Mar. 14th, 2011 11:16 pm
Ni Tuigim Fein
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muckefuckI'm really quite pleased with how my recent reading blitz is progressing. In fact, as I told ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu earlier tonight, I'm tearing through my Irish fiction so quickly that I'm in danger of running out before the month does. He immediately offered up the Tóibín I bought him last month and I may take him up on that (despite my misgivings about reading a book you yourself got someone before they have). I do still have Joseph O'Connor's hefty Star of the Sea, but I'm now thinking I'll save that for fall.
It dismayed me that it took me a full week to get through the Edna O'Brien novel I picked up on my first (disappointing) visit to Open Books, so I compensated by polishing off her House of splendid isolation in barely two days. I'm much too lazy to give it the proper review it deserves, so instead I'm just going to carp on her spelling--her Irish spelling, that is. I don't know what her English spelling is like since obviously her editors cleaned that all up for her. But if they tried to do the same for her Irish, they only made it worse. Or did they? I mean, there's no question it's awful, but what I can't tell is whether it's meant to be awful.
One of the two protagonists is a member of the Provisional IRA operating in the South. My understanding is that there were few if any fluent speakers of Irish among the Provos. Many of them learned the language in captivity--hardly an optimal environment--often by self-instruction. So the grammatical mistakes could be there for versimilitude. But is this really something we could expect even the average Irish reader--whose command of the language tends to be shaky at best--to catch? In any case, we have two crumbs of Gaelic from him: Bhean an Tighe "Woman of the House" (vocative) and Mo Chara Sláin Go Fóill which is glossed as "My friend, health forever".
Er, not really. Slán literally means "healthy" or "health" and is used for "goodbye". I know several ways to say "forever" in Irish, but go fóill isn't one of them; it means "still, yet, for a while". The Pota Focal dictionary translates Slán go fóill as "bye for now", which is nearest the mark. But what to make of the slender final in sláin? Spellchecker gone mad? Because it gives it the appearance of a genitive, i.e. "my friend of health" or a near miss for the vocative, i.e. a chara shláin! "My healthy friend!"
What makes me suspect that these are O'Brien's mistakes is the spelling of tighe, which is now obsolete (the modern spelling is tí) but would've been current at the time that she (b. 1930) was still in grammar school. If she'd had someone do the translation for her in 1994, when the novel was written, you'd expect them to follow the Caighdeán Oifigiúil.
It gets worse--much worse. When one of the protagonist's accomplices is captured, he feigns ignorance of English, telling the garda who pounces on him, "Ni Tuigim Bearla". Aside from the lack of accents, there's an elementary learner's error here: lack of aspiration after ní "not". But at least it's comprehensible. On the next page he goes on to say:
Uar an Bas looks like a straightforward munging of uair an bháis "the hour of death". Then we're back to crazytime with On mbrug. Ón mbrugh ("from the mansion")? Meadba could be Meadhbha, the genitive of Meadhbh "Maeve". Fained looks like Old Irish[*]--perhaps faind "plumage" or the genitive of fand "tear". Greine resembles gréine, the genitive of "sun" (but etymologically "eye") and fairge looks like a form of farraige "sea" (but etymologically "(open) expanse").
In other words, it's all complete nonsense and I can't figure out what it's doing there. Your man's captors can't make any sense of it either; the only one with any Irish at all says it's "something about Queen Maeve" but it's clear he's only guessing. Perhaps there's some satirical point in a Provo from the North confounding Southern gardaí with pseudo-Irish babble, but it's lost on the readers if they themselves can't tell that it's invented. Moreover, that's all out of keeping with the rest of the scene and, indeed, the overall portrayal of the Garda not to mention the tone of the work.
I'm left with no other conclusion except that, when a distinguished product of Irish schooling and one of the Republic's greatest modern prose writers is asked to produce proper Irish, this is the best she can do. And that no one whose hands the work passed through could or would gainsay her attempts. Sure, the original publishers were Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, but what I have is the Penguin paperback; surely the passages would've been fixed if they'd caused serious embarrassment. But if anyone did point out what a mess this was, then no one cared.
[*] The spellings are so completely off for Modern Irish that I'm forced to cast a wider net here on the assumption that O'Brien tried to shoehorn in a pre-modern quotation without realising it might need updated.
monshu earlier tonight, I'm tearing through my Irish fiction so quickly that I'm in danger of running out before the month does. He immediately offered up the Tóibín I bought him last month and I may take him up on that (despite my misgivings about reading a book you yourself got someone before they have). I do still have Joseph O'Connor's hefty Star of the Sea, but I'm now thinking I'll save that for fall.It dismayed me that it took me a full week to get through the Edna O'Brien novel I picked up on my first (disappointing) visit to Open Books, so I compensated by polishing off her House of splendid isolation in barely two days. I'm much too lazy to give it the proper review it deserves, so instead I'm just going to carp on her spelling--her Irish spelling, that is. I don't know what her English spelling is like since obviously her editors cleaned that all up for her. But if they tried to do the same for her Irish, they only made it worse. Or did they? I mean, there's no question it's awful, but what I can't tell is whether it's meant to be awful.
One of the two protagonists is a member of the Provisional IRA operating in the South. My understanding is that there were few if any fluent speakers of Irish among the Provos. Many of them learned the language in captivity--hardly an optimal environment--often by self-instruction. So the grammatical mistakes could be there for versimilitude. But is this really something we could expect even the average Irish reader--whose command of the language tends to be shaky at best--to catch? In any case, we have two crumbs of Gaelic from him: Bhean an Tighe "Woman of the House" (vocative) and Mo Chara Sláin Go Fóill which is glossed as "My friend, health forever".
Er, not really. Slán literally means "healthy" or "health" and is used for "goodbye". I know several ways to say "forever" in Irish, but go fóill isn't one of them; it means "still, yet, for a while". The Pota Focal dictionary translates Slán go fóill as "bye for now", which is nearest the mark. But what to make of the slender final in sláin? Spellchecker gone mad? Because it gives it the appearance of a genitive, i.e. "my friend of health" or a near miss for the vocative, i.e. a chara shláin! "My healthy friend!"
What makes me suspect that these are O'Brien's mistakes is the spelling of tighe, which is now obsolete (the modern spelling is tí) but would've been current at the time that she (b. 1930) was still in grammar school. If she'd had someone do the translation for her in 1994, when the novel was written, you'd expect them to follow the Caighdeán Oifigiúil.
It gets worse--much worse. When one of the protagonist's accomplices is captured, he feigns ignorance of English, telling the garda who pounces on him, "Ni Tuigim Bearla". Aside from the lack of accents, there's an elementary learner's error here: lack of aspiration after ní "not". But at least it's comprehensible. On the next page he goes on to say:
Ni Fuinim, ni tá blasmaireact orainn Uar an Bas...On mbrug. Sin meadba go Fained greine ar fairge.Áiféis! Fuin means "to knead, to knit together". What possible reason is there to tell the peeler who's nabbed you "I don't knead"? Ni tá is a complete boner for níl "is not", but your guess at "blasmaireact" is as good as mine. It looks like a collision of blas "flavour" and maireachtáil "living". "Flavourliving is not upon us"?
Uar an Bas looks like a straightforward munging of uair an bháis "the hour of death". Then we're back to crazytime with On mbrug. Ón mbrugh ("from the mansion")? Meadba could be Meadhbha, the genitive of Meadhbh "Maeve". Fained looks like Old Irish[*]--perhaps faind "plumage" or the genitive of fand "tear". Greine resembles gréine, the genitive of "sun" (but etymologically "eye") and fairge looks like a form of farraige "sea" (but etymologically "(open) expanse").
In other words, it's all complete nonsense and I can't figure out what it's doing there. Your man's captors can't make any sense of it either; the only one with any Irish at all says it's "something about Queen Maeve" but it's clear he's only guessing. Perhaps there's some satirical point in a Provo from the North confounding Southern gardaí with pseudo-Irish babble, but it's lost on the readers if they themselves can't tell that it's invented. Moreover, that's all out of keeping with the rest of the scene and, indeed, the overall portrayal of the Garda not to mention the tone of the work.
I'm left with no other conclusion except that, when a distinguished product of Irish schooling and one of the Republic's greatest modern prose writers is asked to produce proper Irish, this is the best she can do. And that no one whose hands the work passed through could or would gainsay her attempts. Sure, the original publishers were Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, but what I have is the Penguin paperback; surely the passages would've been fixed if they'd caused serious embarrassment. But if anyone did point out what a mess this was, then no one cared.
[*] The spellings are so completely off for Modern Irish that I'm forced to cast a wider net here on the assumption that O'Brien tried to shoehorn in a pre-modern quotation without realising it might need updated.
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I suspect that you may already know that their imperfect but distinctive use of the language was, apparently, known as 'Jailic'. I used to know a former Loyalist prisoner who referred to some of the Provi prisoners as 'chuckies' — from the use of the slogan 'Tiocfaidh ár lá,' even if they had no other Irish.
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