A glimpse inside my satchel

I've fallen into another lull in my reading and I'm hoping Mishima can get me out of it. A coworker gifted me a copy of Andrew Clare's translation of 獣の戯れ ("The frolic of the beasts"). He was mildly disappointed that the love triangle in the novel didn't include a homosexual edge but maybe I can take a shot at reading one of the female protagonists as a gay man.

Meanwhile, I'm still more-or-less actively reading four other works: the short story "Díoltas" ("Revenge") in Ó Flaithearta's collection Dúil; Ó Séaghdha's Motherfoclóir; Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle; and the graphic novel Operación Bolívar by Edgar Clement. I pretty much lost interest in the Behan right after St Pat's and I haven't touched the Weltfish in weeks. (I'm hoping spring weather will pique my interest in their spring buffalo hunt.)

I'm kind of surprised I haven't finished the Zweig yet, since of the pack it has the best pairing of difficulty to reward. I love Ó Flaithearta's writing, but my comprehension of Irish isn't always up to the challenge, whereas Ó Séaghdha is the opposite--his English is easy but his shallowness and lack of organisation frustrate me. Clement is somewhere in the middle, though there it's the format more than the language that makes him a challenge to comprehend.

I'll admit, I lost a little interest in the Zweig after reading some recent criticism of him. Apparently some critics (notably Michael Hofmann) consider him somewhat hacky and, with that in mind, I can see some of the work's structural weaknesses. But I still find the writing beautiful and that should easily carry me through the last forty pages. Then maybe I'll be ready for something meatier.

Meanwhile, I think I've put my finger on what I dislike most about Ó Séaghdha. To be pithy, he can't see the language for the words. He loves to reel off vocabulary--Irish has a word for this! And this, too! And this and this! but he seldom talks about how those words are put together. You can read half the book before encountering a single complete sentence. I understand that he wanted it to be accessible even to non-speakers, but that's going too far the other way.

For someone who claims to love the language, he doesn't seem to understand firmly how it works. So far he's only discussed one grammatical aspect (modh coinníollach, which has an inexplicably fearsome reputation among learners) and he gets it wrong. He never talks about inflections or constructions or any of the grammatical and pragmatic features which give Irish its unique character. And aside from a passing mention of Peig, he never discusses writing in Irish; I get the impression he simply hasn't read much. All it all, it's not the book I'd hoped it would be.