IRISH LANGUAGE: Aghaidheanna Fidil agus Púicíní: Seoirse Mac Tomáis in Éirinn 1923-1934By Muiris Mac Chonghail, Sáirséal/Marcaigh, 2009, 236pp. €17.50
SEOIRSE MAC TOMÁIS is one of the most beguiling of the many scholars who visited the Great Blasket in the early 20th century. As a student of classics at Cambridge, he first came to Ireland in 1923. By 1934, when he resigned from a position as lecturer in Greek in University College Galway, Mac Tomáis had translated about 10 texts from Classical Greek to Irish (including the Iliadand the Odyssey); he had established a syllabus for the teaching of Greek through Irish, and written a few grammars and textbooks. Most enduringly of all, at least from the point of view of Irish literature, he encouraged his close friend from the Blasket, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, to write his memoir, Fiche Blian ag Fás, which became one of the great classics of regional literature. Mac Tomáis was much more than editor of the book. He advised, corrected, and acted as an unofficial but highly efficient agent for Ó Suilleabháin, wrangling with An Gúm and then the Talbot Press, protecting the text from excessive interference from the publisher (An Seabhac, who edited at Talbot Press), and co-translating it to English with Moya Llewellyn Davies. He found a good English publisher for the translation, and an introduction by none less than EM Forster.
Muiris Mac Chonghail, in the first section of this book, untangles the story of the gestation and publication of Fiche Blian ag Fás, one of the great classics. It is to his credit, and to that of Éilís Ní Anluain, his editor and advisor, that this intricate and detailed account of the publication process is highly readable and entertaining. The personalities involved, the energetic young genius, Mac Tomáis, and the older, conservative editor, An Seabhac, emerge from the account of disputes about grammar and spelling as vivid characters. "Níl fhios agam an mbíodh clóca air" Mac Chonghail writes, "ach samhlaím go mbíodh." ("I don't know if he wore a cloak but I imagine he did.") Indeed, An Seabhac was an aristocratic Gaeilgeoir. He spoke and wrote a form of the language which was "uasal" – a sort of Irish (or, more accurately, Kerry) "Received Pronunciation". Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's Irish was not quite up to scratch, according to him. Slightly "liobarnach", and, to boot, polluted by Connemara Irish.
The first part of the book deals with the production of Ó Súilleabháin’s memoir. This is followed by a selection of the correspondence of Seoirse Mac Tomáis and An Seabhac. The results will be indispensable to any student of Blasket literature. It is the final part of the book, however, a biographical account of Seoirse Mac Tomáis’s 10 years in Ireland, with a summary of his subsequent life (he died in 1984), that will be of most interest to the general reader.
The depiction of the local historical context – the manipulations of the minister for finance, Earnán de Blaghd, to have Mac Tomáis appointed as lecturer in Greek, (through Irish), in Galway, and Ó Súilleabhain to the Gardaí in An Ceathru Rua, for instance – is masterly and eye-opening. (At one point the Minister for Finance, the Minister for Education, and the President of UCG met to discuss the proposed appointment of the junior lecturer.)
Mac Tomáis was not happy in Galway, however. As an outsider, he was not welcome in the college, and he found its internal politics frustrating and incomprehensible. "They don't know what a university should be", he complained in a letter to De Blaghd. (UCG was very different in those days to what it is now.) In 1934 he returned to Cambridge, and was appointed Professor of Greek at Birmingham in 1937. During a long and successful career he made many important contributions to scholarship and intellectual life, including Marxism and Poetry(1947), which influenced many young English poets. Although he seldom returned to Ireland, he believed the Blasket and its rich oral culture had given him the answer to the "Homeric question" , ie how and who had composed the Homeric songs originally.
Muiris Mac Chonghail draws on a variety of sources and sums up Mac Tomáis’s scholarly achievement and his contribution to Irish literature and culture, while at the same time providing us with a sensitive, vivid picture of the man himself. Totally convincing is his suggestion that for the passionate young scholar Gaelic Ireland, Greece, and the people of the Blasket (especially Muiris Ó Súilleabháin) blended together in a harmonious Utopian image of an ideal world. He was in love with Gaelic Ireland: its language, landscape, literature; its men and women.
Muiris Mac Chonghail has the courage to form his own opinion about people and what motivated them, sometimes unbeknownst to themselves. He uses his imagination cleverly but with discretion. As a result, what could have been dry and specialised is, on the contrary, a lively, illuminating, and thoroughly engaging book – written in fluid, elegant, and very accessible Irish.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer. She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing in UCD