Gaelically Gaelic
Flann O'Brien: The Poor
Mouth, Dalkey
Archive Press, 128 pp.
Flann O'Brien published An
Beal Bocht
in 1941. Of his handful of novels
it is the only one written in Gaelic. The novel was translated into English and
published in 1973 as The Poor Mouth. The title (both
Gaelic and English) comes from a Gaelic expression--"putting on the poor
mouth"--which means to exaggerate the direness of one's situation in order
to gain time or favor from creditors.
The direness one finds here is great indeed, as is the
exaggeration. One should read
this book because its like will not be there again.
The action is set in a
fictional village in the Gaeltacht known as Corkadoragha, a place where the
suffering and poverty of the Gaelic people is pure and unmitigated. The tale is in first-person narrative
and purports to be the life story of Bonaparte O'Coonassa, a local
resident. In Corkadoragha,
according to the narrator, the torrential rains are more torrential, the
squalor more squalid, the hopelessness more utterly hopeless than they are anywhere
else in Ireland. And O'Coonassa is
not the only pessimist to be had.
The few other main characters spend most of their breath hilariously
bewailing the cruelty of what they call "Gaelic fate". Everything disastrous that occurs is
attributed to this national fate, which is normally evoked as a kind of
all-inclusive doom that both annihilates and somehow ennobles one. Gaelic fate is seen partially in the
sky and its constant downpours--"sky-crucifyings," as one character
calls them--and partially in distinction to the other, better fate enjoyed by
"the foreigners," i.e. the English. The most salient feature is a poverty that must be accepted:
to struggle against it would be foolish.
The
hardships of life in Corkadoragha have one beneficent effect, however. Because the region is known for its
exemplary destitution and backwardness, it is also judged by scholars and other
Dublin enthusiasts to have the very best, the very purest Gaelic. So the muddy hills and flooded fields
of Corkadoragha are periodically visited by culture vultures from the capital,
hoping to learn some real Gaelic and get in touch with their true roots.
The narrator tells us of the
great Gaelic feis that was organized.
The feis was a cultural festival that aimed to celebrate all things
Gaelic. Enthusiasts came from the
capital and the whole local population took part. Of course from beginning to end the festival-goers were
crucified by a nonstop downpour.
And eight of the locals died because, we learn, their weakened constitutions
couldn't stand the rigors of the folk dancing:
The dance continued until the
dancers drove their lives out through the soles of their feet and eight died
during the course of the feis. Due
to both the fatigue caused by the revels and the truly Gaelic famine that was
ours always, they could not be succoured when they fell on the rocky dancing
floor and, upon my soul, short was their tarrying on this particular area
because they wended their way to eternity without more ado.
Even though death snatched
many fine people from us, the events of the feis went on sturdily and steadily,
we were ashamed to be considered not strongly in favor of Gaelic while the
[festival] President's eye was upon us.
Various speakers give
speeches "strongly in favor of Gaelic". And here we can see O'Brien aping what he most hated about
the self-proclaimed Gaelic Revivalists: their aggressive provincialism; the
hermetic circularity of their discourse, a way of speech and thought that was
bound to strangle itself in a noose of its own design. The man elected as president of the
festival harangues the crowd:
Gaels! It delights my Gaelic heart to be here
today speaking Gaelic with you at this Gaelic feis in the centre of the
Gaeltacht. May I state that I am a
Gael. I'm Gaelic from the crown of
my head to the soles of my feet. . . .
If we're truly Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question of the
Gaelic revival and the question of Gaelicism. There is no use in having Gaelic, if we converse in it on
non-Gaelic topics. He who speaks
Gaelic but fails to discuss the language question is not truly Gaelic in his
heart; such conduct is of no benefit to Gaelicism because he only jeers at
Gaelic and reviles the Gaels.
There is nothing in this life so nice and so Gaelic as truly true Gaelic
Gaels who speak in true Gaelic Gaelic about the truly Gaelic language.
If for the culture vultures being Gaelically Gaelic means speaking
of nothing but revivalism, the true Gaels of Corkadoragha seem to define their
Gaelicism rather by the extent of their hopelessness. The ennobling character of their "Gaelic fate" is
best seen in the narrator's subtle eulogy of Sitric O'Sanassa, a beggar of the
district. O'Sanassa is admired by
both Dubliners and locals:
He possessed the very best
poverty, hunger and distress also.
He was generous and open-handed and he never possessed the smallest
object which he did not share with the neighbours; nevertheless, I can never
remember him during my time possessing the least thing, even the quantity of
little potatoes needful to keep body and soul joined together. In Corkadoragha, where every human
being was sunk in poverty, we always regarded him as a recipient of alms and
compassion. The gentlemen from
Dublin who came in motors to inspect the paupers praised him for his Gaelic
poverty and stated that they never saw anyone who appeared so truly Gaelic. . .
. There was no one in Ireland comparable to O'Sanassa in the excellence of his
poverty; the amount of famine which was delineated in his person.
O'Sanassa lives in a hole
he's dug into the side of a hill.
In the course of the tale he decides to leave the human world altogether
and live the rest of his life in a sea cave with the seals. The others try to get him to quit the
cave, but to no avail. He has his
reasons for staying:
Where he was, he had freedom
from the inclement weather, the famine and the abuse of the world. Seals would constitute his company as
well as his food. . . . It did not
appear that he would desert such a well-built comfortable abode after all he
had experienced of the misery of Corkadoragha. That was definite, he declared.
O'Brien's fictional
Corkadoragha allows the writer to get in his sights both the ridiculous posing
and capering of the revivalists and the pathetic fatalism of the Gaeltacht
peasants. Beggars, politicians,
farmers, literati--they all strut forth in their glorious folly. The Poor Mouth is an example of universal
satire, the kind of literary work the Russian critic Bakhtin has defined and
celebrated as carnivalesque. And in fact there's
something in the novel that reminds one of Rabelais. As with Rabelais, one senses the violence of O'Brien's
satire is not entirely mean-spirited: there's something celebratory in it
too. Perhaps this is why, even in
the more nationalist days of the mid-century, O'Brien's novel received much
more praise than condemnation.
O'Brien's Gaelic was
translated into English by Patrick Power.
The translation has gotten much praise, from John Updike among others:
Patrick C. Power has
performed sorcery in translating a work so specific in its allusions and exotic
in its language. Again and again,
so consistently that we come to take it for granted, Mr. Power re-creates
Gaelic music in English.
Whether or
not one can really hear Gaelic music in English I'm not sure--and I doubt
Updike can be sure either--but it's certain that one of the joys of this work
is the quirkiness of the narrator's expression. There's an infectious rhythm and verbosity in the manner of
explaining things: a wordiness that is both useless and expressive of patient
despair. Powers establishes his
tone and rhythm on the first page and never loses it. The style has similarities to that of O'Brien's English
novels, but there's something else too, something unique and, I suspect,
inimitable. How this style relates
to O'Brien's Gaelic I can only guess.
But it's definitely compelling as we have it in the English.
The Poor Mouth is published by Dalkey
Archive Press and illustrated by Ralph Steadman. The translator has provided useful footnotes to explain
certain allusions and untranslatable puns.
The likes of this book will
certainly never be there again.
Eric Mader-Lin
Order
it direct from Amazon.com.
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