Too "Joycean". This wasn't meant as a compliment

March 18, 2016 7:31 AM

On the day after the greatest American Irish holiday, take a moment to celebrate the fact that you can finally read the greatest Irish novel in American! Er, . . . . english!
posted by pt68 (13 comments total)

I read this for the first time a few years ago after TnaG, the Irish language broadcaster, did an adaptation of it (which doesn't seem to rate a mention at all in the article, unless I missed it). It's great - though not as great an The Poor Mouth/An Beal Bocht, which has a special place in my heart for parodying every bloody Irish language thing I read in school. (Peig! I will never forgive you, not even on my deathbed.)

At first glance the translations don't really seem to match the book's language, apart from dirtiness, but it's really hard to tell from extracts, and I don't remember it as well as I probably should.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:49 AM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

As for vanishingly few people speaking Irish, I wonder how true that is. Gaston Dorren's Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide To Europe says that this was the case, with the Irish Republic's policy of preserving it in the Gaeltacht marking it as a symbol of old tradition rather than a modern language, but that Irish has recently been invigorated by an influx of “linguistic converts” picking it up (and tensions between prescriptivist Gaeltacht traditionalists and “urban Irish” speakers playing fast and loose with the rules). Colloquially, more than a million people have started the Irish course on Duolingo (though of course, how many of them have kept at it may be much lower).

I once heard the popularity of Irish described as going in generations; i.e., if your parents are fluent in it, it's not cool, but if they're not, it's a useful cryptolect for chatting with your mates in.
posted by acb at 7:51 AM on March 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

As for vanishingly few people speaking Irish, I wonder how true that is.

It was true when I was younger (and I lived in the Gaeltacht). I think it's gotten better in the cities these days and I know a bunch of people from college who relearned it a bit when older. And I'm not sure how much of an advantage native Irish speakers have reading books like these anyway: growing up with Donegal Irish made reading a lot of Southern Irish novels really hard as the dialects can be quite different, and I've yet to see a novel that was given notes to allow for that. Regarding Gaeltacht traditionalists: no one I knew spoke like people in books - it was not at all grammatical a chunk of the time and people roll in English a lot. Especially for swearing, but there people just made the word adapt to Irish grammar which meant they rarely sounded like the English word. (For example: when you call someone a fecker, it sounds like ecker, due to exciting things Irish does with fs in certain circumstances.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:03 AM on March 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

I studied Irish for about six months, and will likely get back to it. Apparently Irish is a bit of an upswing, assisted by the fact that Irish teaching in school has gotten a lot better. But there was a documentary a few years ago (2007) called No Béarla (it's on YouTube) in which Manchán Magan traveled around Ireland speaking only Irish to test if 25 percent of the country actually speak the language, as reported, and outside of the Gaeltacht he found it was almost inevitably impossible to have even the most rudimentary conversations, despite the fact that Irish is required in Irish schools and that government institutions are required to be bilingual.
posted by maxsparber at 8:10 AM on March 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

I've never heard of this, and it sounds fantastic! Now I'm torn on which translation to go with. I'll admit "holy fuckaroni!" made me smile. I'd err on the side of fun over academic, probably...
posted by naju at 8:13 AM on March 18, 2016

Why does the New Yorker go with "Churchyard Clay" (which has a nice ring to it) over either of the two translation titles ("The Dirty Dust", "Graveyard Clay")?
posted by naju at 8:17 AM on March 18, 2016

The Irish comedian David O'Doherty had a routine in one of his shows (it's available on this recording) where he give an example of the one real-world use of having learned Irish he encountered; it was to get away with fare evasion on a tram in Germany when confronted by a multilingual ticket inspector.
posted by acb at 8:20 AM on March 18, 2016

> Why does the New Yorker go with "Churchyard Clay" (which has a nice ring to it) over either of the two translation titles ("The Dirty Dust", "Graveyard Clay")?

Probably because it has a nice ring to it, not to mention "churchyard" is a better translation of cill than "graveyard."

I look forward to reading one or both of these translations; regardless of the fact that I've studied the language, my Irish will never be good enough to read Máirtín Ó Cadhain in the original.
posted by languagehat at 9:29 AM on March 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

I’d love to read one of these translations. I first heard of the book a while back, perhaps when the earlier translation was announced, only to completely forget about it thereafter; so I’m grateful to be reminded of it via this post. Many thanks, pt68.
posted by misteraitch at 2:54 PM on March 18, 2016

On the latest Three Percent podcast episode they mentioned that they'll do an episode in a couple of months where the two hosts each read one of the two translations and then compare their experiences.
posted by Kattullus at 3:02 PM on March 19, 2016

A clever and hopeful dramatization of the state of the language is My Name Is Yu Ming.
posted by bertran at 11:06 PM on March 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

As seen on MetaFilter.
posted by languagehat at 8:43 AM on March 20, 2016

in which Manchán Magan traveled around Ireland speaking only Irish to test if 25 percent of the country actually speak the language, as reported, and outside of the Gaeltacht he found it was almost inevitably impossible to have even the most rudimentary conversations, despite the fact that Irish is required in Irish schools and that government institutions are required to be bilingual.

I always wonder about these shows. I don't doubt that far more people claim Irish than can speak it (and let us not speak of the last government appointing a minister of the Gaeltacht who couldn't actually speak Irish), but there's an awful lot of people who've had such an awful experience of it at school that they just won't speak it without a lot of drink and coaxing. I haven't spoken Irish in Ireland or to another Irish person for 20 years. I just don't have the confidence.

My years in secondary school consisted of heaving every single dialect word i used or grammatical deviation from the state norm crushed out of me. I moved there relatively old, though and I did better than very single native Irish speaker in school from my area. These, who were the product of generations of Irish speakers and for whom Irish was a first language, took the lower level Irish because they couldn't make an immediate jump to writing it properly -i.e. according to the state norm. So between that and people coming to the area during the summer months from various organizations to tell us we were doing Irish wrong I'm terrified of speaking it wrong. And people I knew in English speaking areas had equally awful experiences. So there's a lot of bitterness out there and a fair bit of deliberate forgetting.

I hope it's improved but last time I checked in with a student in secondary school (10 years ago) it didn't sound very different. My niece in primary school spends more time on religious studies than Irish. (Though in fairness, she seems to spend a lot of time on religious studies.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 12:45 PM on March 21, 2016 [2 favorites]