Irish Lit. is Not Comperative

7/31/2019 Irish Lit. is Not Comperative

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M . . s essay Cana-

dian Literature Is Comparative Literature. Published in College English,it argues that studies of Canadian literature worthy of the name need toacknowledge the comparative essence of the exercise, acknowledge notonly that Canadian literature exists in many languages but is also formedby multiple cultural communities. Blodgetts essay is a pithy summary ofwhat has become known as Comparative Canadian Literature. AlthoughClment Moisan lamented in that il nexiste pas encore dtudes com-pares des deux littratures du Canada [comparative studies of the twoliteratures of Canada do not yet exist] (), by the s and s, suchstudies had become more common. e best-known examples in Frenchare MoisansPosie des frontires: tude compare des posies canadienneet qubcoise () and Comparaison et raison: Essais sur lhistoire etlinstitution des littratures canadienne et qubcoise (); in Englishthey are Blodgetts own book Conguration: Essays on the Canadian

Irish Literature is Not

Comparative Literature

Jerry White

University of Alberta

Irish literature exists as a dual entity.It was composed in two languages.

omas Kinsella, e Dual Tradition

ESC. (June/September ):

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Literatures and Ronald Sutherlands books Second Image: ComparativeStudies in Qubec/Canadian Literature () and e New Hero: Essays inComparative Quebec/Canadian Literature (). Blodgetts most recentbook, the meta-historicalFive Part Invention (published in ; see

:, , for Tracy Wares review), is very much in the tradition of thisbody of Comparative Canadian Literature. ese are some of the real highpoints of the Canadian literary criticism of the s and s, embodying acritical ethic that is textually engaged, culturally aware, and linguisticallypluralist. And they lead to very exciting developments in Canadian intel-lectual life; Moisan is a distinguished literary historian and until recentlyheaded up the Centre de recherche en littrature qubcoise at UniversitLaval in Quebec City, Blodgett helped to found both the Canadian Com-parative Literature Association and its journal the Canadian Review ofComparative Literature / Revue canadienne de littrature compare (bothof which remain committed to making Canadian literature part of world

literature, and doing so in a way that is multi-lingual), and Sutherland wasinstrumental in creating and developing a graduate program in CanadianComparative Literature at Universit de Sherbrooke.

It is tempting, then, to think of this work as a potential model for Irishliterature. ese sorts of Comparative studies seemed to be what DeclanKiberd was calling for in his manifesto Writers in Quarantine? eCase for Irish Studies, published in e Crane Bag. He insisted there thata reasonable Irish Studies needed to be bilingual, so that its practitionerscould deal with texts in both Irish and English in a way that recognizedthat they were basically part of the same tradition. is essay shares a greatdeal with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks call for a Comparative Literaturethat integrated the best aspects of Area Studies. Writing inDeath of A Dis-cipline, the book-length version of her Wellek Library lectures, shecalled for a next step that would work to make the traditional linguisticsophistication of Comparative Literature supplement Area Studies (andhistory, anthropology, political theory and sociology) by approaching thelanguage of the other not only as a eld language.[] We must take thelanguages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather thanas objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropoli-tan migrant (). is sort of sanctioned ignorance is a recurring complaint

J W isAssociate Professor

of Film Studies at the

University of Alberta and

Editor of the Canadian

Journal of Irish Studies

/ Revue canadienne

dtudes irlandaises. He

is the author ofOf is

Place and Elsewhere: e

Films and Photography

of Peter Mettler(TorontoFilm Festival / Indiana

UP, ), editor of

e Cinema of Canada

(Wallower Press, ),

and co-editor (with

William Beard) ofNorth

of Everything: English-

Canadian Cinema Since

(University of

Alberta Press, ).

Anne MacCarthy discusses this article in her bookIdentities in Irish Literature,especially on pages and . I gave this book a mostly negative review

in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies / Revue canadienne dtudes irlandaises. (Fall ), ; nevertheless, writing that review started me thinking aboutsome of these issues.

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of Irish-language activists, who often feel they are portrayed as toiling insome arcane, eccentric pursuit, whereas everyone knows that the realaction is in English (even though Article of the Constitution of Irelandspecically identies Irish as therstlanguage of the Republic). One of the

more eloquent expressions of this frustration comes from the Belfast poetGearid Mac Lochlainn, whose poem Aistriuchin reads in part:

Amanna, ironn t tuirseachde chluasa falsa ireannacha.Finssamh an monoglota deir leatIt sounds lovely. I wish I had the Irish.Dont you do translations?

Iad ag stnadh orm go mrshileachmar a stnfadh ar an corr a chuireannmchompord de chinal orthu.Iad ssta go bhfuil s thart

ssta go bhfuil an le Barla ag teacht i mo dhiaidhle cpla scal grina chuirdh riteach ar an snag seo san oche

Sometimes, you get tired of talkingto lazy Irish ears. Tiredof self-satised monoglots who say

It sounds lovely. I wish I had the Irish.Dont you do translations?

ere they are, gawping at me, wide-eyed,like Im some kind of odd-ball

just rolled out of lingo-land,

making them all uneasy.And how glad they are when its overglad the English poet is up nextwith a few jokes to smooth overthe slight hitch in the evening ()

(Translated by Frankie Sewell and Gearid Mac Lochlainn)

Translation is actually a very interesting issue in this poem. e lines in Irishlines read mar a stnfadh ar an corr a chuireann / mchompord de chinalorthu, a literal version of which would be something close to as one wouldstare at an odd bird, whos putting / a kind of discomfort upon them. Sewell andMac Lochlainn, however, transpose this to like Im some kind of odd-ball / justrolled out of lingo-land, / making them all uneasy. e English version, then,emphasizes the degree to which monoglot Anglos consider Irish to be weirdand vaguely annoying and seems to be speaking directly to the monoglots in a

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Creating disciplines that move beyond this centralization of the cul-tural assumptions of a monoglot Anglophone elite is not an easy task, asMac Lochlainn, Kiberd, and Spivak know all too well. Such work is notencouraged by a system which ignores the fact that writers of Irish and

English live on the same small island and share the same experiences(: ), Kiberd writes; his essay, like Spivaks book, emits ambitionand frustration in equal measure. It scarcely bears recounting that Kiberdhas since emerged as Irelands most esteemed literary critic, having livedup to his idealism in this Crane Bagessay with books in both English(Synge and the Irish Language,Imagining Ireland,Irish Classics) and Irish(Idir Dh Chultr) that deal with both of the primary linguistic traditionsof Ireland.

But what I want to do here overall is explain why the comparativemodel, although highly useful in some ways, is nally not right for studiesof post- Irish literature. e crucial dierence between the problems

of, say, Canadian and Irish bilingualism is that the former has a sort of eviltwin in the form of a separatist movement of long standing, while the latteris a crucial if largely symbolic part of Irish identity. Gluaiseacht CheartaSibhialta na Gaeltachta [the Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement], after all,was a civil rights movement; it was not seeking to establish a ConnemaraRepublic, any more than the American civil rights movement after whichit was partially modeled was seeking to establish a separate country for

bitter, angry way. But the Irish version, which lacks any equivalent of the epithetlingo-land, stresses the unspoken Anglo confusion; the Anglos in the audienceare made uncomfortable by what their inability to understand the language, in

a classic Irish grammatical construction, is putting upon them (t brn orm,for instance, means I am sad, but it literally means sadness is upon me). MacLochlainn, then, is bitter in English; he sounds more understanding in Irish.

An anonymous reader pointed out that if I was dealing with a more histori-cally broad period of literary history, I would surely need to address NormanFrench and Latin in addition to Irish. Indeed, ils N Dhuibhnes playMilseogan tSamhraidh (Baile tha Cliath: Cois Life, ), set during the Famine, endswith the line Mr: Pater noster, que es in caelis go dtaga do rocht, go ndan-tar do thoil ar an talamh mar a dhantar ar neamh. r n-arn laethil tabhairdinn inniu agus n lig sin i gcath Sed libera nos a malo. Sed libera nosa malo. Amen (). Furthermore, Kinsella writes about the Norman presencein Ireland as well, noting that Within a hundred years of their arrival [in theth century] great walls were being built around New Ross, a town that nowseemed to rival Dublin in status, and a long lively poem in Norman French

survives to celebrate the event. Within another hundred years the transitionalFrench-speaking period had passed, and there are the rst traces of Irish poetryin the English language: pious, comic, delicate, powerful (: xxiv).

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African Americans. But the degree to which Comparative Canadian Lit-erature has taken up this cultural and arguablynationaldierence betweenEnglish-Canadian and Qubec literature varies somewhat. Acknowledgingthat works in both English and French dealt with alienation and frustration

in the s and s, Sutherland writes that:It can safely be said, therefore, that French-Canadian and Eng-lish-Canadian novels of the twentieth century have traced asingle basic line of ideological development, creating a wholespectrum of common images, attitudes and ideas. ey havedone so for the most part independently, each in its own soli-tude, but obviously we have twin solitudes. In eect, recallingMarius Bewleys statement that writers dene nationality, itbecomes evident that French Canadians and English Cana-dians are much more alike than many spokesmen have everdared to suspect. Aside from language, it is quite probable thatthere are at the moment no fundamental cultural dierences

between the two major ethnic groups of Canada. (: )

Blodgett is more pessimistic about this separation than Sutherland, writ-ing that:

If it is true that the present eort to unify Canada could in factleave it in pieces, we should cultivate a co-operative separat-ism that would prevent the kinds of ideological unity that theinternational and centrist schools seek. Good fences, I believe,do indeed make good neighbours. In rhetorical terms, then,any model that implies similarity through metaphorical con-

junction is exactly the model that obscures those distinctions

e term Gaeltacht refers to regions in the Republic of Ireland that have beenidentied as being at least percent Irish-speaking and which are subsidizedby the government with the aim of keeping them that way. e largest Gaeltachtis in County Galway, with other Gaeltacht areas existing in Counties Donegal,Mayo, Kerry, and Meath. e working assumption is that Irish is the commu-nity language in these areas; the degree to which this is actually the case varieswidely. ere are no ocial Gaeltacht areas in Northern Ireland, other than aninformal Urban Gaeltacht in West Belfast. As for the matter of an indepen-dent Gaeltacht, Desmond Fennell has argued for a radically decentralized Irishgovernment; part of his argument included proposals for a sort of home rulefor Gaeltacht areas. See especially his essay Gaeltacht agus Impirilachas,Comhar. (), (translated as e Gaeltacht and Imperialism, in hisbookBeyond Nationalism [Dublin: Ward River Press, ], ). See alsohis pamphletsIarchonnact Began (Dublin: Iarchonnachta , ) and Take

the Faroes for Example: e argument for self-government in the provinces andthe gaeltacht(Dublin: Pobal Teoranta, ) for more detailed proposals forGaeltacht government.

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that are necessary to the elaboration of both the francophoneand anglophone literatures. (: )

Moisan is more pessimistic still, writing that:

Quoi quil en soit des nombreuses querelles autour de leur

existence ou de leur inexistence, on peut armer au dpartquil y a deux littratures canadiennes, lune dexpressionfranaise, lautre dexpression anglaise. Il faut dire galementque dans la pratique ces deux littratures se sont ignores la fois au niveau de la critique, de lhistoire et de la crationelle-mme. ()

[Although there are numerous arguments as to their existenceor inexistence, one can conrm o the top that there are twoCanadian literatures, one French and the other English. Itsnecessary also to say that in practice these two literaturesignore each other, at the level of criticism, history, and of

creation itself.]

Blodgett and Moisan, I believe, are closer to the mark than Sutherland;indeed, Blodgett seems to be explicitly responding to Sutherlands desireto downplay the cultural dierences between Anglophones and Franco-phones. For while such dierences between English- and French-speak-ing Canadians may appear minor in comparison to the those they havewith American, British, or French writers, they are not absent. Sutherlandknows this, although clearly he wishes that it was not the case, in a waythat recalls Kiberds desire for a more bilingual Irish Studies; Blodgettand Moisan are more resigned to the fact of separation and see it as ameans to become aware of dierences between literary traditions, a pathwhich is just as potentially fruitful as a desire to nd similarities betweentraditions.

e degree to which these sorts of dierences are not completelyabsent, and to which the Irish model really is dierent from the Canadianone, can be seen via the matter of bilingual writers. Canadian literature hasfew gures whose work in both French and English is equally distinguished.ere are some exceptions. e Qubcoise novelist and essayist NicoleBrossard has written essays in English and has also translated some of herown work into English (a collection of this work was recently publishedas the bookFluid Arguments). Despite these forays, though, Brossard isknown mostly as part of Quebecs French-language literature; her pres-ence in English is throughforays, not a part of her work equally centralas her work in French. Novelist and essayist Nancy Huston is probably

The degree to

which these

sorts of

differences are

not completely

absent, and to

which the Irishmodel really is

different from

the Canadian

one, can be seen

via the matter of

bilingual

writers.

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the best-known example of someone who writes in French and Englishwith equal renown. But Huston, based in Paris, is actually an example ofthe intermediary between the global and the local, a gure that ClaudioGuilln writes es una de las guras tradicionales de comparatismo ()

[is one of the traditional gures of comparatism]. Guilln writes of thisgure that Bilinges o multilinges fueron sin disputa, en tiempos anti-guos o modernos, numerosos entornos urbanos, en cuya existencia nohace falta insistir aqula Vilna en que creci y estudi Czaslaw Milosz,la Alejandria de Cavas, la Praga de Kafka, o aquel Estrasburgo demasiadoneoclsico que en decepcion un poco al joven Goethe () [osewho are bilingual or multilingual were, without question, in both ancientand modern times, in numerous urban contexts, a reality whose existencewe do not have to stress herethe Vilnius where Czeslaw Milosz grewup and studied, the Alexandria of Cavas, the Prague of Kafka, or theformerly all-too-classical Strasbourg which in was somewhat disap-

pointing to a young Goethe.]. Beckett embodies this sort of bilingualism,an approach to language that helps to link a national literature to the world.Guilln mentions Beckett in his considerations of bilingualism, seeinghim as a rare example of someone at home in two languages; he writes

[E]l equilingismo , o dominio idntico de dos medios lingsticos decomunicacin, salvo excepciones, como Samuel Beckett, es rarsimo. Y esde notar que Beckett no es ante todo poeta () [[E]qui-lingualism oridentical command of two linguistic forms of communication, aside fromexceptions like Samuel Beckett, is rare. And it is notable that Beckett isnot primarily a poet.].

Indeed, such concerns echo Hustons distinction between les vrais etles faux bilingual writers (she places herself in the second camp). In heressayNord perdu, she writes that:

Les vrais sont ceux qui, pour des raisons gographiques, his-toriques, politiques, voire biographiques, (rejetons de diplo-mates), apprennent ds lenfance matriser deux langues la perfection et passent de lune lautre sans tat dmeparticulier. Il arrive, bien sr, que les deux langues occupentdans leur esprit des places asymtriques : ils prouvent parexemple un vague ressentiment envers lunelangue dupouvoir ou de lancienne puissance colonial, langue impose lcole ou dans le monde du travailet le lattachement pourlautre, langue familiale, intime, charnelle, souvent dissocie

de lcriture. ()

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[e real ones are those who, for geographical, historical, orpolitical, which is to say biographical reasons (lets leave dip-lomats aside), perfectly learn from childhood two languagesand move from one to the other without any soul-searchingdoubts. It can happen, of course, that the two languages

occupy an asymmetrical place in their minds: they experi-ence, for example, a tension between onethe language ofpower or of the former colonial regime, a language imposedat school or in the world of workand the attachment to theother, a familial, intimate, carnal language often separate fromwriting.]

is is the sort of bilingualism that predominates in Irish literature.Decrying the separation of literature written in Irish and literature writ-ten in English, Kiberd asserts that e absurdity of this division becomesacutely apparent in any attempt to study the work of such writers as Patrick

Pearse, Brendan Behan, Flann OBrien, or Liam OFlaherty, all of whomwrote with facility and fame in both languages (: ), presumably,as Houston would write, sans tat dme particulier. ils N Dhuibhne isan example of a younger writer who does likewise. e bilingual writer is,in short, simultaneously well-established in Irish literature and studiouslyignored in Irish literary studies. Canadian literary traditions, on the otherhand, really do, more or less, exist in the quarantine that Kiberd decries,

joined from time to time (and even then tentatively) by a genuinely cosmo-politan gure like Huston. Canada and Qubec do call for a comparativeapproach, as Blodgett and Moisan acknowledge explicitly and Sutherlandbasically accepts. But with Irish literature, such an approach would meannot just splitting apart a single if bilingual tradition but sometimes splittingapart the oeuvres of individual authors. Do we really need a ComparativeStudies of Liam OFlaherty in order to deal with the relationship betweenthe Irish-language short stories ofDiland novels likeFamine? Of coursethis is not what happens, or what should. e ever-present possibility,though, is that material written in Irish by an author is simply ignored, ordealt with in translation as though it had been written in English (this isactually less true of the work of OFlaherty, on which one can quite easilynd articles by scholars such as William Daniels, Tmas de Bhaldraithe,or Maureen ORourke Murphy, that deal with both the Irish- and theEnglish-language elements of his work). In this way, Irish literary studiesare lamentably close to Blodgetts sense that e expression Canadianliterature does not seem to cover the literatures of Canada but only theanglophone part of those literatures (: ) or Moisans sense that

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On na pas encore dissip lquivoque et la confusion du terme littraturecanadienne lui-mme, qui dsigne la plupart du temps la littrature dunseul groupe ethnique () [We still havent gotten past the ambiguity andconfusion of the term Canadian Literature itself, which most of the time

refers to the literature of a single ethnic group].Much the same is true of the expression British Literature, and itmight seem tempting to oer that as a better analogy than Canada; Iwould nally, though, resist that temptation. Susan Bassnett, in her bookComparative Literature, has a chapter on Comparing the Literatures ofthe British Isles on the ways in which languages such as Welsh, ScottishGaelic, Scots, and even Manx and Cornish, make it dicult to speak ofBritish literature responsibly. She laments that the way in which Englandor English has become synonymous with Britain or British, writingthat e terminology of English literature or English Studies is usedall-embracingly, so that Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writers

are frequently included within a syllabus without any reference to theirdierent point of origin and literary traditions (). Again, the need hereis to separate and then compare, in order to avoid the homogenizing ten-dencies of an articially unied literary studies. Good fences, for Bassnett,make good syllabi. Indeed, such fences seem natural to many outsiders.Bassnett opens this chapter with an amusing anecdote about speakingwith a Slovak colleague who asked her who was doing British ComparativeLiterature. Bassnett rattled o colleagues in Britain working on variousEuropean literatures, but her Slovak colleague was confused: He simplywanted to know who was comparing the literatures of the British Isles, forthat seemed to him and his colleagues to be the proper business of Britishcomparatists. When I said there were no such programmes of researchor teaching, and that the British Comparative Literature Association hadnever even considered the question, my statement was met with disbelief (). Part of this, no doubt, is a linguistic problem similar to that of IrishStudies; there are simply not that many scholars who can deal with textsin Scottish Gaelic or Welsh (let alone Cornish). But part of it is a lingeringambiguity over the exact status of Wales and Scotland. Most citizens of theUK would be comfortable calling Wales or Scotland countries (and thatis denitely not true of English Canadians and Qubec), but at the sametime skepticism about Welsh or Scottish separatism runs fairly high (andneither country has ever had a referendum on actual independence, whileQubec has had two since ). So if Bassnett, when properly chidedby an outsider, does see the project of British literature as comparative, Isuspect that it is largely because of her ability to accept Scotland and Wales

Good fences,for Bassnett,

make good

syllabi.

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as separate culturally or nationally, even while leaving aside the questionof their future as independent nation-states. is is actually quite close tothe case of Swiss literary studies, which is similarly fragmented. FranoisJost has written that Nous prfrions employer lexpression de lettres

suisses rather than the notion of a singular Swiss literature (). Man-fred Gsteiger has been more direct, writing that the nationalism, if it stillexists, is rarely Swiss, but cantonal, especially Vaudois, as in the worksof Jacques Chessex, or Jurassien, referring to the only newly created, butlong since proposed Canton du Jura, as gloried in Alexandre VoisardsOde au pays qui ne veut pas mourir() or Romanch, as a linguistic andcultural defence (). Will Kymlicka diers with this slightly, writing that

the Swiss have a strong sense of common loyalty, despite their culturaland linguistic divisions (). But he also species that in Switzerland, asin most multination states, national groups feel allegiance to the largerstate only because the larger state recognizes and respects their distinct

national existence (). I do not think Irish speakers require a similarlyexplicit acknowledgement of dierence in order to feel allegiance to thelarger state or to identify as Irish. As with the Canadian case, this senseof very intense cultural separation is where a Swiss analogy with Irishliterature breaks down. For while there are undoubtedly cultural dier-ences between, say, the Connemara Gaeltacht and Dublin, they are notthe same sort of dierences that exist between Scotland and England, oreven between the Swiss cantons of Ticino (Italian-speaking) and Zurich(German-speaking). omas Kinsellas work in editing e New Oxford

Book of Irish Verse, one of the most explicit and high-prole calls I know offor a multilingual approach to Irish literature, traces out just this sense ofIrish literature as both linguistically diverse and basically unied (and thusnot quite the same as lettres suisses). In the introduction to that workhe famously wrote that It should be clear at least that the Irish traditionis a matter of two linguistic entities in dynamic interaction, of two majorbodies of poetryasking to be understood togetheras functions of a sharedand painful history (: xxvii; emphasis added).

What I have been sidestepping so far, of course, is the very real nationaldierence that exists in Ireland: that between those who identify as Britishand those who identify as Irish. at the conict in Northern Ireland isessentially about national identity is practically inarguable; although it ispopularly represented as a CatholicProtestant binary, arguments about

Romansch, of course, is a linguistic and not cantonal identity (although Ro-mansch is spoken mostly in the canton of Graubnden, where percent of thepopulation speaks the language), but the point is well taken here.

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the true nature of the Eucharist are not what sustain Northern violence.While I do not want to get into the back-and-forth of the debates amongnationalist and revisionist historians in Irish Studies, it is worth notingthat in literary studies, arguments from the Unionist (or anti-nationalist)

side of the fence are often couched in the language of inclusion, not com-parison. John Wilson Foster, a Belfast-born critic recently retired from along career at the University of British Columbia, summed up the basicsof such an analysis in a review essay on the Field Day Pamphlets, a seriesof seminal interventions sponsored by the theatre company founded byBrian Friel and Stephen Rea, that paved the way for the canon-creating,now ve-volumeField Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Foster ended upparticipating in the editorial work on this anthology, although he saw FieldDays ideology generally as too narrow in its understanding of Irishness,and wrote that he accepted to do so as long as the all-Ireland anthologyreected the strong Scottish and English dimensions of Northern literary

culture (). Resisting the conation of Loyalist extremism with North-ern Protestant culture, he writes that:

I echo Tom Paulins regard for the dialects and languages ofIreland [Paulin had written a Field Day pamphlet calledA New

Look at the Language Question, in support of serious consid-eration of the English spoken in Ireland], but suggest we studythem without yoking them to a political prescription. I echoDeclan Kiberds call for the study of unionist culture, but letits positive as well as negative guises be studied, and byIrish,indeed anti-unionist, students of culture. And I echo SeamusDeanes summons to dissolve the mystique of Irishness, but Ichallenge him to initiate this necessary task by seeking to dis-

solve through understanding the negative mystique of UlsterProtestantism. In [philosopher Rihcard] Kearneys otherwiseilluminating pamphlet, unionist mythology receives one sen-tence, and whereas nationalism is a tradition unionism is a

camp (whose tents he no doubt wishes were folded). If myown summons seems one-sided, that is because critics of non-nationalist background have reciprocated in advance to theextent that they are sympathetic students of that Anglo-Irishliterature dominated since Joyce by Catholic and national-ist writers. ()

ere are eeting echoes here of Moisans lament that the two Canadianliteratures do not speak to each other. But like Kiberds assessment of theplace of literature in Irish, Fosters call here is for inclusion of Northern

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Protestant/Unionist experience in all its complexity, not for its studyalongside Irish literature. Like Kiberd, Foster sees Unionism as part of

Irish culture, a part that is too often ignored by ill-equipped critics or his-torians. ese discussions of both Irish-language and Protestant/Unionist

writing are very close, then, to what Joseph Pivato writes about in his essayMinority Writing and Comparative Literature. Pivato is mostly interestedin the ambiguous place of Canadian writers who work in Italian, Icelandic,Ukranian, etc. Summing up his position he says that It is a paradox of theethnic writer that he or she has a central role in our culture by speakingfrom the margins (). e cultivation of this sort of paradox is oneof the few things that Foster and Kiberd have in common in their under-standing of Irish Studies.

So rather than call for a Comparative Irish Literature, I think that itis time to honour Kiberds call for a bilingual Irish Studies, and Kinsellascall for an attention to the dual nature of Irish writing. is Irish Studies

could draw on the tools and methods of Comparative Literature; amongthe most important of these is multilingualism. is, of course, is a deal-breaker for Kiberd, who recalls that As far back as during a sym-posium at Trinity College Dublin Sean Lucy remarked with some gustothat he would take no student of Anglo-Irish literature seriously unlessthat student were bilingual. Clearly, Kiberd doesnt take monoglots veryseriously either. Kinsella has been similarly adamant, writing in his shortbook e Dual Tradition, that e Irish language is a dicult language tolearn, and has little contemporary relevance.[] A dual approach is nonethe less essential if the literature of the Irish tradition is to be fully under-stood (: ). Comparative Literature has come to consider thesesorts of approaches as essential in a way that both Kiberd and Kinsellawould no doubt nd satisfying. An ability to deal with texts in the originallanguage remains a more or less non-negotiable cost of entry into the eld;in their Quest-ce que cest le littrature compare?Pierre Brunel, ClaudePichois, and Andr-Michel Rousseau write simply that Le plus sr accs des littratures trangres est de les pratiquer dans leur langue originale() [e most reliable access to foreign literatures is to approach them intheir original language] and elsewhere write that Il faut donc se rsoudre apprendre les langues de ceux dont on veut connatre les littratures, cequi, grce aux mthodes audiovisuelles et la multiplication des contacts,devient une tche moins redoutable que par le pass () [It is thereforenecessary to resolve to learn the languages of the literatures one wishesto know, which, thanks to audiovisual methods and the proliferation ofcontacts, is easier now than in the past]. Presumably, this maxim is also

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true of non-foreign languages, as Irish is for Irish Studies scholars. isbreaks down at the undergraduate level, where professors must teachsurvey courses in World Literature that deal with texts in literally dozensof languages; command of all of these is not a reasonable expectation. But

at the professional level, there is, in Comparative Literature, an expecta-tion that in matters of ones research, a true comparatist deals with thatmaterial in its original language. It is often remarked informally that inthe absence of such command of the original, one is dealing not with aliterary issue but a translation issue (I rst heard this one-liner from Pivatoduring a lecture at the University of Alberta in ).

e fundamental reason for an ability to deal with material in originallanguages is so that questions of linguistic form can be seriously dealt with;in literature, such questions are not exclusively linguistic, but languageissues are certainly at the heart of most sustained formal analyses. In theabsence of direct access to that language, formal discussion is frequently an

inherently qualied undertaking. is may seem like old-school formalismalong the lines of Robert Frosts maxim that poetry is what is lost in trans-lation, but Irish literature actually poses some interesting problems whenit comes to important elements being lost in translation. Flann OBrien, aname likely to be on any Introduction to Irish Literature syllabus, wasfamously playful when it came to language; although he wrote mostly inEnglish (and his booksAt Swim-Two-Birds and e ird Policeman arepractically canonical in Irish Studies), this linguistic playfulness is espe-cially visible in the work he wrote in Irish. is passage from his classic

An Bal Bocht(which he signed as Myles na gCopaleen) provides a goodexample of the way that he used the language itself to satirize the placethat Irish held in the imagination of the metropolis:

A ghaela, a dirt s, cuireann s gliondar ar mo chroGaelach a bheith anseo inniu ag caint Gaeilge libhse ar anbhfeis Ghaelach seo i lar na Gaeltachta. N miste dom a r gurGael mise. Tim Gaelach mo bhaithis go bonn mo choise

Gaelach thoir, thiar, thuas agus thos. T sibhse go lir

Flann OBriens name is the proper topic of an essay unto itself. His real name isBrian ONolan or Brian Nuallin, but because he was a member of the Irishcivil service, he was not allowed to write under his own name. He signed hisEnglish-language novels as Flann OBrien. He signed An Bal Bochtas Mylesna gCopaleen. He signed his long-runningIrish Times column, e Cruiskeen

Lawn as both Myles na gCopaleen and Myles na Coppaleen. An eloquent andmelancholy explanation of OBriens nomenclatorial uidity can be found inKiberd : .

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for-Ghaelach mar an gcanna. Gaeil Ghaelacha de shliochtGaelach is ea an t-iomln againn. An t at Gaelach, beidh sGaelach feasta. Nor labhair mise, ach a oiread libh fin, aonfhocal ach Gaeilge n l a rugadh m agus, rud eile, is faoinnGaeilge fin a bh gach abairt d ndras riamh. M timid

f or-Ghaelach, n folir dinn a bheith ag pl cheist na Gaeilgeagus cheist an Ghaelachais le chile i gcna. N haon mhaith-eas Gaeilge a bheith againn m bhonn r gcomhr sa teangasin ar nithe neamh-Ghaelacha. An t a bhonn ag caint Gaeilge,ach gan a bheith ag pl cheist na teanga, nl s for-Ghaelachina chro: n haon tairbhe don Ghaelachas a leithid sin margur ag magadh faoin nGaeilge a bhonn s agus tabhairt maslado Ghaelaibh. Nl aon n ar an domhan chomh deas n chomhGaelach le for-Ghaeil fhor-Gaelacha a bhonn ag caint for-Ghaeilge Gaela i dtaobh na Gaeilge f or-Ghaela. Fgraim anfheis seo anois ar Gael-oscailt. Suas le Gaeil! Go maire rnGaeilge sln! ()

e point of the joke here is the multiple mutations and declensions ofthe noun-stemgael; this is quite a demanding grammatical exercise (asI can personally attest, having been in an Irish class at Donegals OideasGael where this passage was used). Joking about declensions, as anyonewho has read OBrien knows, is entirely in keeping with his sensibilities.Furthermore, such grammatical tomfoolery is consistent with the satireof the book overall; the prime targets here are the language puritans whotravel to the Irish-speaking regions with the belief that they can indulgetheir famously obsessive and purity-oriented approach to grammar. Whilesome of this satire is present in Patrick Powers translation, its grammati-cal aspects are lost:

Gaels! he said, it delights my Gaelic heart to be here todayspeaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic feis in the centre of theGaeltacht. May I state that I am a Gael. Im Gaelic from thecrown of my head to the soles of my feetGaelic front andback, above and below. Likewise, you are all truly Gaelic. Weare all Gaelic Gaels of Gaelic lineage. He who is Gaelic, willbe Gaelic evermore. I myself have spoken not a word exceptGaelic since the day I was bornjust like youand everysentence Ive ever uttered has been on the subject of Gaelic.If were truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the questionof the Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. ere is

no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on non-Gaelictopics. He who speaks Gaelic but fails to discuss the language

Joking about

declensions,

as anyone

who has read

OBrien knows,

is entirely in

keeping with hissensibilities.

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question is not truly Gaelic in his heart; such conduct is of nobenet to Gaelicism because he only jeers at Gaelic and revilesthe Gaels. ere is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic andtruly Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about thetruly Gaelic language. I hereby declare this feis to be Gaelically

open! Up the Gaels! Long live the Gaelic tongue! ()

Consider the use of the stem Gael in the two paragraphs. In the Powertranslation, we have Gaels, Gaelic, Gaeltacht, Gaelicism, and Gaelically. Inthe OBrien original, we have Ghaela, Gaelach, Gaeilge, Ghaelach, Gael-tachta, Gael, Gaeil, Ghaelacha, nGaeilge, Ghaelachais, Gaelachas, Gaelaibh,Ghaeil, Ghaeilge, Gaela, and Ghaela. Even the word truly makes a messof the speech, as we move fromf or-Ghaeil tofhor-Galeacha and over tof or-Ghaeilge, not to mention the fact that the baggage of the term for-ghael is lost when it is transposed to truly Gaelic. e translation useslanguage to make a joke about repetition; the original is actually a joke

about minor dierences, and the narcissism that goes along with them. isloss is not, of course, Powers fault (he is a most distinguished translator ofIrish, having also produced a renowned version of Brian Merrimans Cuirtan Mhen-Oche). English just isnt an inected language in the same way;theres no way to get it to do the things that Irish does to nouns. To saythat truly Gaelic Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic is the equivalentof OBriens for-Ghaeil fhor-Galeacha a bhonn ag caint for-GhaeilgeGaela i dtaobh na Gaeilge for-Ghaela is true in the strict sense; theonly thing missing is the joke. is bit of satire, then, is understood bya reader of the translation in broader terms than for the reader of theoriginal; because the deeply eccentric obsession with grammar is lost,these psychotic language enforcers come across as unduly obsessed withaunting ethnic purity, what with all their repetition of the word Gaelic.at is part of the story, and indeed an important part of the story, but itis not the entire story. Reading only through the dark glass of translationdoes indeed mean that some parts of the story will always be missing. Itis up to the scholar to try to provideeither in the classroom or as partof scholarship, both of which are venues where, in all but a few highlyadvanced cases, command of a language other than that of instruction orof the book/article cannot be assumeda sense of what has been lost andhow that loss connects to the work overall.

For-ghael literally means truly Gaelic, although it has become a kind of short-hand for a native Irish as opposed to an Anglo-Irish identity.

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is is not just a formal matter; to a great extent, linguistic questionsdetermine very basic parts of any canon, including the canon of Irish Stud-ies. An ability to deal with material in the original language allows a scholarto bypass the industrial apparatus of translation; the simple question of

what has and has not been made available in a published translation is notan obstacle to study. In Irish Studies the most pressing case of the canonbeing limited by the whims of translation is the longstanding unavailabilityof Mirtn Cadhains novel Cr na Cille in an English translation,even though it has been translated into Norwegian (Jan Erik Rekdals

Kirkegrdsjord appeared in ; see articles by Hinle and Rekdal).Michael Cronin made an impassioned call for such a translation in a

Irish Times op-ed, writing that it has been hailed by Declan Kiberd asan Irish classic [Kiberds bookIrish Classics devotes a chapter to it]. AlanTitley has described it as a major achievement in writing, storytelling andimagination. It is commonly held to be one of the greatest Irish novels of

the th century. And most Irish people have not read one line of it.But Cronins call is also part of a larger project to redene the useof translation away from the simple enabling of monolingual status, anenabling whose logical conclusion is the death of Irish. Indeed, in the Irish-language section of his bilingual bookletAn Ghaeilge san Aois Nua / Irishin the New Century, he distinguished between internal and external trans-lation (aistrichn inmhenach agus aistrichn seachtrach), writingthat Is an t-aistrichn seachtrach an t-aistrichn at drithe ar luchtlabhartha an Bharla agus an t-aistrichn inmhenach an t-aistrichnat drithe ar lucht labhartha na Gaeilge (: ) [External translationis a translation directed at an English-speaking audience, and internaltranslation is directed an Irish-speaking audience]. is follows a line thatCronin had already developed in his seminal historyTranslating Ire-land, and which is also developed by Maria Tymoczko in her work on thetranslation of Old-Irish and Middle-Irish texts. Tymoczko sees Kinsellastranslation of the Tin B Cailnge as a seminal example of an activelymodernizing, discursive translation, writing that his representation of

Cronins book is part of a series of short books in Irish and English about thefuture of the language, published by the Dublin-based press Cois Life. e rstwas James McCloskey, Guthanna in ag: An mairdh an Ghaeilge beo? / VoicesSilenced: Has Irish A Future?(); the Irish and English material in the book,while not identical, is quite similar. Not so with Cronins book, which has oneessay in English, and then a very dierent one in Irish, albeit on the same topic;

this is also true of Maolmhaodhg Ruaircs recent entry in the series, a highlypolemical work of linguistics calledAr ir Gramadach Nua / In Search of aGrammar().

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Irish culture, however accurate it might be, challenges the tenets, valuesand goal of Irish cultural nationalism in many respects (); clearly thisis an example ofaistrichn inmhenach, internal translation, aimed atrevising or challenging the cultural nationalism that emerged in the wake

of the end of the War of Indepencence in and seemed to calcifyduring the years of the Irish Free State ( to ). Both Cronin andTymoczko also echo translation scholar Lawrence Venuti, who has writtenthat In the case of foreign texts that have achieved canonical status in aninstitution, a translation becomes the site of interpretive communities thatmay support or challenge current canons and interpretations, prevailingstandards and ideologies ().

e crucial dierence from the Venuti schema, of course, is thatCr na Cille and the Tin, like most other texts in Irish Gaelic, are notforeign in the context of Irish Studies. But Cronin and Tymoczko areclearly longing for a translation practice that creates just these sorts of

interpretive communities, communities that challenge current canons inIreland. Indeed, Tymoczko goes on to write that In more recent theoriesof translation, writers have focused less on the function of translators asselectors/substituters, than on the function of translators as connectors/creators (). And Cronin points out in his Irish Times piece that thecreation of these connections has happened with Irish-language poetry;he writes that Whereas Irish-language poets through the medium oftranslation have enjoyed a certain public prole in recent years, Irish prosewriters have remained almost wholly invisible to a large section of theIrish reading public. He seems to be longing here for more of Guillnsguras tradicionales de comparatismo, the intermediary, only longing forit in a nationalrather than a reallycomparative context. Irish poetry hasfound its intermediary, in gures like Nuala N Dhomhnaill, who pub-lishes monolingual editions but whose bilingual editions are often veritablesymposia of playful translation practice. Her collection Pharaohs

Daughterwas translated by thirteen leading Irish poets (including SeamusHeaney), and her collection e Astrakhan Cloak(whose title is a

ats not true of every text, of course. Pdraig Siadhail, for example, remainsquite a prodigious writer of novels and essays from his home-base of Halifax(where he is the DArcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies at Saint Marys Univer-sity). His most recent book,Idir Dh r: Sceits Cheanada (Belfast: LaganPress, ) is a collection of short pieces (many written for the Irish Times)about Canada, including one about the West Edmonton Mall; his novelPeaca

an tSinsir(Indreabhn: Cl Iar-Chonnachta, ) is an academic satire set atthe ctional Ollscoil na mBunchnoc (University of the Foothills) in WesternCanada.

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play on the Irish word for translation, aistrichn) was a sort of translationexchange with Paul Muldoon, as was her collection e Water Horsewith poets Medbh McGuckian and Eilan N Chuilleanin. No compa-rable situation, with English-language writers fruitfully collaborating with

Irish-language writers to join and expand their interpretive communities,currently exists with Irish-language prose.So the real problem here is that a major part of Irish literary culture

has been left o the map; outsiders andinsiders coming to Irish literaturewill tend to get an incomplete picture of the countrys prose. In her call fora new Comparative Literature, Spivak writes that e new ComparativeLiterature makes visible the import of the translators choice (). Withonly a few exceptionssuch as high-prole translations like Kinsellas eTin or Seamus Heaneys Sweeny Astray (a version of the Middle-IrishepicBuile Suibhne) orBeowulfthis choice has been almost completelyobscured in Irish Studies; the absence of Cadhain from most discussions

of twentieth-century Irish literature is a good example of this unthinkinginattention to the ways that translation limits discourse.But if Irish Studies, as a discipline, is reliant entirely on the Irish-lan-

guage texts that have been translated into English, it is dicult to see howit will ever move forward. e discovery of emergent voices and the recov-ery of unjustly neglected ones (such as Cadhain) are important tasks forliterary critics and historians; language would seem to be a crucial toolthere. Furthermore, Irish historians, particularly those dealing with thepre-Famine era, need access to what was before the mid-s the majoritylanguage of the island. Gearid Tuathaigh made an impassioned call forhis fellow Irish historians to put aside their neuroses about the Irish lan-guage and to accept that it is an indispensable historical research tool whenhe addressed the ird Galway Conference on Colonialism in . iswas, of course, an echo of Kiberds own argument. And Tuathaighscall for students of Ireland to learn to use the islands once-majority andnow-subaltern language also shares a lot with Spivaks analysis of thecentrality of language to a revitalized Comparative Literature and to anArea Studies that seeks to move beyond complicity in cultural imperial-ism. Anticipating the protests of impracticality that she fears will followan emphasis on the learning of non-imperialist languages, Spivak writesthat ere are a few hegemonic European languages and innumerableSouthern Hemisphere languages. e only principled answer to that is:too bad (). Just as Subaltern Studies needs attention to subaltern lan-guages, Irish Studies simply needs attention to Irish, if for no other reason

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than without it, its canon will calcify, with generation after generation ofscholars re-hashing the same set of translated texts.

e matter of Comparative Literatures expectation that scholars willdeal with the reception of works by native speakers of the language of

the text is also complex. is is a long-standing practice in ComparativeLiterature; an article that dealt with Strindberg and Ibsen and failed todeal with secondary sources in Swedish and Norwegian would likely beconsidered suspect. Part of this expectation is to guarantee that scholarsare paying due attention to the place that texts have in their culture oforigin. Douwe Fokkema writes that In order to draw up a typology ofcultures, the literary scholar interested in cross-cultural studies could tryto discover, if possible with the assistance of local experts, whether thetexts in use in a certain culture are being dierentiated according to formand function by senders and recipients (). Essentially, then, this is a mat-ter of compelling scholars to ascertain any non-literary qualities (religious,

folk, etc.) that texts may have in their original culture but which may notbe immediately evident. Cronin writes along almost the exact same lines(although concerning translation as opposed to comparison), suggestingthe necessity for idirdheal ar dts idir aistrichn i rimse an chultiragus aistrichn i rmise na socha. Ciallaonn cultr sa chomhthacs seo(agus sa chomhthacs seo amhin) an oidhreacht liteartha, fhealsnach,dhiaga, pholaitiil at ag pobal ar leith i bhfoirm tacsanna (: ;emphases in original) [dierentiation rst of all between translation in therealm of the culture and translation with respect to society. Culture, in thiscontext (and in this context only), means the literary, philosophical, divine,and political heritage people have vis--vis textual forms]. Elsewhere hewrites that the reason that language is more than just language, so to speakis, [t]oisc nach bhfuil eolas ag gach uile dhuine ar gach uile theanga dbhfuil ann is lir go bhuil rl ar leith ag an aistrichn i bpolaitocht anaitheantais sa tsocha (: ) [because not every single person knowsevery single language in existence, its clear that translation has a crucialrole in the politics of identity within society]. For both Fokkema and Cro-nin, the imperative is clear: ask the people who speak the language whatthe texts in that language mean.

But while the rule about using a scholars command of the nativelanguage to avoid over-reliance on translation may seem straightforwardwhen dealing with Norwegian drama, it is clearly more complex whendealing with either linguistic traditions that span national borders. Usinga British critic writing in English when dealing with American literaturewritten in English serves no inherentpurpose. e desire to keep ones

Using a Britishcritic writing in

English when

dealing with

American

literature

written in

English serves

no inherent

purpose.

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scholarly feet close to the cultural ground is laudable; that such a goal isachieved through purely linguistic means is less clear. is is especiallyinteresting when it comes to critical texts in Irish; Kiberds work, as appliedtoAn Bal Bocht, illustrates this well. Writing in his book Idir Dh

Chultr, a work that examines the interaction between Irish and Englishin Irish literature, Kiberd argues for a strong connection between the waythat Joyce, inPortrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Brian ONolan /Flann OBrien, inAn Bal Bocht, represent the west of Ireland. Discussingrst OBriens and then Joyces portrait of middle-class nationalists whogo to the Gaeltacht, he writes:

Is dream bharaoch iad muintir na Gaeltachta sa leabhar seo,gur m a dtir ar charnadh an airgid n ar shln na teanga

ar thalamh an tSeanduine a tgadh an Coliste Gaelach indeireadh na dla, talamh a bh luachmhar i gceart an t-am aceannaodh uaidh . Ars eile t Brian Nuallin ag deanamh

aithrise ar an mid a bh le r ag Stephen Dedalus faoi luchtna tuaithe:ey can spot a false coin but they represent noadmirable type of culture. ey live a life of dull routine,the calculation of coppers, the weekly debauch and theweekly piety. (: )

[In this book, the people of the Gaeltacht are a materialisticset, more interested in accumulating money than in saving thelanguageafter all, the Irish college was built on the old mansland; furthermore, the land was right costly at the time hebought it from him. Once again, Brian ONolan was repeatingwhat Stephen Dedalus had said about country folk:

ey can spot a false coin but they represent noadmirable type of culture. ey live a life of dull routine,the calculation of coppers, the weekly debauch and theweekly piety.]

Kiberd deals with very similar issues in a chapter in his bookImaginingIreland, published in :

Anti-pastoralists like ONolan and Kavanagh were, of course,following a lead which had been given by James Joyce, whoseown views on the peasantry became even clearer with thepublication in the s ofStephen Hero, in which the main

protagonist says: e gloried peasantry seem all to me aslike one another as a peascod is to another peascod. ey canspot a false coin, but they represent no very admirable type

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of culture. ey live a life of dull routine, the calculation ofcoppers, the weekly debauch and the weekly piety. is mighthave been an account of a townland where every man has theinterchangeable name of Jams ODonnell. ForAn Bal Bochttruly is the Irish version ofOne Hundred Years of Solitude,

a book in which identities are uid and interchangeable, ascharacters are trapped in repetitive cycles of time and rainsthat pelt down without mercy. (: )

An elucidation of a Portrait-Bal Bochtconnection is accomplished inboth passages, but in quite dierent ways. e analysis in English entersinto an international comparison that is missing from the analysis inIrish, but the passage in Irish feels like more of an exercise in closely readcomparison between Irish- and English-language novels. I want, then, toremove the connection between language and criticism that might existin, as I said earlier, a study of Strindberg and Ibsen. Gearid Denvirs

bookLitrocht agus Pobal, for instance, is a work of literary history thatdeals with literature in Irish with close attention to the cultural contextof the Connemara Gaeltacht; anyone wishing to understand literature inIrish would do well to consult it. But this is not a solelylinguistic matter.Someone wanting to understand contemporary literature in Irish woulddo just as well to consult Kiberds Irish Classics, which deals, in English,with such crucial texts as Cr na Cille and the Blasket Island memoirs,both crucial inuences on the poets and novelists that Denvir is dealingwith. Furthermore, both authors devote an entire essay to Sean Riordin.e point of challenging this linguistic imperative around criticism, then,is to illustrate that while there may in Comparative Literature be aprimafacie expectation that the language of secondary literature will, to someextent, match the language of the primary literature, such an expectationis indeed not borne out in Irish literary studies. Criticism in Irish is a richand growing eld, one that should surely be consulted because it is part ofthe eld of Irish literary studies. But the consultation of criticism in Irish,even when dealing with texts in Irish, does not in itself fulll Fokkemasimperative to enlist the assistance of local experts.

Indeed, one place that this connection between culture and languageoften breaks down is in North American Aboriginal culture, as well asthe culture of recent immigrants. e degree to which a bilingual visionof Canadian identity writes out both immigrants and Aboriginal peopleshas been widely noted, and Ireland is now facing a similar reality. Writingabout the increased linguistic diversity that the recent surge of immigra-tion to Ireland has brought, Cronin notes that that if Irish is simply one

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language among others, it follows that it is more dicult to argue forspecial status for the language within the Irish state, a point that under-lines the urgency of new thinking on the maintenance of Irish and therethinking of state bilingualism in a multilingual polity (: ). Simi-

larly, Blodgett writes that both immigrant and Native histories inscribestatements about the status of language because their histories have theproblem of continuous linguistic erosion in a predominantly bilingualsociety (: ).

Does a scholar engaged with Irish Studies in the st century, then, havethe same obligation to move beyond a simple bilingualism (by drawingon, say, Romanian, or Yoruba, the languages of the two largest immigrantgroups to Ireland) that a Canadian Studies scholar has to draw upon Creeor Inuktitut? One mitigating factor in both cases is the relative paucity ofwritten texts in either linguistic-cultural conguration; there are just notthat many written texts in Cree, just as there are not that many written

texts in Irish Yoruba (to coin a phrase). Immigrant literatures in Irelandexist almost entirely in English (and that is not true in the same way inCanada, where, as I have already mentioned vis--vis Pivato, writing inGerman, Icelandic, or Ukrainian is more part of the literary heritage);contemporary Aboriginal literature in Canada mostly exists in either Eng-lish or French. No doubt oral texts in Aboriginal languages are of crucialimportance, and their histories of recording and translation make this a

very complicated eld indeed; much the same could be said of the legalnarratives of immigration which are becoming more and more contentiousin Irish political life. Indeed, these kinds of histories point once again tohow much cultural information and historical narrative is contained inthe relationships between languages; it is dicult to get a sense of the truenature of that relationship without some command ofboth languages ofthe between. So just as it makes perfect sense for someone interestedin Canadian Studies and especially interested in Aboriginal literatureto acquire some familiarity with, say, Inuktitut, or with Cree, it makesincreasing sense for someone interested in Irish Studies, and especiallyin the narratives of recent immigrants, to acquire some familiarity withthe languages of large immigrant groups. What it is absolutely essential toacknowledge, though, is that notwithstanding misplaced idealism abouthow because of globalization everyone speaks English now and doesnt that

just make everything easier for everyone, the increasingly open concept ofnational literatures that we see in both Canada and Ireland has increasedand will likely continue to increasethe need for linguistic expertise, andfor the tools of comparatism. is increased need should not actually

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represent as much of a shift for Irish Studies as some may think, for asCronin writes, An eect of the marked increase in multilingualism overthe last decade has been to make visible elements of the Irish multilingualpast so that language change is presented less as a threat to the founding

languages of the nation (to borrow a Canadian term) and more as part ofan Irish multilingual tradition that has been largely overshadowed by therivalry between English and Irish (: ).

Explaining just how split the four linguistic traditions of Switzerlandare in their literary manifestations, Beatrice Stocker asserts that there canand never will be any such thing as Swiss Literature (); I wish to stateemphatically that there is such a thing as Irish Literature. Declan Kiberdsnow decades-old call for serious recognition of the reality that this IrishLiterature exists in more than one language is still something that needsto be taken seriously. e tools of Comparative Literaturean attentionto the original language, a close engagement with the cultural context of

that language, an ability to deal with relationships among languageshavean enormous amount to oer studies of this Irish Literature and to IrishCultural Studies generally. But my proposal here is that these tools be usedfor a dierent task. I take Claudio Guillns point that Preero no decir,con otros, sin ms contemplaciones, que la Literatura Comparada consisteen el examen de las literaturas desde un punto de vista internacional.Es fundamental la contribucin palpable a la historia, o al concepto deliteratura, de unas clases y categoras que no son meramente nacionales() [I prefer not to say, as others have, without much contemplation, thatComparative Literature consists of the examination of literatures from aninternational point of view.[] e palpable contribution to history, orto the concept of literature, of classes and categories that are not merelynational, is fundamental]. Indeed, this call to get beyond an equation of

literature and nation-state explains why there can be a Swiss identitywithout a Swiss literature; much the same could be argued to be true ofCanada. But I do not believe it is true of Ireland. e languages of Ire-land have co-existed in a literary context in a way that they really do notin Canada, or in Switzerland. An Irish Studies worthy of the name willrecognize this basic linguistic fact and will adjust its disciplinary expecta-tions accordingly.

The languagesof Ireland have

co-existed in a

literary context

in a way that

they really do

not in Canada,

or in

Switzerland.

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Acknowledgements

Unless otherwise noted, the translations in this essay are my own. Manythanks to Albert Braz, Michael Cronin, Jason King, and Mary Haslam for

valuable feedback on earlier drafts.

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Irish Lit. is Not Comperative