GAELIC STUDIES: ANGELA BOURKEreviews An Leabhar Mòr: The Great Book of GaelicEdited by Malcolm Maclean and Theo Dorgan, O'Brien Press, 322pp. €50
If Riverdance were a book, it might look like An Leabhar Mòr. Instead of the Joycean Liffey, however, the imaginative stream that runs through this substantial, colourful publication and unites its elements is Sruth na Maoile, between the coast of Antrim and Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre.
The back-facing fada on Mòr in the title is the clue to its origin in Scotland, but this book, first published in 2002 by Canongate and long out of print, is the work of many hands, the result of a sustained co-operation between poets, artists, calligraphers and critics in both countries. A two-page satellite photo in deep blue and emerald green follows the title pages, showing Ireland and Scotland in unfamiliar aspect, as a Gaelic archipelago centred on that 12-mile stretch of cold sea water.
In the 19th century, Thomas Moore’s Song of Fionnuala and Gaelic revival translations of medieval literature made the Straits of Moyle familiar as the place where the Children of Lir spent 300 years in enchanted exile, as swans.
That image of the King’s children, banished by their stepmother and remembered in many media, including Oisín Kelly’s sculpture in Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance, has displaced memory of Sruth na Maoile as a connecting seaway, facilitating communication between Gaelic-speaking people in Ireland and Western Scotland. An Leabhar Mòr is a celebration, a reminder and a re-enactment of that communication and connection.
This project began over 10 years ago, when Malcolm Maclean, Director of the (Scottish) Gaelic Arts Agency, Pròiseact nan Ealan, visited Theo Dorgan at Poetry Ireland in Dublin, to examine the Great Book of Ireland, produced by Poetry Ireland in association with Clashganna Mills Trust in 1991. That book, a one-off artwork, in which poets and artists wrote and painted directly onto vellum, was billed as a new Book of Kells.
As the millennium approached, on the heels of the Northern Ireland peace process, it seemed to Maclean and Dorgan that the time was ripe for a similar re-assessment and re-presentation of the shared Gaelic imagination over some 1,500 years of recorded history.
The Irish-Scottish cultural agency Colmcille, set up under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, undertook sponsorship, and a five-year project began, to select 100 poems in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, to match them with new work by visual artists and calligraphers, and to add introductory essays, translations and explanatory and biographical notes.
Fifteen Scottish and 15 Irish poets were invited to nominate one poem each of their own, and two by others, from any period of Gaelic literature, to which total of 90 the editorial team added 10 more. Fifty visual artists were then nominated, and a further 50 recruited, many of them speakers of Irish or Scottish Gaelic, and each was asked to respond to a single poem, working on handmade paper of uniform size, in landscape format, in a way that would accommodate calligraphic representation of the poetic text.
Within this symmetry and discipline, the artists worked at will, in media from gouache and acrylic to print and photography, tapestry and copper wire, co-operating with 10 calligraphers to produce a sumptuous collection of images that offer a startling and energising contrast to the round towers and wolfhounds of a century ago. Their work has been shown in many venues, in these islands and farther afield, since the project came to completion; it features on an interactive website, which includes material for schools, and has given rise to at least one film, in addition to this book.
As Duncan MacMillan writes in his introductory essay on Scottish and Irish visual art, “The whole thing in all its dizzying complexity is definitely a product of the fragmented aesthetics of the modern world. But microcosmic chaos can produce macrocosmic order”.
The kaleidoscopic variety of An Leabhar Mòr is comfortingly contained within a coherent and authoritative vision. Ronald Black introduces ‘Twentieth-century Scottish Gaelic Poetry’, and Theo Dorgan contributes an essay on ‘Twentieth-century Irish-Language Poetry’. Colm Ó Baoill’s short, readable essay, ‘Early Irish and Scottish Gaelic Poetry’ demonstrates that what are now two fairly distinct poetic traditions have grown from a common stock that remained united until the political upheavals of the 17th century, and shows how they diverged thereafter.
The poems begin with a passage from Amra Choluim Chille, said to have been composed by Dallán Forgaill about AD 600, and continue through the pristine haiku-like lyrics found in the margins of medieval manuscripts, before moving to named poets of the late middle ages in both traditions, and to the modern period.
The 16th-century Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa’s Fuar Leam an Oidhche-se d’Aodh (Ode to the Maguire) features, as does part of Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill by the 18th-century Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair.
- Angela Bourke is professor of Irish language studies at UCD. Her books include The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story and Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker