The Books: The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry: Pearse Hutchinson

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

Next book on the shelf is The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Peter Fallon & Derek Mahon.

Language. Pearse Hutchinson is obsessed with language. This doesn’t set him apart, I suppose, from other Irish poets, or the Irish in general. Talk to anyone from a group of people whose language was suppressed and destroyed, and they will have serious feelings about language. But Hutchinson, who worked as a translator, and became obsessed with the Galicia region of Spain, after visiting there, as well as his contact with Catalan exiles, made language his entire life’s work. His sense of solidarity with people from other regions who also suffered similar fates as the Irish, informed and changed his poetry.

He was born in 1927. He started publishing poems pretty early, but it was his visit to Spain in the 1950s that helped him find his voice. He spoke many languages: Irish, of course, and English, but also Latin and Spanish and Italian and Dutch. He was well-traveled. He learned Catalan as well as Galician, so he would be able to read the exiled and forgotten poets of those suppressed regions. Such determination reminds me a bit of young James Joyce becoming so obsessed with Henrik Ibsen he taught himself Dano-Norwegian in order to read them in the original. Pearse Hutchinson needed to get close to the original sources, it would not do to read them in translation.

He must have had a gift for languages. He understood the underlying patterns and was able to assimilate new vocabularies and rules with ease. He had learnt Irish in school as a boy, but it was his travels that made him want to go back to Ireland, and investigate his own lost language. He immersed himself in Irish-language poetry. He began to see the connections between other lost languages and Irish.

After the formation of the Gaelic League and other Fenian-focused projects, the teaching of the Irish language became compulsory in Irish schools. Of course by that time, it was “too late”. The language had been eradicated (except for some isolated areas in the west of Ireland where Irish was still spoken – and is still spoken there today). Learning Irish in school was akin to learning Latin: useless in the everyday world, where you needed to speak English. You can imagine the Irish schoolchildren rolling their eyes at the whole thing.

He was known primarily as a translator. He was responsible for translating the work of Catalan poets into English, bringing them to the Irish (and English-speaking) public. He also published his own work. The 60s was when he started publishing for real. He wrote in Irish, as well as English, and collections of poems came out in both languages. He published through the famous Dolmen Press, mentioned here in the post about Thomas Kinsella. Hutchinson was also a radio and TV broadcaster, responsible for producing programs on RTÉ, the national network, devoted to Irish poetry and the Irish language. He published many books of his own work, and also collections of his translations of the Catalan and Galician poets who were his primary inspiration back in his youth in the 50s.

He died in 2012. He was in his 80s.

Now about his work itself. I am not familiar with all of it, and have read none of his translations. His poems can be blunt, and sometimes they have a fairy-tale-like quality. The language is always plain, simple. Not fancy. He can be a bit obvious at times, he does not pull his punches, but that is only because his anger is titanic. He doesn’t use euphemisms. He is angry at what was done to his language without his consent before he was born. He has been robbed of his birthright and he is furious. His entire life was a project in re-invigorating the dead language of his ancestors – and – if that was not possible – than creating a space where the Irish can mourn what has been lost.

So in light of all of this, the poem I will post today will be a poem about the Irish language.

A Dublin-man visits an Irish-speaking area in Ireland (called, in Irish, a Gaeltacht).

Gaeltacht

Bartley Costello, eighty years old,
sat in his silver-grey tweeds on a kitchen chair,
at his door in Carraroe, the sea only yards away,
smoking a pipe, with a pint of porter beside his boot:
“For the past twenty years I’ve eaten nothing only
periwinkles, my own hands got them off those rocks.
You’re a quarter my age, if you’d stick to winkles
you’d live as long as me, and keep as spry.”

In the Liverpool Bar, at the North Wall,
on his way to join his children over there,
an old man looked at me, then down at his pint
of rich Dublin stout. He pointed at the black glass:
“Is lú í an Ghaeilge ná an t-uisce sa ngloine sin.” ¹

Beartla Confhaola, prime of his manhood,
driving between the redweed and the rock-fields,
driving through the sunny treeless quartz glory of Carna,
answered the foreigners’ glib pity, pointing at the
small black cows: “You won’t get finer anywhere
than those black porry cattle.” In a pub near there,
one of the locals finally spoke to the townie:
“Labhraim le stráinséirí. Creidim gur chóir bheith
ag labhairt le stráinséirí.” ²
Proud as a man who’d claim:
“I made an orchard of a rock-field,
bougainvillea clamber my turf-ricks.”

A Dublin tourist on a red-quarter strand
hunting firewood found the ruins of a boat,
started breaking the struts out — an old man came,
he shook his head, and said:
“Aá, a mhac: ná bí ag briseadh báid.” ³

The low walls of rock-fields in the west
are a beautiful clean white. There are chinks between
the neat white stones to let the wind through safe,
you can see the blue sun through them.
But coming eastward in the same county,
the walls grow higher, get grey:
an ugly grey. And the chinks disappear:
through those walls you can see nothing.

Then at least you come to the city,
beautiful with salmon basking becalmed black below
a bridge over the pale-green Corrib; and ugly
with many shopkeepers looking down on men like
Bartley Costello and Beartla Confhaola because they
speak in Irish, eat periwinkles, keep
small black porry cattle, and on us
because we are strangers.

¹ “The Gaelic is less than the water in the glass.”
² “I speak with strangers. I believe it’s right to be speaking with strangers.”
³ “Ah son: don’t be breaking boats.”