after a process of linguistic and social self-definition can anyone
born or bred in Ireland develop the confidence to react to the dualities of
Irish life [...] The Irish language may be seen as a pointless anachronism or
as the key to national identity (179).
Indeed, an identity unable to choose between two different cultures ultimately
undermines itself. Even while having a double view, it is still important to know
one’s own place. Carpenter’s reference to the Irish language is appropriate here,
as it brings into perspective the cleavage between the Anglo-Irish identity and
that of the majority of the Irish peasant class. The realisation of variety and
difference is not a bad thing but to try to be part of both groups may be.
Representation of the two opposing identities in one and the same Anglo-Irish
literature can be problematic. As Carpenter puts it: “The world in which one sees
two things at once becomes merely confusing, in life as in literature, without
rigorous technical control” (183).
The riots following J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907)
confirms the binary position of the revivalist authors. Although the riots did not
so much protest the lack of real Irish in the Synge’s work as the unfamiliar (and
unaesthetic, in their view) style, they display the fury of the lower Irish class
towards the Anglo-Irish around the turn of the century. Although the rioters
were urban middle class and hardly related to the characters described by Synge,
they felt patronised and mocked. In the process of self-definition, the Anglo-Irish
writers sought new styles and invented new languages for literary expression.
30
Overall, their ideas deviated from that of the writers in the Irish language. One of
the points at which the literary revivalists differed from the language movement,
was their attitude towards the Irish language. In the course of this thesis I will
examine Synge’s and others’ view and use of the language.
2.6 Yeats and Synge
How did Castle Rackrent (1800) 17 or Traits and Stories of the Irish peasantry
(1830) 18 affect the use of the Irish language? It can never be answered with
absolute certainty but it is clear that Anglo-Irish novels and stories have not
contributed to the Irish language. After all, Irish was driven further back into its
rural and oral status while the English language prevailed in these novels. There
are signs that Carleton was still attached to the Irish language (which he
mastered) as his characters speak Irish frequently. However, he “does not record
these longer statement or conversations in Irish. Conversations in English,
however, are strewn with words, phrases and even sentences in Irish,” Ó Háinle
says in his essay “The Gaelic Background” (7). As we have seen, Edgeworth used
the same manner: she too fused Irish words into her sentences. However,
needless to say, it is quite another thing to write a novel or a story in Irish than to
write it in the Hiberno-English dialect.
The question that leads from this is “why was Irish literature almost
exclusively written in English?” To find an answer to this question, I will look at
four authors individually: W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, Douglas Hyde and Patrick
Pearse. They were contemporaries and have all played their role in the
rebuilding of Ireland, using one form of Irish or other. In this paragraph, I will
focus on Yeats’ and Synge’s attitudes towards the Irish language.
17
18
Maria Edgeworth.
William Carleton.
31
The one writer who triggered the Irish literary revival was W. B. Yeats
(1865-1939). After decennia of barren literary achievement in Ireland, he started
to write his own poetry directly in English, based upon Gaelic themes. He broke
with the tradition of translating Gaelic poetry into English.
Yeats spent his early life alternately in England and Ireland. Under the
influence of his soul-mate Maud Gonne he became a “literary Fenian” (Brown
127). Yeats had to search for himself a fitting language to use and tradition to
draw upon because a body of Irish contemporary literarure (whether in Gaelic or
English) to refer to, to fall back on and to be proud of was missing. Thomas
Kinsella puts it this way: “If [an Irish poet] looks back over his own heritage the
line must begin, again, with Yeats. But then, for more than a hundred years,
there is almost total poetic silence” (209). Thus, it is true, had Yeats looked back
he would have found no writer who preceded him for a long time. However,
there were others in this period that found themselves in the same position, yet
chose to write in an altogether different fashion. As an example we may take
Tomas Ó Criomhthain (1856-1937), Yeats’ contemporary. Both writers were
pioneers with a large fertile land ahead of them. However, along with the more
aristocratic style he employed, Yeats chose a different course in that he wrote in
English. Ó Criomhthain wrote in Irish. Some of the Irish writers who came after
Yeats criticised Yeats for his tenuous connection with the Irish tradition. Austin
Clarke (1896-1974), a native speaker of Irish, felt that Yeats had denied Irish
Catholic religion as well as the Irish language in his work (Garratt 104-5). Clarke
was rightly pointing to the dilemma in Anglo-Irish literature; however, he did
not try to solve the problem as he chose not to write in Irish either. Instead, he
recreated the “bardic style” in the English language.
Yeats did not master the Irish language, although he tried to learn it in
1898 and 1899 (MacKillop 140). At the age of 34, after several earlier attempts, he
writes in a letter: “I have taken up Gaelic again, and though I shall never have
entire mastery of it, I hope to be able to get some of the feeling of the language”
32
(140).19 Apart from this, Yeats’ does not mention his competence his skills in Irish
but, presumably, it never exceeded that of what he knew through HibernoEnglish dialect or from dictionaries. However, in the “General Introduction for
My Work”, Yeats states: “I could have no more written in Gaelic than can those
Indians write in English; Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother
tongue” (385). In this fragment, recalling a dinner party, Yeats compares himself
to the Indian writers, attending the dinner at which he was giving his speech. By
doing so, he equals his Irish to the English of the Indians, which seems an
overestimation. Yet this shows how Yeats was able to excuse himself for writing
in the English language at least in front of others, while at the same time the very
fact that he felt that he should have an excuse for it, shows his awareness of the
opposing natures of the two languages. James Mac Killop argues there was no
need for this binary feeling; in his view Yeats was sufficiently Irish for using
“Irish words in English contexts” (Mac Killop 138) as opposed to the simple
dialect words employed here and there by authors such as Synge (138). Indeed,
Yeats was different from Anglo-Irish writers who had preceded him for speaking
“in his own voice” when writing, “as in The Celtic Twilight (1893) […] of
“sheogues” and “shanachies”’ (Mac Killop 138-9). However, regardless of the
voice, Yeats, knowing too little of the language, had to search for these Irish
words in dictionaries and folk-lore; which makes most of his poetry an
unfortunate attempt to Irishness. Perhaps Yeats tried to reconcile his
incompetence in the Irish language by writing on Celtic themes extensively,
reinforcing these by using an Irish-looking word here and there.
In addition, the nature of the Irish words that Yeats used shows they are
part of the duality in Anglo-Irish literature. They were selected according to their
sound or otherworldly meaning in order to be fit into Yeats’ otherwise English
poems. Sometimes their form has been invented by the poet himself, but more
frequently he used originally Irish words in Anglicised form. Usually, they are
19
Mac Killop has quoted this fragment from The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade, p. 302.
33
spelt according to their pronunciation in English, like in the case of sheogues
(síogaí in Irish, meaning elf, fairy), mentioned above.
One instance of Yeats’ use of Irish words in his poems will be examined
further. The example may be taken from Thomas MacDonagh’s Literature in
Ireland (1916).20 He gives an example of Yeats’ habit of adapting Irish words
which he takes from the poem “The Hosting of the Sidhe”. The first two lines
read:
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare (Yeats 26).
By Clooth-na-Bare, the Old Woman of Beare is meant. She is a figure connected
with the Sídhe (fairy hill) who appears in many legends.21 However, her name, in
literature, is Cailleach na Béara or Cailleach Bhéara. Here, we see MacDonagh’s
view of how the Anglo-Irish writers tended to treat the Irish language. It is clear
MacDonagh thinks the words are not used in the right way. In his eyes – and he
represents the language movement of that time - , the right way would be to
render Irish words literally. MacDonagh calls Clooth-na-Bare a “perversion”of
the Irish name. “The word clooth is not Irish; it has no meaning. Even for others
than Irish scholars the right word would have served as well” (51). The phonetic
transcription of Cailleach is /kal’∂x/ (stress on first syllable). Yeats may have
chosen the adapted form of cailleach for esthetic reasons; he may have preferred
clooth because it disposes of the unstressed syllable.
MacDonagh’s objecting to Yeats’ treatment of Irish shows how Yeats was
received by part of his audience. MacDonagh belonged to “the generation of
Irish readers who knew both Irish and English” (50). It seems the Gaelic
movement felt they were not taken seriously by some Anglo-Irish writers.
“Whether we regret it or not, we cannot ignore the knowledge of those to whom
we communicate our works,” says MacDonagh (50). In other words, he sensed
20
21
This book was published shortly after MacDonagh’s execution.
Yeats mentions this too in his own notes to the poem on p. 476 in The Major Works.
34
disrespect towards the audience as well as to the Irish language itself, in Yeats’
treatment of Irish words in his poems.
However, Yeats did not invent or “pervert” Cailleach na Béara. He did this
to many other originally Irish words, but in this case Clooth-na-Bare is the name
of a region of Lough Ia in Co. Sligo. Yeats seems to refer to both the geographical
place and the Old Woman of Beare at the same time. In his own notes to the
poem he states: “Clooth-na-Bare is evidently a corruption of Cailleac Bare”
(Yeats, “Notes” 476). Doubtlessly, MacDonagh knew about this place in Sligo
and had read Yeats’ notes, yet this did not alter his critical view of Yeats’
approach towards the Irish language. Elsewhere in the same discussion,
MacDonagh gives more examples of Yeats and some of his contemporary AngloIrish writers but he is never very positive about the treatment of Irish by these
authors. J. M. Synge is an exception to these, in MacDonagh’s view, for “his
respect for the Gaelic language. He treats Irish as he would treat French or
another language” (49). MacDonagh’s brief assessment of some Anglo-Irish
works written around the turn of the century warned against the use of Irish in
English disguise because this displayed disrespect towards the original words
and the new generation that was determined to keep Irish alive.
Irish authenticity was thought to come from subject matter, that is,
recreated material from native sources (Garrat 27). Yeats even had none of his
poems or plays translated into Irish. As a contrast, his colleague George Moore,
had one of his works translated into Irish, as mentioned in §2.2. This was for
Moore an atypical act since he hardly mingled with the language preservation
movement and had even antagonised the Gaelic League (Weaver 40). He was, on
the other hand, a fluent speaker of French and had many friends among French
artists. Whatever Moore’s motives may have been, his example serves here to
show the possibility of translation into Irish.
Yeats, as we have seen, changed Irish words and spelled them according
to their pronunciation (or even to what he incorrectly believed to be the
35
pronunciation). On the other hand, he sometimes used the correct spelling but
left out length marks. For example, Sidhe should be Sídhe. On the whole, Yeats’
use of Irish words in his work of the late nineteenth century is frequent but the
way he employs them is rather inconsistent.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was an increase of interest in
the Irish language which gave rise to a new type of “experts” with good
linguistic competence. Some of them received an education at Trinity College
and could read Irish adequately. It was a group that hardly ever used the Irish
language as a mode for communication. David Greene says even ‘the native
speakers prominent in Irish scholarship at the time had all followed the lead of
O’Donovan and O’Curry; O’Longan, O’Looney, Hennessy and Goodman22 all
did good work in various fields but never spoke the language, either among
themselves or in the outside world. It was let to the cranks, and to cranks who
knew very little living Irish. They found, however, that more and more people
were becoming anxious to know something about that living language’ (15-6).
One of those “anxious” to learn about the Irish language was John M.
Synge (1871-1909). He is part of this group in that he had a great interest in the
Irish language and in Gaelic history. Moreover, at Trinity he received the best
teaching in Celtic studies available at the time. He never used his knowledge of
the Irish language in verbal communication or letters. Synge used Irish on a few
occasions in his diary albeit in the form of very simple entries (Kiberd, Synge 2930). “Synge’s refusal to acquiesce in the public fanaticism about the language was
matched only by thorough-going privat devotion to its study” (Synge 4).
“We might argue that he was inspired by the life and literature of the Irish
language, although he set down his works in English,” says Kiberd (4). Indeed, if
we look closely at Synge’s relationship with the Irish language we see that it was
a great passion of his and that this passion extended to an obsession of life in the
22
These men marked Celtic scholarship in Ireland in the nineteenth century.
36
Gaeltacht.23 This is displayed in, amongst others, The Aran Islands24, an account
of his time amidst the Irish speaking and the rough natural environment. To call
his visits an intrusion would be unfair yet in the eyes of the natives he was an
outsider with a notebook, as with Flann O’Brien (Myles Na gCopaleen) in his
satirical The Poor Mouth:
Oftentimes now there were gentlemen to be seen about the roads, some
young and others aged, addressing the poor Gaels in awkward
unintelligible Gaelic and delaying them on their way to the field. […]
They rambled about the countryside with little black notebooks for a long
time before the people noticed that they were not peelers but gentle-folk
endeavouring to learn the Gaelic of our ancestors and ancients (48-9).
Although his work is fiction, O’Brien intended to portray both the Gaelic
speakers and the Anglo-Irish “gentle-folk” and the way they related towards
each-other. By living among the peasants Synge went even further than Yeats in
his attempt to heal the Anglo-Irish splits. Despite of this, Daniel Corkery, in his
Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, states that Synge was well aware that ‘he
could never become more to the islanders than a stranger’ (56).
What Synge found in the Gaeltacht he did not dutifully use for his literary
works as they were not written in Irish but instead in “English as Irish as it is
possible” (Kiberd, Irish Classics 603). In defending Synge, Declan Kiberd says:
When a genius of international stature finally did emerge in the Irish
language, it was too late. By the time Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille was
published in 1949, there were few readers left who could understand the
rich idiom of that book, much less the magnitude of its intellectual
achievement (Synge 6).
It is true that Ó Cadhain found only a small audience that could value his work
in Irish. However, Kiberd’s suggestion that this was, by the same token, an
23
The Gaeltacht is the collection of regions in Ireland where Irish Gaelic is spoken as a native language.
The Aran Islands (1912) being the most famous, his Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara
(1929) are devoted to the same topic.
24
37
excuse for Synge to write in English, is wrong on two grounds. Firstly, great
writers of international stature (comparable to Synge, though never as successful
as Yeats and Joyce) had occurred in the late nineteenth century, the most famous
of them being Tomas Ó Criomhthain (1856-1937), Canon Peter O’Leary (18391920) and Patrick Pearse. Secondly, in translated form, Cré na Cille has been
critically studied and continues to be and in that way it does receive the
acknowledgement it deserves.25
After the Playboy riots, in 1907, Synge wrote a letter to the Gaelic League.
Here he expresses his contempt towards the League:
Much of the writing that has appeared recently in the papers takes it for
granted that Irish is gaining the day in Ireland and that the country will
soon speak Gaelic. No opposition is more false. The Gaelic League is
founded on a doctrine that is made up of ignorance, fraud and hypocrisy.
Irish as a living language is dying out year by year – the day the last old
man or woman who can speak Irish only dies in Connacht or Munster – a
day that is very near – will mark a station in the Irish decline which will
be final a few years later (Prose 399).
This letter confirms the idea that Synge did not choose to write in English for the
matter of audience. Rather, it shows that Synge had a stubbornly distrustful view
of the language movement. It is clear that he associates the Irish language with
the past and does not have a spark of hope for it to survive in the future. Yet, it is
puzzling to read his Aran Islands or even his Playboy of the Western World in
which he creatively assimilated his observations of the Irish peasants, while
being aware of his strong feelings against literary expression in the native
language.
As opposed to Yeats, Synge had the choice in which language to write and
he chose English because he knew Irish sufficiently (as shown by Kiberd, Synge
19-53). We may see this as deliberate partiality in his view of the Irish language; a
25
Oddly, it was Kiberd himself who devoted pp. 574-89 of his Irish Classics (2000) to Cré na Cille.
38
view that did not include the necessity for extensive use of it. However, Synge’s
apparent choice may actually have been beyond his power; being part of the
Anglo-Irish class he was unable to escape his fate of being a stranger to the
people in the Gaeltacht. Consequently, this powerless feeling may have caused
him to give up on the revival of the Irish language as well.

39
3. The Language Movement
3.1 The Necessity of Irish
This study intends to show that the Irish language, in the nineteenth century,
was a vital element in Irish identity. Studying the Irish language is apt to involve
political history as it has been of dramatic influence on the use of the language. If
the use of Irish in literature is studied one is even more compelled to include
politics in the view. However, by politics I do not mean any left or right wing
position but rather the recognition of the Irish people with an identity of its own.
According to Mary C. Bromage, “historically, linguistically, spiritually,
geographically, Ireland’s composite identity underlay the struggle for her
nationhood” (22). In her essay, she explains how, in various fields, Ireland was
and is different from the rest of the world, in particular from its occupier (22).
In the early seventeenth century, the replacement by English speaking
upper-class of their Irish-speaking predecessors degraded the status of Irish and
made economically interested people prefer English to Irish (Ó Murchú 25). This
could lead to the assumption that there are no negative side-effects when one
gives up on his or her native language and opts for a dominant language.
“Languages are infinitely extendable and modifiable according to the changing
needs and conditions of the speakers” (de Freine 67). It seems that opting for a
more profitable language does not affect one’s personality and self-esteem. It
seems that language is just a mental code, used for communication and that a
language shift, at first sight, is merely driven by economical reasons. Martin
Brennan argues in A View of the Irish Language that this is not the case, for two
reasons. First, because language has the power to bring two minds together, it
must be spiritual; despite the “material nature of the symbols” it uses (71).
Second, words have their “overtones and undertones, shades of meaning, hints
of hidden depths, rich associations” that vary “from person to person” (71). In
40
addition to the second point, each language has its own way in suggesting,
highlighting and contrasting “through deploying words in sentences, its own
peculiar nuances and idioms” (71). As for the first point, languages being
essentially spiritual for uniting minds is not what this thesis aims to study or
prove. I am particularly interested in hints that point at the connection between
language and culture (a nation’s personality), so that the effect of the decline of
Irish may be evaluated.
A language provides a people with a sense of cultural “cohesion, a
consciousness of belonging and of having values in common and a
corresponding pride,” Brennan convincingly argues (76). Consequently, loss of
Irish ruptured this unity of mind and language, although it was unnoticed by
most people, and not much regretted except for the Gaelic League and the
organisations that preceded it. If a mind is disrupted from its language, it does
not know how to express itself properly and it might even be true that part of a
person’s individual personality is lost as soon as it does not have the former
means of expression. At least, a civilisation, abandoning its own distinct
language, loses part of its cultural distinctiveness. It is the loss of distinctiveness
that causes a crisis in the nation’s “mind”. In Ireland, people were pre-occupied
with recovering the Gaelic past or simply busy staying alive and did not notice
they were “[letting their] lifeblood, the language, ebb almost away” (Brennan 76).
The use of grotesque-sounding terms such as lifeblood, personality, mind
of a people to refer to nineteenth century Ireland is frequent. Douglas Hyde,
speaking of the aims of the Gaelic League in a lecture, puts it thus:
The rock that is the foundation-stone of the Gaelic League is “The Irish
mind” and “Respect for our race,” and if this is allowed to us we will
build up some certain thing upon it; but the people of the [National]
Board wanted in the past to make their own hovel on a wet bog, and
without any stone foundation under it, but contempt of the people for
41
themselves and contempt for and ignorance of their race (“What Ireland Is
Asking for” 56).
Here, Hyde calls the Irish “mind” one of the main objects of the Gaelic League.
The revival of the sense of national distinctiveness was thought to be necessary
as “contempt for and ignorance to” the people’s background prevailed. On this
foundation, the League sought to preserve and restore the Irish language. In
1904, in the preface to his edition of an Old Irish legend, Patrick M. MacSweeney
emphasises the importance of the League by stating that “to remedy [the] sad
state of the national mind has been the glorious work which the men of the
Gaelic movement have set themselves to accomplish. Were their efforts to cease
even now, they would leave an indelible impress on the national mind” (preface
v).
The struggle for language preservation was really an effort to determine
Irish identity. Declan Kiberd, in an interview by Susan Shaw Sailer, maintains
that native speakers of Irish struggled less to find identity than those who were
more or less anglicised:
One way to soften it [the issue of nationalism] is to think in terms of the
Irish language. For example I read a book recently called Mise by a man
called Colm o Gaora, an autobiography in Irish by a native speaker from
Rosmuc, who was in the Gaelic League, and was also involved in the
Uprising against the British in 1916. He made the point that nationalism -and he was a recruiter for the republicans -- never made headway in the
Gaeltacht areas because the people didn't feel any need to prove their
Irishness. They were Irish anyway. But when the recruiters went into
County Meath and County Kildare, which we still conventionally think of
as very anglicized counties, even in their terrain, even in the look of their
villages, they got lots and lots of takers. So it’s as if the idea of a flawed
mimesis, of an incomplete anglicization, co-exists with an anti-English
42
feeling and has done repeatedly as a syndrome through the last century
(“Translating Tradition”).
Kiberd, here, connects “incomplete anglicization” with contempt against
England. Although he is really speaking about the twentieth century, he is saying
what Hyde had realised back in 1892. In his lecture “The Necessity for DeAnglicising Ireland”, delivered in that year, Hyde criticises not so much the
English as the Irish, who ”[protested] as a matter of sentiment that they [hated]
the country which at every hand’s turn they [rushed] to imitate (Hyde, Necessity
119). Indeed, the people in the nineteenth century had allowed anglicisation to
take place in many areas of their lives. Most importantly, they had “[dropped]
their own language to speak English”, and “[knew] nothing about Gaelic
literature” (119). In these areas Hyde wished to see a change. He wanted to shift
the hatred against England into a collective urge to become Irish. “I argue […],
since they absolutely refuse to become the one thing, that they become the other”
(120).
In addition to this, the life of a language is closely related to its use in
literature. After all, literature is one of the main media that use language and
therefore has the power to keep it alive. This is what the Irish Free State
understood when the State publishing agency began to promote fictional
publications in the Irish language in 1925. When Ireland found itself in the
transition to a modern age, like other Western European countries, it had little to
distinguish itself with, except their pre-Norman history. Celtic history was
valuable, but hardly anything to identify with in modern times. Apart from
ancient past there was nothing to cling to. The language that used to portray that
history along with mythological additions was no longer spoken and sung
widely. For that matter, the efforts of the new Irish Free State to promote the Irish
language in the twentieth century were significant, but did not have the effect it
could have had in the nineteenth century. Around 1860, the Irish language was
43
still the mode of communication of the majority of the rural population, as has
been shown in §1.1.
Although this thesis does not aim to cover the present situation, I may
make a brief comment on it, here. As is commonly known, Irish is still a minority
language in Ireland. It would be interesting to study at length the extent to which
the people are confident with this but here it is sufficient to state that the
disunion of mind and language seems to be less harmful and significant in the
modern age than it was in the nineteenth century. Now that Ireland does not find
itself under oppression any longer and prosperity has increased extensively
throughout Ireland, people appear to make the voluntary choice of bringing up
their children in the Irish language, although they themselves may not have
learned it as their own first language. The language seems to be used by some as
a positive symbol of Irish nationality, whereas in the lives of others it is almost
totally absent. The life of the Irish language is now mostly dependent on people
who make the voluntary choice of raising their children in Irish. Despite of this,
the language is set on a gradual course of decline since English is the dominant
language for largely all purposes. As a counterbalance, Irish is taught in all
government-subsidised schools since 1922. However, fewer than 10,000 pupils
speak it as their first language (Bergen.org), which is far less than the (estimated)
figures for the nineteenth century. Therefore, in the present time it is too late to
prevent the decline of Irish by the creation of a large body of literary writing in
this language.
3.2 The Gaelic League
The language movement was largely driven by the Gaelic League. The
League had branches all over Ireland. “At its height the league had at least one
branch in every Irish county” (McMahon 122). By 1899, the Central Branch in
44
Dublin had an estimated number of 440 members (123). It is unclear how many
members the League had in total, however; given that the Central Branch was
the largest, the League clearly was not joined by many. The League published a
weekly newspaper in English and Irish from 1899-1918, called An Claidheamh
Soluis (The Sword of Light). This newspaper published stories in Irish by new
writers.
The playwright Synge viewed the Gaelic League with contempt, as we
have seen in §2.6. This is surprising, given the work the League did in the
Gaeltacht that he cared much for. From a letter written to him by one of his
acquaintances, a native Irish speaker from Inishmain, he learned:
20 Feb 99.
Dear John Synge, I am for a long time expecting a letter from you and I
think you are forgetting Inishmain altogether. […] We have a Branch of
the Gaelic League in Inishmain now and the people is going on well with
writing Irish and reading. I will write this letter in Irish but I do not know
are you able to understand it.26
Teaching native speakers to read and write their own language was the League’s
main objective. It was an initiative to protect and promote the Gaelic language
(both as mode of communication as well as literary mode) which was regarded
as the corner stone of Irish identity. The League tried to keep clear of any
political position and the restoration of the Irish mind through language was to
be done in a lawful way. However, this being the League’s official creed, within
it there were some who believed the language was one of the arguments for the
independence of the Irish nation. After all, when discussing a people’s sense of
identity and distinction it is hard to leave out politics completely. Douglas Hyde,
looking back in 1937, says the fight between two civilisations had been fought by
way of “prohibiting people from finding fault with the education their children
26
Quoted by Kiberd in Synge (47) from Synge Manuscripts, TCD, Letter 80. This letter was written wholly
in (poor) English. It is unclear if the correspondent wrote in English because he thought Synge’s Irish was
not good enough or because his own ability to write Irish was inadequate.
45
were getting” and “urging people to replace the cricket bat with the hurling
stick” (Greene 19). Thus, Ireland’s cause was not to be served using violence but,
instead, widespread campaigning was thought to be the best means.
This aim, the League’s moral obligation, was initially to be reached
through speeches and books and by certain people this was seen as the League’s
weakness. David Greene criticises the early Gaelic League for “co-operating with
all existing parties,” (19) i.e. for its lack of radical political position. Yet, in my
view, the League was the only group of people at that time targeting Ireland’s
demoralisation with the right means: the native language. If the existence of the
Irish language was not one of the most compelling arguments for independence,
i.e. the most tangible proof of “Irishness”, perhaps it was not the most useful
language for Irish literature either? In fact, I think the opposite is true: the
binding factor of the Irish people was their culture, expressed in Gaelic. These
binding elements are a strong argument for independence of the Irish nation in
the nineteenth century. The movement, seeking language-restoration, provided a
motivation for the campaign for the secession of Ireland from the UK, which
would later inspire Irishmen like Patrick Pearse to combine the fight for the
conservation of the native language with the fight for political independence.
Hyde and his fellow intellectuals, who were concerned about the rapid
decline of Irish, understood that culture is intricately entwined with language
and that giving up on the native language would be to abandon the native
culture as well. Consequently, the Irish were losing their “only defense against
total assimilation by the English-speaking world” (Brennan 78). However, the
Gaelic League was not influential enough and could not bring the shift to a halt,
because it had no support from any authorities until 1922. Meanwhile, the
League officially remained strictly outside the boundaries of politics and refused
to speak about the topic of self-government. This is understandable since
Ireland’s situation was thus precarious that it would only be helped if the issue
of national identity were targeted before actual political independence was
46
accomplished. After all, as even the politician Thomas Davis (1814-1845) realised,
“it was too absurd to seek self-government and yet to allow the people of Ireland
to be transformed into mere West Britons” (De Blaghd 33).
By the end of the nineteenth century, the cohesion of collective Irish
awareness was feeble. In addition, literature in the Irish language as an
expression of Irish culture to sustain the sense of Irishness was missing. For
emerging writers in Ireland it was a matter of how to manage in this artistically
barren period. The Gaelic League hoped for the emergence of a writer with
European stature who would write in Irish. Kiberd maintains: “the leaders of the
Gaelic movement succeeded in convincing their readers and writers that a
vibrant literature could not be founded on the propagandist play and the
patriotic lyric” (Synge 6). In this sense, the Gaelic League was less of a nationalist
movement than the writers of the Irish Literary Revival. Indeed, the works of the
modern Irish writers rarely drew upon old Irish mythology. The Gaelic League
may have been suspicious of bringing the Gaelic past alive as a counter act to the
Anglo-Irish literary movement’s obsession with it. After all, the literary
revivalists drawing upon such subject matter did so for interests of their own,
creating a safe identity for themselves (Leerssen 11). Generally, however
brilliantly written, poetry like “The Madness of King Goll”27 by Yeats did not
contribute to the reconstruction of a modern Ireland. It appears that the two
movements, the Gaelic League and the Irish literary revivalists, both strongly
concerned with Ireland’s fate, were unable to join forces because they accused
one another of using the wrong means to achieve the goal.
3.3 Hyde and Pearse
27
Published in The Major Works, (2001) p. 7-8.
47
The efforts of the Gaelic League to preserve and promote the Irish language gave
rise to some writers in Irish. Their names have been mentioned before: Ó
Criomhthain, Pearse and O’Flaherty among others. One of the most prominent
figures in the Gaelic League was Douglas Hyde. Hyde is well known for his
presidency of the Irish Free State from its foundation until his death in 1949. He
was born in 1860 in Co. Roscommon to protestant parents. Hyde was educated at
home almost exclusively but learned Irish from people living in Roscommon
cottages when he was about thirteen years old. Within his family and
environment Hyde was the only one to know Irish. His brother had told him that
his competence in Irish might grant him a sizarship at Trinity College (Dunleavy
and Dunleavy 25). Indeed, Trinity College offered Irish classes, like the ones
Synge attended, “but by “Irish” Trinity scholars meant the old language of
Continental scribes that had been deciphered by European philologists, the
classical language of bardic poets, or the literary language of chroniclers and
historians artfully inscribed on parchment or vellum” (25). Hyde was one of the
first scholars to value the modern version of Irish.
What Hyde is less known for is his poetry in the Irish language. Still, he
began his battle for Ireland’s cause as a poet. Unlike writers such as William
Carleton, Hyde used the vernacular in his own works. Hyde was the first to
encourage the use of modern Irish in literature although he himself was not a
first-rate poet but rather a collector, editor and translator. After some of his Irish
poems had been published, he occupied himself with the task of collecting folk
stories and songs from native speakers of Irish. In the introduction to his own
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888),28 W. B. Yeats remarks:
Mr Douglas Hyde is now preparing a volume of folk tales in Gaelic,
having taken them down, for the most part, word for word among the
Gaelic speakers of Roscommon and Galway. He is, perhaps, most to be
28
This collection was republished along with Irish Fairy Tales (1892) in Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland
(1977).
48
trusted of all. He knows the people thoroughly. Others see a phase of Irish
life; he understands all its elements. His work is neither humorous nor
mournful; it is simply life (7).
Yeats appreciated Hyde’s efforts; they partly worked in the same field, however;
their intentions differed. Hyde, believing the language to be a vital element in a
nation’s mind, did everything he could to keep the Irish language, both spoken
and read, alive. To achieve this he used different disciplines: editing, compiling,
composing, as well as dedicating himself to the Irish political cause. The
consistent element was the Irish language.
In contrast to the translators who had preceded Hyde, he published the
original along with a literal translation of the poems he had collected. In contrast
to Brooke, Moore, Walsh, and Lady Gregory, Hyde printed his translated poems
along with their originals. He took great effort to listen to and write down Gaelic
tales from Irish speakers in Roscommon, where “his tutors were the old women
of the bog huts and neighbours” (Dunleavy 23).
In his autobiography, Carleton gives an example of his mother’s habit of
refusing to sing the English version of songs, for example ”The Red-haired Man’s
Wife” and recalls her remark: “The Irish melts into the tune but the English
doesn’t” (Life 8). Hyde published “The Red-haired Man’s Wife” in translated
form, in his Abhráin Grádh Chúige Connacht or Love Songs of Connacht (1893),
proving that close-to-literal translation is possible if footnotes are used to
illuminate words that are rather un-English. In cases where a literal translation is
not allowed by the metre or rhyme, Hyde includes the literal translation in the
footnotes, to mention what has been lost in translation.
The poet Austin Clarke, who was a native speaker of Irish and an admirer
of Hyde’s, moved away from Yeats’ revivalist movement as it focused too much
on pre-Christian Gaelicism. He felt that Hyde had set an example in choosing a
different course within the Irish literary revival. Generally, Hyde was more
interested in later Irish culture than the old pagan period that Yeats related to.
49
However it was Hyde’s use of the Irish language in his work along with his
frequent speeches and essays in which he expressed his concern for the language
that truly marked his departure from the revivalist mainstream. Clarke was right
to notice this, only (as we have seen) he himself did not use the Irish language in
his own poetry. Robert F. Garratt, in his Modern Irish Poetry thinks this failure is
due to Clarke’s very knowledge of Irish. “The younger writers had genuine
contact with the ancient culture. Yet it was precisely this contact that convinced
post-Yeatsian poets of the impossibility of reconstructing the past” (6). However,
there is no reason to think Clarke would necessarily have failed had he written in
Irish. He and some other post-Yeatsian writers may well have been convinced of
this, but Hyde had proved the opposite to be true: that modern Irish was no
longer allied with the long-gone past and that it was worthy of being a literary
medium.
Hyde was not the only member of the Gaelic League who combined their
efforts to promote the Irish language with literary achievements in Irish. Patrick
Pearse’s (1879-1916) first encounter with the Irish language was similar to
Hyde’s. Pearse started to learn the language at the age of eleven when he went to
the Christian Brothers’ school (Vijf Verhalen 9). Pearse was editor of An
Claidheamh Soluis from 1903-1909. In 1904 he writes in the newspaper: “A nation’s
speech is, in a real sense, the creation of that nation, […] it is the largest and most
important of all the elements in which go to make up a nationality” (Pearse,
Verhalen 10).29
In §2.6, we have seen how Yeats was criticised for his adapting the
spelling of Irish words by Thomas MacDonagh. The attitude towards the Irish
language – even in poems in English – that MacDonagh was looking for could be
found in Patrick Pearse’s work, for example in his poem “I am Ireland”. Pearse
29
This remark has been cited in Pádraig H. Pearse: Vijf Korte Verhalen, 2002, with no further reference as
to the exact date of Pearse’s article in An Claidheamh Soluis.
50
had initially written the poem in Irish (“Mise Éire”, 1912), and translated it in
English himself later. The first two lines of the Irish version read:
Mise Éire:
Sine mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra. (Na Scríbhinní Liteartha 30).
The English version reads:
I am Ireland:
I am older than the Old Woman of Beare.
Great my glory:
I that bore Cúchulainn the valiant.
Great my shame:
My own children that sold their mother.
I am Ireland:
I am lonelier than the Old Woman of Beare. (Literary Writings 35).
The translation of the poem is very literal. Pearse chooses to change Chailleach
Bhéarra into the Old Woman of Beare, which is the literal meaning of the Irish
name. Yeats’ use of the anglicised form of this name in his poem “The Hosting of
the Shide” was not appreciated by the critic MacDonagh, who was a friend of
Pearse’. However, MacDonagh’s critical attitude towards Anglo-Irish literature
was not solely because of the (mis) spelling of Irish words. Rather, it seems
Pearse and other members of the Gaelic League were convinced that the Irish
literary revival opposed the aims of the League. Yeats and his comrades were
even seen as a threat to the life of the Irish language by the young Patrick Pearse:
The Irish Literary Theatre is, in my opinion, more dangerous because less
glaringly anti-national than Trinity College. If we once admit the IrishLiterature-Is-English idea, then the language movement is a mistake. Mr
Yeats’ precious ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre may, if it develops, give the Gaelic
51
League more trouble than the Atkinson-Mahaffy combination. Let us
strangle it at its birth (Kiberd, Irish Classics 602).
Pearse, who would be executed as a young man shortly after the Easter Rising in
1916, was a man with stronger ambitions for Ireland than Yeats or even the
Gaelic League. He was overt in his feelings against English colonialism. Yet, in
this quote he clearly separates the two different ways Ireland was viewed in his
time. The first view was that the Irish were English with a Gaelic past, whereas
the second view saw that the Irish were Gaelic with English influence that yet
had to be disposed of. It is the ever recurring tension between the Anglo-Irish
and the promoters of the native language.

52
4. Conclusion
Anglo-Irish literature as a term tends to stop us thinking of literature in the Irish
language and creates a clear division between Irish and Anglo-Irish, says
Kinsella (208). Indeed, it is this contrast that I have examined in this thesis, but
from an altogether different angle than is usually done. Whereas Kinsella tries to
unite the two traditions by seeking a new common term, in quest of their
connections, I arrive at a rather painful conclusion; that Irishness in literature is
nearly impossible to achieve when writing in English and that any attempt to it is
prone to be ‘instead an adjunct to English poetry [and prose] – important,
perhaps, but provincial or colonial’ (208).
Does language really make that much difference, i.e. is Irish literature in
English necessarily less Irish than that in the vernacular? It can never be
exclusively the case as can, for example, be shown from certain translations from
Irish to English – their Irishness is obvious when the translation is done with the
careful intention to retain the original voice. However, it has appeared to be very
difficult not to fall into the trap of translating in the style of the late nineteenth
century, which was customary in English poetry of that age. For literary prose
and poetry in the nineteenth century (i.e. not translations of older material) it
goes that it was primarily written in English and that Irish is only used in
exclamations and words from Hiberno English, here and there. This is a
characteristic feature of Anglo-Irish literature as well as culture: the influence of
two traditions, two languages (although Irish much less than English), two
cultures. Anglo-Irish literature is interesting for this matter, but cannot be the
same as that which is written in the Irish language.
In the struggle to prevent the loss of the Irish language, powerlessness
was felt by some from Anglo-Irish descent as well as some natives in the
nineteenth century. It was the educational policy among others that needed to be
53
changed, but first and foremost anglicisation was permitted by the people
themselves. Consequently, the elites who could write let the nation’s ‘lifeblood,
the language, ebb almost away’ (Brennan 76) by allowing literary expression to
be dominated by the English language. However, several scholars started to
tackle the threats against the Irish language by the last two decades of the
nineteenth century. Mainly through the work of the Gaelic League, alternative
views and attitudes towards the use of the Irish language in literature have been
adopted. Even halfway the twentieth century, writers willing to take Irish
seriously emerged, like Liam O’Flaherty, who translated his own Gaelic novels
into English. O’Flaherty used different intensity of emotion in either language:
“O’Flaherty filters his world to his English reader through the prism of his prose,
but it is an Irish sensibility in a borrowed language. Often, when he is excessive,
he directs his rage not at his Irish reader but on his behalf against the world”
(O’Rourke Murphy 25). This is what happens when literature is written in
different languages: the results are never identical in tone and colour.
Anglo-Irish writers cannot be blamed for their choice to write in English –
except perhaps those who were brought up in the Irish language such as
Carleton and Clarke (respectively in the early nineteenth and twentieth
centuries) – for the Anglo-Irish culture was largely based upon the English. As a
result, the Anglo-Irish culture used the English language to express itself,
whether in philosophy, science, religion or art. Yet the use of English in Irish
writing creates alienation and irony; an inherent insecurity that is not easily
redeemed. The only way to avoid this would be, ideally, to write in the Irish
language. However, one stumbles upon problems such as audience, oral vs.
written tradition as well as the pitfall of romantic antiquarianism. It was the
attitude of Douglas Hyde that dealt with these problems in a manner that was
serving the history and the future of both the life of the Irish language, people
and literature.
54
“Respect for our race” (Hyde, “What Ireland is Asking for” 56) is the main
reason why the Irish language was promoted. The different attitudes, studied in
this thesis, have been deemed by the language movement either respectful or
disrespectful. Thus, the idea of “respect” is often measured according to the use
or the disuse of the Irish language. Respect also appears to be the main motive of
every promoter of the Irish language in literature, as we have seen in the
example of Thomas MacDonagh. It was what he regarded as lack of respect
towards the Irish language that made him to be critical of the Anglo-Irish writers
in general.
Respect is difficult to assess in an academic research. This thesis can only
conclude that certain general patterns can be discerned when one looks at
nineteenth century Irish literature. In general, the Anglo-Irish writers did not
learn the Irish language. An example of this is W. B. Yeats. However, some
writers who had learned Irish, J. M. Synge for instance, did not write in Irish but
in English, using an Irish word here and there. Even if Anglo-Irish writers were
native speakers of Irish, such as William Carleton, often they did not write in
Irish but in English. Furthermore, those writers that did decide to write in the
Irish language were invariably members of the Gaelic League, such as Douglas
Hyde and Patrick Pearse, but also the less well-known Canon Peter O’Leary (Ua
Laoghaire) and Thomas MacDonagh.
There still remains the question why. It seems the inclination to choose
English over Irish was culturally inspired. Firstly, although some education in
Gaelic could be obtained at Trinity College, to learn modern Irish meant that the
Anglo-Irish had to get in intensive contact with people from the Gaeltacht. Social
segregation did not make it very easy for the Anglo-Irish upper- and clerical
class to mingle with Irish speakers. Secondly, if writers had enough knowledge
of the language and chose to use it in their work, they would be associated with
the language movement, the Gaelic League. This is partly due to the bilingual
weekly paper An Claideamh Soluis, which published new work in Irish. Although
55
the League was officially apolitical, in reality it was run by nationalists such as
Hyde and Pearse. The gap between the cultural backgrounds of the literary
revivalists and that of the writers of the Gaelic language movement appeared to
be unredeemable. With the exception of some, in the nineteenth century, writers
from an Anglo-Irish background considered the Irish language not part of their
culture.

56
Page six of Abhráin Diadha Chúige Chonnacht containing three prayers, Ortha Mhuire, A
Iosa, and A Righ na hAoine and notes. Collected by Douglas Hyde, 1906.30
30
Source: http://www.askaboutireland.ie/show_image_gallery.do?institution_id=23&topic_id=7.
www.askaboutireland.ie. Path: Places>Galway County Library>Irish Language and Legends. Requested
on 2 February 2006.
57
Page seventy-nine of “Ós Cionn na Fairrge”containing three verses of the poem “Móra
Dhuit a Thir Ár nDúthchais” By Patrick Pearse (1936). This poem was originally published
in “An Chlaidheamh Soluis” (the Gaelic League’s weekly newspaper) on 10/03/1906.31
31
http://www.askaboutireland.ie/show_topic.do?id=7&version=text_only. Path: Irish Language & Legend
Feature>Meath agus Athbheochan>Pádraig Mac Piarais. Requested on 23 February 2006.
58
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