Arnon Grunberg

Sandwich

Law

On Beckett in Irish – Anne Enright in LRB:

‘I am going to see Happy Days in a co-production between the Abbey and Company S.J.The script is in Irish, and this is another form of return in the endless over and back from authenticity to artifice of Irish art and Irishness. What would Beckett sound like in a language he could not speak, but which might be intuited in his use of English? It would be like bringing the work back to a time before it was started. It might make the text feel smaller – local in the wrong way. Also, it would be hard to understand, being in Irish and out in a field.
I wake in the morning and think that, despite the forecast, it might not rain. This is a disastrous kind of jinx to put on a day in the west, and very important not to voice aloud. But the fine weather holds and the crossing to Inis Oírr is calm. On the ferry, it is easy to spot two other people going to the play because they are also wearing black and we know each other from the theatre foyers of long ago. A guy in shorts and coloured raingear is handsome, like an actor, but he turns out to be a barrister with impressive Duolingo Irish. He tries it out as soon as we arrive, ordering a sandwich in Tigh Ned and the barman compliments him on his ‘Gaeilge deas’. The barman also says this fluency is a surprise coming from his old law lecturer, and there is a quick pulling down of masks in mutual amazement. So here we all are. On a short walk up to the arts centre later I meet Nicky Grene, the professor who taught me Synge in college, because where else would he be? This might sound a little sentimental, but Ireland has had one of the longest lockdowns in Europe. A country of casual encounters and chance recognitions has been deprived of this amiability, which is our cultural lifeblood, for a very long time.’

(…)

‘If you had no Irish, you might take the play as pure soundscape and be moved. Winnie is accompanied by the chirping of indifferent small birds. Now and then, the transcendent silence of the island opens to the sound of the sea and moves on again to allow some other distance in.
A few of the listeners are native speakers, others have good school Irish. My own is quite poor. When I was learning it, back in the 1970s, Gaeilgeoirs were always cross. If you knew a bit about the language, it was always the wrong bit, and anyway you were the wrong person to know it. This ready sense of affront has melted away in the decades since, but it seemed, at the time, a losing game.
My husband has no Irish at all. He has brought the text in English, so I can glance over to scan the page and pretend I understand Micheál Ó’Conghaile’s translation. I miss the cheery plosive of Winnie’s repeated ‘happy’, but the babbling is nicely convoluted and the chatter sounds natural and unaffected. Winnie’s repeated refrains are less brittle than usual. ‘An sean stíl’ conjures a less glamorous past than ‘Ah, the old style.’ ‘Á sea’ is ‘ah yes’ – already rendered as a sigh. For ‘Many mercies. Great mercies’ we get the sonorous and melancholy ‘Trócaire Dé. Mórthrócaire Dé.’ Perhaps Winnie has to mention God (Dé) because, in this language, there is no other source of mercy. She seems more pious in Irish and also more death-minded. The crick in her neck is a ‘camreilig’, meaning a twist or crook of the grave. There is nothing forced about the pathos and, in the lyricism, no sense of reach.’

(…)

‘The director, Sarah Jane Scaife, who has a long connection to the island, says that every moved stone will be put back in its original position. ‘And each one of them belonging to somebody,’ Nicky says, quoting a man who knows. On the way back, a member of the audience stops to fill a recent break at the top of one of the walls. These are so carefully, so elegantly, built that my husband says, ‘You’d want to know what you were doing, there.’ But the man is a local and he really does.
On the ferry home, the producer Anne Clarke says that Medicine, the show she is working on, opened in Galway last night and the rules on audience numbers changed at the last minute so they had two hundred in the hall – nearly half its capacity – with free seating. She watched people file in and choose where to go, and they sat together, she says. They all sat together. For a tiny moment, I think she might cry. Tom Creed, a Dublin director, is working his phone. A picture has landed of Leo Varadkar, one of the main architects of the Irish lockdown, who according to the tweet, has ‘failed to commit to a plan for the Irish entertainment industry’. He is sitting on the grass – at a crowded music festival in London – picking his nose.’

Read the article here.

More than ten years ago while I still had an apartment in Dublin, a woman knocked on the door. She wanted to ask me a few questions for the census, so I said, ‘sure, come in.’ Suddenly she asked me: ‘Do you speak Irish?’
Since she didn’t use the word Gaelic I was confused, and I thought she meant English.
So I answered hesitantly: ‘Well, we are speaking Irish, aren’t we?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘we are not.’
I said: ‘Well, in that case I don’t speak Irish.’
After reading Anne Enright’s piece I would love to go to Beckett in Irish. If for no other reason than to doze off a bit.
The last time I dozed off while watching a play was during a performance of ‘Madame Butterfly’ at the Met. It was beautiful, but too long. The tickets were quite expensive, which made the short nap even more delicious.

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