Michael McCaughan's "Coming Home": Book Review

Facing his mid-life crisis, Michael McCaughan explores his reunion with the Irish language he'd abandoned, along with most students in the 26 Counties during nearly the past hundred years. He begins his memoir as resigned as Ireland's majority: 'We have acquired a prayer, permission to go to the bathroom and an empty slogan.' (13) Sé do bheatha a Mhuire, an bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas and tiochfaidh ár lá. Throughout his career as a Spanish translator abroad, he'd regale Latin Americans who'd begged him to "say something in Irish" with a hodgepodge recited from rote.

Coming Home is a generic phrase itself. The book's subtitle: 'one man's return to the Irish language', situates him within a small shelf of similar stories, some cited, others not. Lonely Planet co-founder Brian Fallon left Boston on the same quest, a bit fictionalised as Home With Alice (2002). The fact this was published only in Australia may reflect the presumed limited appeal of this trope. That same year, Darerca Ní Chartúir in her overview-guide to the language appended testimonies from four Americans attending summer schools in Gaeltachtaí. Two years on, Ciarán MacMurchaidh edited 'Who Needs Irish?' A few learners answered why in the affirmative alongside acclaim by natives. and from a schooled minority who embraced the speech that McCaughan and many of his peers spurned.

I contributed to the 2007 issue of Estudios Irlandeses an examination of 'Making the Case for Irish Through English: Eco-critical Politics of Language by Learners' emphasising the perceived benefit of learning Irish in its natural setting. Brian Ó Conchubhair summed up in A New View of the Irish Language his 2008 chapter on 'The Global Diaspora and the "New" Irish (Language)'. He charted a 'hyper-Gaeltacht' (238) as Gaeilge entered its 'transnational' phase, sustained rather than attenuated by a combination of recent emigrants and the descendants of such, joined by other ethnicities connecting via Irish. Added to this in the decade since would be social media, video chat, and instant messaging.

Ó Conchubhair considers 'Hanson's law of third-generation return' first propounded in 1938: 'what the immigrant's son wishes to forget, the immigrant's grandson wishes to remember'. (New View 245) McCaughan, as one who has lived far from Ireland for much of his five decades, wonders why he took his Spanish from basics to fluency, while Irish languished. He puzzles over his surname and the silence from his Co Antrim-born father, who never revealed his side regarding sectarian origins, and the tug that pulls this son back. Dwelling in the Burren circa 2014, he takes advantage of Raidió na Gaeltachta online in caring for the 'fever' which inexplicably had consumed him to tackle, this time almost from scratch, another tongue. Union with this common resource unlocking centuries of lore past and present motivates his quest, rather than nationalism, Leaving Cert scores, or atavistic pride.

One wonders: within a multilingual Irish society, why Gaeilge shares craic in many a high street less often than, say, Polish? True, the exceptions of the immigrant, young or mature, who masters Irish gain publicity. But as one Irish wag mused, few of America's new arrivals hastened to study Cherokee or Seminole. If casual Irish does enter conversations, it's more likely within a congenial pub rather than a stern shop, (This is the reviewer's query; a minor flaw of this book is its too passing a coverage of this persistent social shame. Next to a continent where many citizens may communicate between four languages easily, the default refusal of most Irish to choose their native option continues to vex not only McCaughan and those he interviews and quotes. Compulsory lessons can't bear all the customary blame. And while a short glossary of Gaeilge terms and a brief list of sources consulted appear, the lack of an index thwarts recall of names, places and materials within this data-rich text.)

McCaughan wants to link in. Like learners can on the Net in the 'hyper-Gaeltacht', he keeps the radio on, plunging into 'the deep end' rather than rely on the English subtitles for TG4. Not far from the remnants of coastal districts where everyday Irish has been spoken, he considers the trauma of An Gorta Mór and the trace elements of guilt which weakened survivors. Remorse generated either a 'fierce, aggressive' attachment or rejection of the language, (22) He alludes to Animal Farm for the post-1922 'language bosses' who held on to their version of the tally stick, an bata scóir, emulating their hated English masters in beating on miscreants who lapsed into a forbidden but habitual tongue.

Either language was replaced with deliberate effort. McCaughan reasons that if Irish 'disappeared out of our families one word at a time', its erosion may be reversed by phrases enriching conversation. This as with much of the content assumes an Irish audience. Gill Books markets this to them, from the author's own birthplace of south Dublin. McCaughan therefore shares hints, resources, and strategies for those with the benefits of an Ireland residence to 'put on a second coat we've grown used to' (adapting composer Peadar Ó Riada's metaphor). McCaughan regards Irish as a 'second skin,' or even as what lingers in the 'marrow'. (64; readers may want to look up Peadar's father Seán's story.)

Exemplars such as Peadar, travel writer Manchán Magan, comedian Des Bishop, poets Paul Durcan, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and Michael Hartnett encourage him to distinguish his mother tongue, an Béarla, from his native one, an Ghaeilge. The fate of Hartnett, who tried to revert to Irish-only for his work, sobers him. McCaughan realises that the call to the mystic within will fall on many deaf ears around him, but he dismisses any practicality. As Spanish enraptured him as a teen, so now does Irish, at last. As well as tips for learners, this book's added value shows in the language policies from the Americas McCaughan uses to integrate his critique of the Dublin governments' hapless schemes.

Echoing Magan's Hartnett-like 'No Béarla' TG4 attempts in 2007 to conduct affairs in Ireland's 'first official language', the author tries to buy via Irish a ticket from Doolin to Inis Mór. He's told; 'you know, your Irish is very hard to understand.' Galwegians scold that he has 'no dialect'. Within the heartland, he considers a Buddhist analogue. Right Speech renders as 'what you say and how you say it is a reflection of a deeper truth'. (136) This illuminates his path. He ignores idealism; like many sojourners to these redoubts, he confronts a common impasse. Weary locals rebuff learners' attempts.

As this demonstrates, in the Gaeltacht, its public language becomes English; parents revert to Irish as a private medium; meanwhile children brought up as native speakers find themselves weakened by the influx of those relocating there with little or no Irish. At school, the classes may stay in public Irish, but McCaughan suspects children revert to English on their own watch, This imbalance presents a conundrum. To assist with their ancestral language the Irish people, who needs it most? Should entities support native communities or learners in urban centres, queuing at Gaelscoileannaí?

Contrasting the decision of most Irish to pay no more than lip service to Gaeilge, McCaughan credits the Zapatista movement, celebrating its indigenous and 'unbroken link to their ancestors' who use Tzeltal. The U'wa of Colombia choose their own too, rather than capitulate to the colonial imposition of Spanish. Proximity need not result in subservience or expediency; Central Europe and Scandinavia revived their local languages in the same period that millions of the Irish lost their own. McCaughan admits key revival differences historically and economically. Yet he seeks out a lively inspiration,

He strengthens his familial tie to the North of Ireland. The selfless attitude and volunteer spirit in Bóthar Seoighe infuses revival. State-designated enclaves mean simply places where Irish is spoken, But "the growth of Gaeilge in Belfast carries the mystique of a forbidden language spoken against the odds, and with a hint of subversive mischief'. (160) On the Falls Road, he sees more evidence of living Irish than in all of Dublin, Cork and Galway cities. Republican activists Michaél Mac Giolla Gunna, Féilim Ó hAdhmaill and Anthony McIntyre agree that their acquired Irish as crafted and transmitted in lessons 'behind the wire' conveyed a generosity imbued with true freedom. Their children, whether in class or at home, are growing up with both languages, with spontaneous poise.

This open-hearted reaction to Irish among those dubbed Nordies cheers this Ulsterman-once-removed.. Adults seek out Irish too, within not only West Belfast communities which welcome what was long persecuted. Ulster-Scots advocate Linda Ervine at the East Belfast mission started from far less than scratch. She conceives of her Irish-language endeavour as a 'vocation, an activity that needs to happen regardless of money'. (177) Their provincial roots tangle in garbled, anglicised place names and natural landmarks. West of Maghera, in south Derry, Gaeilge resurrects from this fresh soil, 'present yet invisible.' (198) At Carn Tóchair, this 'post-colonial option' cultivates a 'critical mass' of learners-to-speakers; what began with half a dozen in 1992 has grown to 180, young and old, fluent.

Niall Ó Catháin champions this líofacht enclave of those reuniting with this subterranean presence. For the Irish language 'was taken from us, and if we want it back we have to use it'. This bold grip reminds the writer of other surprising connections. Peadar Ó Riada tells McCaughan that in the tuneful townland of Cúil Aodha near Cork, a local, Lizzie O'Brien, was godmother to Sid Vicious.

McCaughan misses his chance here to nod to John Lydon's childhood visits to his own maternal domain in that very county. Derided then for his north London accent, he may today travel under an Irish passport, but he still bristles at being mocked for his tone. Lydon became infamous for rejecting many English symbols, as well as Catholic pieties. Ó Riada swirls Irish lyrics into world sounds. In their own ways, both play off a rebellious streak against clerics, some long supposed a Gaelic ally.

He seeks a decentralised Celtic Christian tradition, and as Lydon might accept, 'an atheist god if you like'. (209) If the North reveals the refusal at last to treat the accents in Irish as sectarian shibboleths, so Cúil Aodha suggests the native speaker's home advantage. Lydon and Ó Riada might concur that one born to the language applies his tongue unconsciously, as natural. This ease can never be totally gained by tutelage. It may single one out, depending on the setting, but it also anchors born speakers.

Concluding this journey around Ireland, McCaughan repeats the experience of others who have sought to find themselves through Irish. Native or learner, both find 'this is no country for Irish speakers'. (251) Relegated to the formulaic cúpla focal from a politician, a Republican and/or an Aer Lingus flight attendant, Gaeilge reveals its second-place status. The battle over Irish-only signage for An Daighean/ Dingle and the resentment from the tourist industry, second-home dwellers and visitors to Gaeilge amháin sa Ghaeltacht confirms the truth of McCaughan's charge. Yet he brandishes one cheery sign himself. The 'can-do philosophy' in the Six Counties epitomizes its 'brass nerve'. South of the border, this courage dwindles. Enlivened, McCaughan ends with a hope that one focal at a time, an Irish polity committed to diversity will sustain and nourish its native language, as its daily reality.

Dublin: Gill Books. 6 June 2017. ₤7.99/ € 14.99. 256 pp.

Elif Batuman's "The Possessed": Book Review

 
These garrulous 2010 anecdotes of this Stanford graduate student document how Russian literature permeates the imagination of her peers and mentors. It also shows how unhinged, conniving, and silly academia can be. Nothing new there, but Elif Batuman is also an intellectual, as her Harvard undergraduate preparation shows. She also displays her determination to market herself then as now.

Cadging grants for specious research into Tolstoy's death sets in motion one chapter. Another, the most coherent and slightly less rambling, precedes that in demonstrating how to pitch Isaac Babel in more appealing form than a display of manuscripts in the Stanford library. Here, you get the best example of how Batuman examines herself in relation to her young life's pursuit. She thinks of literature as "a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft." The tell-tale "pretty much..." signals her habitual preference for the chatty over the sober in her scholarship. It's present, but until the last essay analyzing Devils (fka "The Possessed" itself, it prefers to soft-sell the lit-crit for a coming-of-age assemblage of journalism originally appearing in separate form. It shows. Some information repeats, and the Samarkand stint that's interspersed with the Russian-oriented entries makes the collection lurch about, even if she also links events and thoughts together in revised sections. It's ambitious, and it's certainly more readable, if loquacious.

She's attempting to align her dissertation about "big" novels and the way that they try to make the author's life resemble his or her beloved fiction, as with Don Quixote. "The novel form is 'about' the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books." Many who do create out of this tension attempt and perhaps fail to answer some of her big "different, insoluble" questions: "Why were people created? Why are all people unhappy? Why are intellectuals even unhappier than everyone else?" No answers emerge.

What energizes Batuman she finds repeated in a reconstructed palace of ice, "the monstrous crystallization of the anxiety that made authors from Cowper to Tolstoy to Mann cancel out their most captivating pages: the anxiety of literature, that most solitary and time-consuming of arts, as irremediably vain, useless, and immoral." This is livelier than much of Harold Bloom, I do confess.

Some of the best parts show off Batuman's eye and ear. Natalie Babel turns "with the expression of a cat who does not want to be picked up." Another woman "spoke in a head voice, like a puppet." One more "chanted in a half-pleading, half-declaratory tine, like somebody proposing an hour-long toast." And, a "few times I saw a chicken walking about importantly, like some kind of regional manager."

As a critic, she attempts to push her education into the greater world, through an extended stay in Samarkand. Her own quest to see if her Turkish fluency and her Russian fascination overlap as she tries to learn Uzbek flounders, for "that didn't make it a reconciliation between the two. When you studied Uzbek, you weren't learning a history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographic location, no foreign language, no preexisting entity at all would ever reconcile "who" you were with "what" you were, or where you came from with what you liked." A different type of anxiety of influence lurks within this outcome.

When she applies Rene Girard's theory, we return to the diligent doctoral candidate. "According to Girard, there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity. All of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some Other, to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves." As with ads that feature the beautiful or handsome possessor of the bottle of vodka, this supposed freedom that owner displays means that we are driven not "to possess the object, but to be the Other." This discourages her. Why not stop our pursuit? One novel would be all we needed to disabuse our self from illusion. Love and ambition, what Augustine posited as the "basic premises of literary narrative," would prove failures. Who needs any more scholars "in a world where knowledge, learning, and the concept of difference turned out to be a mirage?" Still, she ends the final entry by claiming if she did it all over, she'd "choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them."

Does this book of occurrences and contemplation succeed? It left me interested in Batuman's argument. It also left me somewhat bemused by her privilege (daughter of medical professionals, Jersey suburb, elite education, and a seeming knack at finagling her way into gaining funds), for she adapts the position of a six-foot-tall misfit. She cannot have been all that inept. I think she bobbles her attempt to parallel her unwieldy structure to Eugene Onegin's "strange appendix that doesn't make sense until later, out of order" but at least she tries to bridge the gap between the common reader seeking insight and entertainment, in what could have been a tired trope, the long march to the Ph.D.
(Amazon US 5/9/17)

Jhumpa Lahiri agus teanga ag fhoghlaim

Léigh mé aiste le Jhumpa Lahiri ina h-iris An Nua-Eabhracha faoi deireanach. Tá sé dar teideal "Múin do féin Iodáilis." Tuigim sé go hiomlán.

Mar sin é, ní thuigim i bhfad an teanga Iodáile fós. Ach, tá fhíos agam féin an streachailt os sí féin. Níl easca é a fhoghlaim teanga éagsúil ina cathair ar leith.

Scríobh sí faoi radharc ar an eolas domsa. D'fhoglaim sí ar dtus ó an teanga iasachta ina SAM. Ansin, chuaigh sí go a talamh dhúchais.

Ní raibh sí ábalta iarraidh le haghaidh treorachaí ar an tsráid ann. Ní fheadfadh sí ag insint go fhreastalaí h-ordú. D'fheadfaidh sí labhairt ar éigean ar chor ar bith.

Mar sin féin, bhí sí ar cíos árasán i Roimh. D'fhan sí ar an gceanna Via Giulia go shiúl mé níos lú an mhí ó shin. Thosaigh sí ar scríobh ina teanga difriúil.

Jhumpa Lahiri and language learning.

I read an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri in the magazine The New Yorker recently. It is titled "Teach Yourself Italian". I understand it totally.

That is, I do not understand a lot of the Italian language yet. But, I know myself her own struggle. It is not easy to study a different language in a separate city.

She writes about a view familiar to me. She learned the start of a foreign language in the USA. Then, she went to its native land.

She was not able to ask for directions in the street. She could not tell a waiter her order. She was barely able to speak at all.

Nevertheless, she rented an apartment in Rome. She stayed on the same Via Giulia that I walked less than a month ago. She started to write in a different tongue. (Photo/Grianghraf)

To Florence

Florence boasts the most beautiful women I've ever seen. Sure, a subjective affirmation. But you walk the sidewalks, shoved aside by imperious girls who step out of Renaissance paintings.And Layne's the one who pointed out their ubiquity. Not that I had not noticed already. A pale shoulder draped in blue lace at the Pitti, a green-eyed, pale, auburn woman whose eyes looked through and past mine as we passed by the Arno, a blonde clad in white lounging in front of her jewelers' portal on Ponte Vecchio.

In some cities, it's odd. Prague and as I'd see at Istanbul (at least its airport and on the sixteen hours of flight home would reveal), feature statuesque model types. I reckon until menopause. Then females shrink to gnomes. But in Italy, elegant women resist gravity, nowadays in tight jean-leggings that in the quaint parlance of my youth, as Latina mothers clucked, "would lead to a yeast infection." They strut alongside salt and pepper husbands, fit and cossetted, scarved against the slightest breeze.

Not that a breeze may grace this city, its straight (relatively) grid from Roman times as a military outpost, in more crowded months. I looked at Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Venice in its 1959 large-format edition, and its b/w photos revealed Il Duomo and the nearby Piazza Vecchio in front of the David replica both with about three people, a hundredth of those present even off-season when I waded into the crowds there. Still, McCarthy complains about the heat, the tourists, the poor food, the triple stinginess, envy, and pride that native son and exile Dante characterized of this defiant city.

I found it loud, graffitied, dirty, and brown. Certainly, the contrasting black and white stripes of the Duomo, the Santa Croce, and San Miniano all resembled the Senese cathedral, but they possessed less of its charm. Instead, they all sat among the affluent avenues and the poorer sections, so close that the roofs nearly met, where Vespas roared and trucks thundered. As McCarthy notes, that scooter is named after a wasp, and that sound and that of police sirens filled every restless night for me there. I felt lucky that I could close the windows of our flat on the V. del Colonnia, and that it was not summer, which at least when McCarthy wrote, apparently hosted three places with air conditioning.

When we got off the train from Siena, we noticed people praying at a little chapel. Florence features the same enormous edifices as any old European center, but it feels less intense than Rome or Siena. Perhaps the medieval Guelph-Ghibelline factions, the power of pope vs. emperor, was to blame. The dome of Il Duomo rises, and the Palazzo Vecchio's tower, the same balance as in Siena, but for the Florentine vision, they lack the natural prominence on a hilltop promontory. Instead, in a vista that McCarthy compared to stolid Boston, the clerical and the secular contend in a dispersed panorama.

Our first afternoon, after settling into our second-floor (or is it first) rented flat, we scoped out the local area. Away from the touristed center, we walked past the 1870s synagogue in grand Middle Eastern style. Surrounded by a fence, its gardens looked inviting, but the price of admission seemed steep. The armed guards and airport-security level anti-explosive doors (also seen in Italian banks) attested to the eternal animosity against the community, as did bullet scars from the fascists. The Nazis plotted to blow up the compound when retreating, but partisans foiled the plot. Florence's blackshirts held out against the resistance even after the Allies occupied the city, sniping at victors.

A modest kosher restaurant and a Chabad appeared the only visible evidence of a Jewish quarter. We decided to keep looking for lunch, winding up at a modern place without any distinction, served by an indifferent immigrant waitress. The television kept playing a political meeting and a sports update. We passed near Santa Croce the university for "foreigners" where Amanda Knox attended, and around there, boisterous packs on study abroad shouted in American or whispered in British accents.

Shopping at CONAD, we forgot that produce had to be weighed and tagged beforehand, so we held up the checkout line. In broken Italian and English, I tried to explain to the cashier that back in L.A. (she asked with a trace of condescension where we were from), the scales were embedded on the belt. Still, Layne was happy to prowl the aisles, and the beer and wine were amazingly cheap, even if other items weren't. We decided to concentrate on eating in rather than out after an underwhelming fish dinner where we were relegated to the "foreigners" room alongside a trio of transatlantic academics, a student and his uncle, and a black tourist asking insistently for a variety of house wine that "rossi" did not match. We tried as was my wont to use our Italian, but Layne and I differ. She reasons that service staff have jobs to do and little time for a foreigner's stumbling baby talk in their native language. Give in to English and move along. I, despite my dire attempts to try Gaeilge and learn Italian on Duolingo, figure it's both good manners and good practice to attempt the native language at first. I am not sure which seems right, as efficiency and etiquette appear to clash, but it's a valuable discussion.

After I wrote this, I learned that one more renowned that either Layne or I suffered similarly. "In reality, in Venice I’m barely able to ask for directions on the street, a wakeup call at the hotel. I manage to order in a restaurant and exchange a few words with a saleswoman. Nothing else. Even though I’ve returned to Italy, I still feel exiled from the language." So confesses Jhumpa Lahiri in the new New Yorker, on her attempts to "Teach Yourself Italian." But she persisted, n.b. Layne et alia.

Around us, nonetheless, wherever we went, we saw English on every menu. I wondered, in the land of the tiramusu (literally pick-me-up), why the phrase "pick-up" was in Italian at the airport, and why so much of our language crept into advertising, and I suppose if my hearing was more acute, speaking. I champion local languages even if I lack fluency, but as a bearer of the global lingo now, I also note how, if one meets a throng of Chinese, Germans, Africans, Indians, and British daily, one serving them will likely have to default to the same basic survival English that my Italian imitates.

Our first full day, after skimming Rick Steves' guidebook left in our flat, I concurred with Layne that after so many masterworks, so many museums, we'd be best to settle on a handful of less frequented sites. Our first was a few blocks away, but in such an unprepossessing front that we missed it. The Dominican convent of San Marco hosts the longtime home of Fra Giotto, and we loved its upstairs dormitory. He painted cells for each resident, and there are subtle differences even if the same sacred scene was depicted. I tried to step back as the wings on the angel of the Annunciation glittered, but with suddenly ten minutes to closing (at barely past mid-day), I failed to situate myself precisely.

Dashing into the library full of manuscripts, pitying the fate of frenzied friar Savonarola (he had two cells rather than one there, before he was burnt in the Piazza della Signorina nearby, an ironic bonfire of his vanity after all he fulminated against), and wondering how cold the cells got and how they eased summer's searing for friars clad in heavy white habits and black mantles, we enjoyed our hurry.

I include this painting, even if it is displayed at the Pinacoteca in Siena, as an example of Giotto I admired. I saw this in a textbook of Renaissance art. The strange image reminded me of an attentive student of the Pre-Raphaelites and Giotto, Stanley Spencer. Baffled by the scene, I looked it up.

William Caxton's early English version of the Golden Legend lists a nameless servant of Pope Felix, who ruled eighth after Gregory the Great. The man suffered a "cankered thigh." An Ethiopian was buried in St. Peter ad Vincula, and his "fresh" corpse enabled a transplant by the two saints, patrons of the church where he served. See The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian

Next, we headed south into an old neighborhood even by local standards. Casa di Dante was for me a must, even if I remained skeptical that this site was the real deal. Nearby at least, the Alighieri family lived and he was born. The exhibits were straightforward, about the herbal expertise this encyclopedic poet-scholar demonstrated, about the battle of Campaldino in which he fought, and about the impact of his famous writings. The displays tried their best with few primary sources extant. The small scale was welcome, even if sparse, compared to the vast exhibitions we'd viewed.

We ended our triple effort after an invigorating snack at an enoteca-artisan (yes) niche behind the Uffizi, where we'd spend a chunk of the next day. Over the Ponte Vecchio, into the Oltrarno, the other side of the river reminded me of Rome's Trastavare. Artisans (for real) worked in little shops on leather, furniture, and crafts. Gradually, we climbed up the slope to the vista at Piazza Michelangelo. There we paused for breath, and a few hundred yards north, we crossed a busy street to trudge up more steps to San Miniato. This abbey occupies the oldest outpost of Christianity in Florence. On a place where the city's first believers were buried in what is a shadowed, redolent terrace, legend tells us that the namesake martyr took his head from the arena, crossed the Arno, and marched up there.

It was twilight. Lights popped on down over the city that spread out below. Inside, it was very dark. A side chapel had been illuminated, but by the time we headed to it, it too was devoid of light. Founded in 1018, the Olivetan Benedictines still lived here; I caught a glimpse of a tonsured monk picking up prayerbooks in the choir stalls. I thought we made it for the chanted Office, but again as often in Italy, my timetable was not that of the hidden reality around me. So, we made the rounds of what felt a venerable sanctuary, and the shrouded nature of it made it feel antiquated, and formidable.
Marble, stone, gilt: the ingredients of so many edifices. Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad grumbled why the beggars outside so many did not turn their efforts towards the keepers within the holy precincts. As often, my soft heart for such Catholic splendor jostled with my hard head about wealth.

We dined at our flat, happy to eat pasta, to drink Tuscan red. I found RAI's classical station and let it play the same familiar songs the station back home did, never with much originality. The first news of the latest Paris murders filtered in, but solid reports were lacking at least in English, from our limited perspective. Our internet was iffy as usual and so we settled for resting our tired feet at last.

Draped at its base by a French tricolor, his right arm banded in black, the replica David stood. The Uffizi required us to undergo security, but the lines went smoothly and the exhibits flowed along. As I teach the Botticelli "Primavera," I took a chance to shove past the selfie-stick tour guide mob. Up close, it did not reveal anything I had not noticed before, so I peered at the manner in which the artist created the toenails of his characters. Rick Steves' guide had pointed out an insight I did not catch, that the joined fingers of the dancers represented another level of the nuptial message, the obvious.

Steves estimated two hours for the place, and he was right. By the time you make the whole horseshoe upstairs, in a well-designed layout, you are weary. Below, the "foreign" painters jostle against blue backgrounds in what feels a basement, so the Flemish and Spanish and French masterpieces lose clout among a lot of lesser Baroques. As with the featured Italians here and at the Pitti Palace, as Steves cautions, picking out the hits from the misses is difficult for the unaided eye. But Rubens' "Portrait of Isabella Brant" stood out, emanating radiance, as if no spotlight was needed.

So, we walked rather than strolled past many on the lower floor, and so did many fellow gazers. The later centuries, frankly, don't wow me as much. After the major works dazzle, it's all aftermath.

The rest of the day, we shouldered aside those same visitors as we tried to move forward under the arches next to the Arno. A wonderful promenade, but you risk your life being pushed off the walk into traffic. McCarthy bemoaned that the Via Romana took traffic across the Ponte Vecchio, hard to believe, into the area where thousands crowded. At least, like Siena, some stretches were clearer.

Night found us back to stroll near the arch of the Republic. McCarthy dismisses this as awful, and the district as poor. The first may be debatable, but the second is now untrue. The Via dei Servi runs as straight as a Roman road, where high-end stores flaunt shoes, dresses, and purses. While my Italian stay failed to uncover any of Berlusconi's "velines" who "reported" evening news, or the at least R-rated ads that Tim Parks claimed festooned major city merchants, the Calzadonia models certainly looked fetching in a store that had many branches, or else each one kept luring my male gaze thither.

Our final morning, we made it to the Pitti, across the river. It occupies a garden only of gravel. But its contents rival its more famous counterpart. Cluttered more than the Uffizi, I found for once the lower level more intriguing. We had less time to linger, as our train time pressed us, but the romanticized Arts and Crafts tinged paintings of domesticity, love, and rural life from a century ago pleased me, although there were too many patriotic murals of the battles for independence against the Austrians.

At the Florence train station, we had a little time. Layne and I alternated watching our bags. Next to them, Italian children cavorted brattily. I suppose the low birth rate means, as in China, that offspring are spoiled more by elders and parents alike. There's a massive Feltrinelli bookstore there, and I browsed its English-language shelf but failed to find any enticing titles. So, I walked up and down each terminal, but failed to find the chapel. Perhaps I confused it with Siena's station? Still, feeling as if I was a little watched given the edgy mood of security, I found a week-old newspaper abandoned, to practice my Italian. Thus prepared, we left the Arno for the never-before-seen prospects of Venice. 

A bheith Gaeilge

Scríobh Anna Hoffman faoi an dúshlán a shábháil ar ár teanga ársa. Duirt sí ina Huffington Post go

raibh an lucht na Gaeilgoirí go mbeadh i dtrioblóid. De réir UNESCO, tá Gaeilge "cinnte i mbaol" anois.

Sainmhíonníon Cuan Ó Seireadáin ó Conradh na Gaeilge an faillí seo mar "béal grá." Mar sin, tá focaíl ach gan an ghníomh ann.  Aontaíonn Cian MacCárthaigh ó Raidió na Lífe go tugann An Rialtas na hÉireann ach "seirbhís liopa" leis an teanga oifigiúil.

Mar sin féin, cabhríonn an staísiún sin i mBaile Átha Cliath foghlaimeoirí. Tá gá le pobal a labhríonn an teanga le chéile, ar ndóigh. Measaim faoi mó chairde i nDroichead Átha ag fás leis Gaeilge.

Ar an lamh eile, ina Gaeltachtaí, tá an scéal gruama ansin. Nuair chuaigh mé go Dún na nGall ina tsamraidh 2007 a foghlaim Gaeilge ar feadh a coicís, ní raibh a daonra áitiúil a labhairt Gaeilge liom. B'fhéidir, dith orthu a labhairt Gaeilge ach amháin eatarthu féin. ach tá sin chuid den fhadhb, cinnte.

Meabhríonn Hoffman dúinn go labhairt "a bheith Gaeilge." Tá sé níos mó ná labhairt. Oidhreacht muid stór ríluachmhar a choiméad beo.

"To Have Irish"

Anna Hoffman writes about the challenge to save our ancestral language. She tells in the Huffington Post that the share of Irish-speakers may be in trouble. According to UNESCO, Irish is "definitely endangered" now.

Cuan Ó Seireadáin of Conradh na Gaeilge defines this neglect as "mouth-love." That is, there are words but no action. Cian MacCárthaigh of Raidió na Lífe agrees that the Irish government gives but "lip service" to the official tongue.

Nevertheless, that station in Dublin helps learners. There is need for a community to speak the language together, of course. I think of my friends in Drogheda growing up with Irish.

On the other hand, in the Gaeltachts, there is a dire situation there. When I went to Donegal in summer 2007 to study Irish during a fortnight, the local people did not want to speak Irish with me. Perhaps, there was a wish to speak Irish only between themselves, but that's part of the problem, sure.

Hoffman reminds us that we speak "to have Irish." This is more than speaking it. We inherit a priceless treasure to keep alive. (Photo/Grianghraf i mBéal Feirste Iarthar/in West Belfast; {"Labhairt cibé Gaeilge atá agat/Speak whatever Irish you have"})

Clan Committment: Armenia + Ireland, 100 years on

 

This photo, "Remnants of an Armenian Family," reminds me of photos taken from An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, known popularly if not exactly correctly, according to many, as the Irish Famine. Change the costumes or headgear, and these five could be an evicted family from a stone cottage far northwest.

Nothing to Celebrate in ANZAC in Solidarity Net criticizes those who from colonies and dominions were encouraged to fight in useless battles for capitalism, imperialism, warlords, and false ideals. It questions the tributes to troops at Gallipoli. About 88,000 for the Ottoman and 44,000 for the British Empire died there. This slaughter and that in Armenia echo, as death returns in a region today. Small nations hunted and hated by armed fanatics, hunted for their allegiance, their clan, their religion.

James Connolly, when asked "What Should Irish People Do During the War?", after denouncing cooperation with the Crown to defend its Empire and admitting if Germany could free Ireland from Britain, that would not be rejected, finally rallied against Kaiser or King. "Should the working class of Europe rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world."

Reflecting this May Day on an Irish history full of invective against its nearest and oldest enemy, I wonder about the psychic cost of raising generations a century later on what riled and inspired our families' desperation: to rage against rulers, to take up arms, to revenge eras culminating in ravaged decades filled with famine, rape, emigration, rack-rent, landlords, conscription, death fast or slow. 

While for years much of my reading and writing focused on The Cause, I find the past few years, and after all nearing two decades since truces were called and arms decommissioned and dumped in Ireland, I'm a bit weary of a sustained diet of study of these events. How, I mulled over as I studied Judaism, can people craft careers in analyzing the records of the Shoah, or literature of the Armenian genocide? It reminds me off hand somehow of the professor of Hitler Studies in White Noise, but no parody is intended by me. Primo Levi's books are being retranslated this autumn and reissued, and the publisher has to remind the press and audience he's not only a survivor-testifier from the deathcamps. 

Watching the shows that John Walsh produces as his son was killed years ago and led him to produce America's Most Wanted as the first of many successful get-tough programs on t.v., my wife and I muse over what that career must do to one's spirit. How far do you capitalize, however well-intended, on death or harm caused to you or your family? Does that market or brand you always? Levi wrote fables like his fellow storyteller Italo Calvino; he dramatized the life of workers, he crafted stories, and he told some of his best tales set before the war, in The Periodic Table, as when he hiked with his little dog. Those moments tend to get subsumed into the great drama. Some veterans never get over the most vivid and harrowing moments of their service, and I suppose for prisoners, hostages, those freed from slavery or torment, kidnapping or disaster, the life after can never create the same energy. 

Meline Toumani, an Armenian-American writer originally from Iran, warns in the New York Times: "Armenians Shouldn't Let Genocide Define Us." She speaks of how Jews are accused of self-hatred if they take issue with the prevailing notion that one must conform to the narrative of what I borrow from the saga of the Irish as "Most Oppressed People Ever." (MOPE: I don't agree with much of that last link's writer, but it's for ease of cyber-reference for this acronym.) Historian Alvin Jackson, a more reliable source, cites colleague Paul Bew who reminds us of the dubious claim "that the most oppressed people in Europe in the 1940s were to be found in Ireland." (671; Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History.) It's almost, but not quite given the fatal lack some carry now, superfluous to say that this was a decade which few countrymen and fellow sufferers who were interned with Primo Levi survived. So, that takes us back to Toumani. Noting Kim Kardashian's support of the centennial, Toumani submits her thesis: "Watching the dubious intersection of celebrity worship and genocide commemoration, I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the less obvious things Armenians have lost since 1915: not just people and property, but a kind of existential confidence. The genocide recognition campaign itself, in the name of restoring Armenia’s losses, has been so all-consuming as to stand in the way of other kinds of development--in Armenia and in the diaspora." It should not be all Armenians, admittedly a long time away from this event, should focus on for their identity.

She argues that it's too limiting to expect members of small ethnicities and their diasporas should or must conform to a narrow range of banal exhortations to carry on or insistent dehumanization of the enemy nation or empire which committed the violence. She went to Turkey to try to learn from the other side's intransigence and denial. Therefore, in her estimation, she has been accused of "self-hatred." She defines this: "The idea is that you are embarrassed by your true nature — your ethnic nature — and so you mock it or speak out against it. The label is used not to engage in meaningful criticism, but to dismiss such criticism by chalking it up to shame. And yet the behavior labeled self-hating often reflects the opposite of shame; it reflects confidence." Comparing the plight of Armenians to that of the Jews, she continues: "The common phrase, 'Is it good for the Jews?' is implicitly present, too, for Armenians: but what does it mean to be 'good' for the Armenians, if survival means blocking out uncomfortable ideas and clinging to simplistic symbols?"

No, neither she nor I are denying horrors perpetuated. Turkey's refusal to take responsibility, Britain's collusion to worsen the potato blight's devastating impacts by pushing millions off the land and on the emigration boats if not the sides of the road to starve, or the black whirlwind of the Shoah all stand as blots on the record of what we do to each other. But how long do we stand in as "survivors"? 

Back to Ireland, similar questions can be raised. I am no great fan of the revisionists who try, as one wag put it, to tidy it all over, as if the English had a small misunderstanding with their subjects. Yet,  as the commemoration of the Easter Rising's centennial looms and politicians and pundits bicker over whether to invite the British, this drawn-out fracas, to some apart from the scrum, appears very petty.

Toumani concludes, for her small ancestral nation (one that like Ireland has clung long to an ideal of an embattled faith, a bastion of learning amid idiocy, an outpost of beauty and tradition and language apart from its brutish neighbors far greater in power, greed, and cunning): "But the question of what healing looks like beyond the use of a single word; of how children can be taught about their histories in a way that does not leave them hating the descendants of their ancestors’ killers. Of how a country can grow in meaningful ways so that there won’t be a Kardashian-size gap in its national confidence. Taking positions that don’t track with your ethnic group’s orthodoxies, or indeed living your life in a way that is not defined by clan commitment, are not signs of self-hatred but rather an indication of learning to value oneself. And this is at the heart of what it means to be not erased but fully alive."

My friends in Ireland are learning slowly how to learn a more inclusive history, as that nation itself becomes more diverse than any other time, rapidly, ever before. Some like me one generation apart from the homeland grapple with that old language, not easy to learn at home, but far more difficult pverseas, at least from my struggle. Many at home and abroad begin to drift from from clerical orthodoxies, and those who do not feel emboldened to speak out against ecclesiastical abuse. Those of us in the diaspora, passing on our heritage to our children, grapple with how much to pass on about past wrongs, and whether so much of our identity consists of commemorating ancestral pain. Clan commitment remains. But our pride does not overshadow an awareness of nuance or honesty.

Ag cheannaigh "Pinnochio" i nGaeilge

Cheannaigh mé an cóip seo le Pinnochio le Carlo Collodi an mí seo caite. Bhí dith orm a fháil an leabhar seo ann. Tá mé ag tósu ag léamh san Iódáilis, tar éis an tsaoil.

Mar sin, cén fath ar mhaith liom an leabhar sin i nGaeilge fós? Bheul, measaim go mbeadh suimíuil seo a fháil ina dhá teanga. Is maith liom iad araon, go nádurtha.

Ina theannta sin, tá seo ag foillsiu le Coiste Litríochta Mhúsgrai ina Gaeltacht i gCorcaigh fós. Duirt sé: "Chuir Pádraig Ó Buachalla i nGaelainn an scéal san sa mbliain a 1933 agus d'fhoíllsigh fén dteideal Eachtra Phinocchio." Bhi Ó Buachalla i gcónaí i Naomh Proinsias, mar inimirceach, freisin.

Tharraing Roberto Innocenti na léaráidí an-álainn. Bhí sé leisaithe ag Dáithí Ó Cróinín agus Séan ua Súilleabhain. Is féidir leat é a cheannach ó An Síopa Leabhar na Kennys i nGaillimh mar i rinne me.

Chríochnaigh mé leagan dátheangach (Béarla-Iodáilis) ar líne aréir. Anois, mbeidh mé ag foghlaim faoi an leabhar níos mó ann. Is maith liom an scéal seo tsíog agus molaim é an thabhairt duitsa.

Buying Pinnochio in Irish.

I bought this copy of Pinnochio by Carlo Collodi last month. I wanted to get this book. I am starting to read in Italian, after all.

Therefore, why do I want that book in Irish, too? Well, I reckoned that it'd be interesting to get this in two languages. I like them both, naturally.

Furthermore it is published by the Literary Committee in the Musgrai Gaeltacht in Co. Cork too. They say: "Pádraig Ó Buachalla put the story into Irish in the year 1933 and it was published under the title Adventures of Phinocchio." Ó Buachalla lived as an immigrant in San Francisco, also.

Roberto Innocenti drew the very lovely illustrations. Dáithí Ó Cróinín and Séan ua Súilleabhain revised this version.  You can purchase it from Kennys in Galway as I did. 

I finished an Italian-English bilingual version online last night. Now, I may learn about the book more. I like this fairy story and I recommend it to you.

Suíomh saor ina teanga na h-Iodáil

Chuir mé suíomh saor ina teanga na h-Iodáil ar an ghreasan le déanaí. B'fhéidir, mbéidh Léna agus misé ag dul go h-Iodáil go luath. Tá súim agam faoi a chúltur agus litríocht ó bhí mé ina bhuacaill; is maith liom na fuaimeannaí na teanga agus a chuid bia.

Measaim go raibh sé chomh mar rugadh mé Caitliceach. Ar ndóigh, maireann an-cumhacht ina Vaticáine, Róimh claisaiceach, Dante, agus an Athbeochan ó shin i leith. Iarraidh mé a cleachtadh ag léamh is mó, chomh maith; tá sé níos easca mar tá mé foghlaimeoir amharc ann.

Chuir mé an suíomh seo leis tri scéaltaí do pháistí. Is An Turgnamh Iodailach é. Gheobhaidh tú eolas faoi cláir foghlama ansin fós.

Tá suíomh eile leis comhráite simpli anseo. Is Iris Iodáil é. Tá ina teanga na h-Iodáil leis cúpla focal i mBéarla.

Seo chugainn, tá suíomh leis ceachtannaí go leor ar aisce ann. Is An Club Iodáilach Ar-Líne é. Breathnaínonn sé níos doimhne dom.

Ar deireadh, tá mé ag baint úsáide an ardáin seo. Is maith liom an app Duolingo don Fhrancais, ach níl ag baint úsáide é leis Iodáilach. Roghnaigh mé Mango ar bealach mo leabharlann ina ionad.

Free language sites in Italian.

I found free sites in the language of Italy on the web lately. Perhaps, Layne and myself will go to Italy soon. There's been for me an interest in its culture and literature since I was a boy; I like the sounds of the language and the food.

I think it was due to me being born Catholic. Of course, the great power of the Vatican, classical Rome, Dante, and the Renaissance live on since long ago. I sought lessons to read better, as well; it is easier for me as a visual learner.

I found this site with three stories for children. It's The Italian Experiment. You'll find information about learning programs there also.

There's another site with simple dialogues here. It's Italy Magazine. It's in the language of Italy with a few words in English.

Next, there's a site with lots of lessons for free. It's Online Italian Club . I found it more in-depth.

Finally, I am using these platforms. I like the app Duolingo in French, but I am not using it for Italian. I chose Mango by way of my library.

Níos mó ná fiche bliain

Is dóigh linn go minic go raibh Lá Vailintín ag ceangail leis grá. Ach, tá grá go mbeidh i bhfoirmeachaí éagsúlaí againn. Shíl mé faoi an ghrianghráf seo an lá eile, mar shampla.

Bhí sé tógtha le ag an iníon ina theaghlach a bhfuil againn ar eolas le breis is fiche bliain. Fhás sí féin leis mo mhac níos sine. Thúg sé seo ar feadh a pháirtí scoir as a mháthair in aice le na Nollaig.

Tá mé ar a dtúgtar an dá na fir fréisin ar an méid ama, gan amhras. Beirt sé chomh maith aithreacha de rang ó mhac níos sine, i ndáiríre. Is maith Pól an Stochaí Deargaí i mBostún chomh mé.

Is maith Daithí, in aice liomsa, céol. Go nádúrtha, tá sé ag seinm an piano go gairmiúil, fós. Plé muid faoi leabhair agus smaointe, fosta.

Bhí sé fuar an oíche sin ann. Mar sin, d'ith císte cnó cócó is blásta. Tar eis a ith mé é, duirt Daithí orm go dhéanamh é ag an bhean chéile!

Over Two Decades.

We often think of Valentine's Day joined with love. But, there is love in different forms for us. I was thinking about this photograph the other day, for example.

It was taken by the daughter of a family we have known for more than twenty years. She herself grew up with my older son. It was taken during a retirement party for her mother near Christmas.
The two men also I have known for the same time, certainly. The pair are also fathers of classmates of my older son, as well. Paul likes the Red Sox in Boston like me.

Dave, next to me, likes music. Naturally, he is plays piano professionally, also. We discuss books and ideas, as well. 

It was cold that night there. Therefore, I ate a most delicious coconut cake. After I ate it, Dave told me that his wife made it.

Italian All-for-One for Dummies: Book Review

While the name of this series still embarrasses me when I consult one of its titles, I admit they are useful and easy to follow. This as the title promises combines content from six Wiley Italian books: Italian For Dummies, Intermediate Italian For Dummies, Italian Verbs For Dummies, Italian Phrases For Dummies, Italian Grammar For Dummies, and Italian For Dummies Audio Set. It progresses with some overlap, therefore, and is often cross-referenced, unsurprisingly, in a rather compact work. Despite its bulk, the price is affordable and the contents are arranged in straightforward fashion.

It starts smartly. The chapter beginning on asking directions not only shows how this is done, but it introduces one to a few landmarks in the big cities, and tells you about architectural terms too. Throughout, the tone is encouraging and the explanations are clear. There is a lot of space in the text to make marginal notes, and part of the heft comes from a clean layout with, as in the verb charts, lots of white area that makes looking at the print page less onerous. There's even some exercises appended with an answer key, to stimulate a more active knowledge of the contents. Still, this will probably supplement tapes and other formats for a serious learner, as most language texts expect.

The markers to stress crucial points, the warnings of tricky instances, and the suggestions for more learning all remind the self-taught learner. These as in the Dummies series carry consistency, so a reader of one of the volumes can turn to another and find the same framework, for a new subject.

Don't expect immersion. This is more of a book to look up explanations and puzzle out problems. There's a considerable stress on English to convey explanations, and the first pages give phonetic transcriptions, although later chapters sensibly cut these. An audio set of tracks can be accessed via the Wiley site although the URL does not match the one included in the text; some reviewers have complained that the book lacks the correct hyperlink. Also, they have noted that the e-book on a Kindle cannot be opened sufficiently to reveal the text and sidebars for clarity. At nearly 700 pages, this is a thick book, and is best referred to as a reference for at-home use rather than on the go.
(Amazon US 10-9-14)

Dianne Hales' "La Bella Figura": Book Review

Dianne Hales blends her personal story of her love affair with Italian into an engaging, informative presentation. A quarter-century of studying it and traveling to its homeland combines with her efforts in Marin County and San Francisco to learn more, and to practice, and to finally start to think and act her way into a language that ranks fourth worldwide in foreign study. Not for its numbers, for it is only spoken by 65 million natives, but for its impact upon so much that makes life worth living, it has value.

She makes her point early on. "English, like a big black Magic Marker, declares itself in bold statements and blunt talk. Italian's sleek, fine-pointed quill twirls into delicate curlicues and dramatic flourishes." She advances her claims for its impressive impact. "While other tongues do little more than speak, this lyrical language thrills the ear, beguiles the mind, captivates the heart, enraptures the soul, and comes closer than any other idiom to expressing the essence of what it means to be human." (15-16)

Her chapters range widely, yet share a common theme. While Dante's elevation of his Tuscan dialect to national fame ensured its prominence as the literary criterion, Hales reminds us that other factors also helped promote a shared Italian lingo in a nation unable, for centuries, to unite politically. The academy of La Crusca, the "three crowns" of not only Dante but his comrades Boccaccio and Petrarch, the civilizing mission of Italian itself all gain credit in engaging discussions. Hales tells a clever anecdote about George Eliot on her honeymoon, to show Dante's power, and she has an eye for the telling vignette throughout her book, as she integrates scholarship into a popularized presentation.

Renaissance art gains a cogent look, and Hales sums up a lot of names and productions without falling into lecture mode. Similarly, as someone with near total ignorance of opera, I learned about its ability (as with Dante's verse) to enter into the popular register so intimately, within daily conversation. Cuisine also helps bring Italians closer, and the many linguistic decorations from food and its varieties enter into small talk intricately. Film also brought together the postwar nation as New Wave; Hales celebrates the legacy of Marcello Mastrioanni. So does love, and sex, and the chapter on "la parolacce" delves into the more vulgar, subtle versions of conversation as insult, boasts, or both.

Near the end of this lively 2009 narrative, Hales cites Ernst Pulgram, who in "The Tongues of Italy" argued that the Romans and their descendents ruled the Western world three times: in law and government, in religion, and in art. The fourth, Pulgram and Hales agree, remains a triumph today: the language. This book satisfies, although if Hales had provided an index and suggestions for beginners, these might have enhanced its utility. I wanted a book complementing my studies in French and how one man struggled with it, William Alexander's "Flirting With French" (2014). This introduction to the contexts in which Italian began and thrives was exactly the one I needed, to nudge me towards Italian's charm. While the hard work of learning it awaits, and this is a guide to its social aspects and cultural formation rather than a how-to reference, you will glean what a textbook omits. (Author's website. 10-2-14: my review #2000 at Amazon US)

William Alexander's "Flirting with French": Book Review

Learning French, even for a middle-aged Francophile, proves elusive. Its infamous pronunciation, its maddeningly gendered nouns, its elisions, its lack of syllabic emphases: William Alexander laments them all. Going on 58, after writing successful books on mad ambitions to achieve the perfect garden and bake the perfect loaf, he seems as well-suited as any driven autodidact for task three.

Most adults will never fully master a second language. Alexander's ambitions meet the obstacle most of our brains encounter when we try to learn a new language post-puberty. As he explains, once the neural networks have sparked childhood fluency, our valuable hard-wiring gets diverted so the brain can apply it to non-linguistic necessities as we mature. Our innate capacity which enables us to quickly attain our native language in infancy then fades; consider how even teens struggle with foreign conjugations and prepositions.

Alexander sums up linguistic theory and neurological research, but he finds that these cannot account for the other 8/9 of our body. Acting out French sentences, he shows, overcomes his brain's hesitations. Reading a play by Sartre or reciting into a microphone via Rosetta Stone stymie him. French evokes from Alexander emotions, impulses, and gestures, beyond vocabulary lists and conversational lessons. He wanders along this book's way to relate his correspondence with a pen-pal, his stints at total-immersion French environments, the history of French, the sly promises of machines such as Google Translate, and the daunting barriers to fluency.

Alexander plugs away. He claims to work, but from the obsessive attempt he documents, pursuing  French becomes what seems to me a full-time job. Inspired to overcome his mental block, with visual imagery he memorizes a thousand words in a children's bilingual dictionary; he strains this same memory, on the other hand, to recall common verbs while chatting with classmates. The yin-yang of advancing and regressing in language learning will comfort any student who has faced, for example, the clash of decimal and vigesimal (base-twenty) counting systems. He finds fresh examples, too.

"Soixante-neuf  is the last 'easy' number in French. Should you want to turn your lovemaking up a notch to seventy, you'll find there is no "seventy" in French. This is undoubtedly due to French frugality." One adds ten to sixty, and up to "sixty-ten-nine", before one hits eighty, as "four-twenties".

Metaphors beyond the most famous of French numbers also enliven his narrative. Alexander's lively chapter on colorful idioms entertains. To tie the marriage knot is rendered as putting a noose around your neck. Having a wet dream equals "to make a map of France". One suspects male-authored phrases so far, but anyone can find a stroke of good fortune. However, few of either sex, whatever luck comes their sudden way, may long for more than a linguistically evoked "ass full of noodles". Outside of a few (non-?) French in recovery, who would not acclaim the praise given a delectable glass of red wine? "C'est le petit Jésus en culotte de velours!" "It's the Baby Jesus in velvet shorts!"
 
Wine may well be prescribed for Francophiles eager to escape the rigors of battling French itself. Alexander's cardiologist asks about any new stress in his patient's life. "Well, I am studying French." Alexander avers near this book's conclusion that he has been learning a lot of French, but not "learning French". The latter goal may recede; his native-born teacher suggests after five to seven years, living in France, of course, he may get pretty good at it. Over thirteen months and nine-hundred hours, he drives himself on towards fluency. Complicated by his arrhythmic heart and a series of surgeries, the results of his sustained immersion will surprise him, at the end of this genial narrative. During to date only half the time Alexander spent, I've been cursing daily during my online French lessons, fifteen minutes or so each. That's all the patience I can summon. But Flirting with French gave me faint hope; as another middle-aged learner, who began during my first visit to Québec last autumn, I recognize in Alexander's story my own frustrations, magnified or diminished. (Amazon US 9-3-14; PopMatters 9-14-14; Author's website)

Ag fhoghlaim Fraincis

Tá mé ag fhoghlaim Fraincis faoi láthair. Thósaigh mé nuair chuaigh Léna agus mise go Ceanada ar feadh fomhair seo caite. Bhí dith orm a thuiscint beagán ansin.

Mar sin, fhéic mé ar an Leabhar Aghaidh post le chara ag fhoghlaim Spainnis leis Duolingo. Ní chuala mé faoi seo riomh. Chuir mé an suíomh anseo. 

Tá mé ag dul go mall ann. Measaim go mbeadh ag gabhail suas céim amhain gach mí. Is féidir liom ceacht laethúil.

Insint an h-am, iarraidh faoi an h-aimsir, nó labhairt triu réamhfhocail: tá siad deacair. Níl easca a cloisint na fuaimeannaí, go fírinne. Ina theannta sin, bím ag obair a thuiscint nathannta cainte leis Duolingo.

Mar sin féin, is maith liom a dhéanamh dul chul cinn. Gan amhras, tá sé beag. Ach, beidh brea liom é nuair tús a chur Duolingo le Gaeilge an bhlian seo chugainn.

Learning French.

I am learning French lately. I started when Layne and myself went to Canada during last autumn. I wanted to learn a bit there.

Therefore, I saw on Facebook a post by a friend learning Spanish with Duolingo. I had not heard of this before. I accessed the site here.

I am going slowly. I reckon maybe getting up one level every month. I do a lesson daily.

Telling time, asking about the weather, or speaking through prepositions: these are difficult. It's not easy to hear the sounds, truly. Furthermore, I'm working to grasp idioms from Duolingo.

Nevertheless, I like making progress. No doubt, it's small. But, I will love it when Duolingo begins in Irish next year. (Grianghraf/photo: An Sionnach Fionn.)

Yangzom Brauen's "Across Many Mountains": Book Review

Probably the first Swiss-Tibetan ever, at least as a writer, actress, and activist, this granddaughter of a Buddhist nun who fled the Chinese invasion of her homeland, with her little child in tow, tells her family's story over three generations. Efficiently conveyed, without sentiment or romantic reverie, Brauen narrates how Kunsang, her grandmother, married in the Nyingma order, which tolerated if not encouraged such liaisons, her father, a monk. This period, of course, takes place in the pre-Chinese decades, when Tibet remained remote and its class structure and traditions firmly endured. Even now, Brauen admits, her "mola" affirms many of the old ways, despite a life which has pulled her away, first to refugee camp in India, then asylum in Switzerland, and now visiting her daughter, Yangzom's "amala," who resides as an artist in New York City's affluent enclave of cosmopolitan Chelsea.

The author compares herself to the bottom of a sandwich; between the tsampa dough of her grandmother and Sonam, her mother's "juicy filling" partaking of both ends but remaining intact and flavorful, Yangzom represents wholesome wheat bread. She tells the saga of half a century and more directly. Her highly educated grandparents did not feel, she insists, part of a backward society, nor did those under them feel that they resented the traditional ways. All was seen in thrall to a higher order. People did not question their place in a stratified and long-settled society.

With the Chinese refusing to let Tibet, then or now, develop in its own way and time to reform and modernity, it's sobering to find that Lhasa has been reduced to a garish, polluted Chinese city, and that the ancestral settlement of Pang, visited in a poignant journey back home, survives but part in ruins, as the monks resist the spies planted in such places by the PRC to ensure conformity. Brauen as an activist has been arrested for her part in demonstrating in Moscow against this regime when it held the 2008 Summer Olympics, and her path, from Bern to Berlin to Los Angeles, all bear symbolic territory, she observes, reveals her steadfast commitment to gaining if not independence then autonomy for her familial homeland. Since her birth in Switzerland in 1970, she has a unique p-o-v.

She reveals small tidbits which enrich her tale. I've read a few Tibetan accounts, but hers stands out for its natural and welcome portrayal of a rare combination of monastic and lay outlooks on Buddhism and Tibetan society within the same living lineage, its focus on women, and its European and American perspectives from one rarely and well-placed to make such a perspective come alive. For instance, we learn that meat was divided up among eaters as widely as possible to diffuse the negative karmic impact of its consumption in a harsh land; the wheel was known to Tibetans, but rather than revealing them as primitive for not using it, they preferred to keep it holy by not putting it into action. The result was that beasts of burden, animal and human, had to labor instead at raw toil.

Brauen presents fairly Tibet as it was, and she does not sensationalize or preach. Still, we see in Sonam's coming of age as a refugee and then immigrant to Swiss Germany the considerable challenge she and her mother faced, let alone the determination of her "pala," her father from another distinguished family, descended from an earlier religious exile, John Calvin. Martin Brauen's work as an ethnographer, sparked by youthful encounters with the first Tibetans who settled in 1961, led to his embrace of the culture, and his own curatorial career and friendship with the Dalai Lama. (See my review of his fascinating study into Western and Tibetan depictions of this land, Dreamworld Tibet.)

Translated from German in 2011 by Katy Derbyshire, this reads as if it originated in English, and flows. Brauen is not a fancy writer, and it's not often that we get such passages as simply describing the setting of the labor camp where Tibetans had to toil breaking boulders into gravel for roads: "The endless rains transformed the paths into raging torrents, the forest floor into a damp sponge, and the grand roads into washed-out, impassable tracks." But choosing to downplay the prose may be wise. The calm precision of her language and its modest focus prevent this from digressing, even if the pace and tone remain largely muted after the Tibetan sections, with naturally more drama and tension.

What she seeks is noteworthy. "I am determined never to stop standing up for human rights and far-reaching autonomy, so that my people do not face the same destiny as the Native Americans or the Australian Aborigines--leading a tragic life as dying races of insignificant and landless folklore performers." Given my own study of how Bhutan has faced its own pressures, caught in its own Buddhist redoubt between Indian expansion, Nepalese incursion, and Tibetan-PRC threat, and my own identity as a "native Irish" student of its ancestral language and cultural remnants, I can relate.

Go Fraincis Ceanada

Ag taistil ar thuas, thíomaint Léna agus mise go Stáit Nua-Eabhrac go dtí i mbaile d'aois i Montréal. Ar dtús, tháinig muid go dtí an h-óstán fíneáil ainmithne ina dhiadh file tSiombhalachais de bhunadh Cheanada-Fraincis agus Gaeilge Emile Nelligan. D'fhoghlaim mé tar ais filleadh abhaile go raibh Quebecois ó h-Éirinn atá thart ar cúig faoin gcéad na n-inimirceach ansin; bhí fhormhór mhuintir na hÉireann go leor chomhshamhlú leis an Caitlicigh na Fraince ann. 

Tá reir bhrí "baile" maidir do "Cheanada" as Iroquois, ach tá talamh an-mhór, gan amhras; bhí duilleogaí mhaiple go leor ach bóithre folamh lasmuigh den séasúr ann. Go deimhin, i Stáit Nua-Eabhrac ina h-Adirondacks agus i Québec anuas ar teorann go Maine, ní raibh muid ag éisteacht comharthái raidió ar chor ar bith. Ar ndóigh, chuala muid an teanga Fraincise go minic chomh mar as mháthair-theanga ghnáth gach cearn den Ceanada.

Anois, b'fhéidir, beidh mé ag foghlaim roinnt Fraincise roimh an chéad am eile go bhfuil mé ar ais ansuid. Bhfágfadh mé i gcónaí é sin a dhéanamh féin. Thosaigh mé leis Duolingo ar mo fón cliste chéana féin.

Shiúil muid ag imeall Montréal ina tstráideannaí cloiche cúngaí le solas gáis--agus "malls" siopadóireacht faoi talamh. Bhreathnaigh Léna agus mé an Abhainn Naomh Labhras síos na tór ó na séipeal Naomh Máiread Bourgeoys agus Ár n-Bhean de Maith le Cuidiú aici (Notre Dame de Bon Secours. Chuir cuairt muid go An-Mhéara (Chateau) Ramezay faisnéiseach fós: tá "rotisserie le madra atá a gcumchachtú" ansin sa céistin boghtach thíos air.

D'imigh go cathair eile d'aois na Fraince: Québec. Chonaic muid an músaem mhór na sibhialtachtaí agus na céimeannaí géar ar lár sean-bhaile. Bhí sé Oíche Shamhna, ach bíonn go leor na baistí; agus riamh turas de uair a chlog ina calèche ag tharraingt le capall timpeall an dún agus catha Machairí Abraham ag rith muid le taispeantas soilse féile uaigneach in sa gceo in aice leis an abhainn fuar. Ith muid cócaireachta Cheanada le linn oíche fuar ar an-sean bialann Aux Ancien Canadiens, go nádurtha.

Chodail muid ar Manoir d'Auteuil. Ansin, cosúil le áiteannaí eile go raibh le feiceáil a muid riomh (Áit Montgomery i nGleann Hudson agus Chateau Ramezay mar shampla), bhí i láthair fhilleadh an Cogadh Réabhlóideac. Ina theannta sin, cuireadh léirítear Benedict Arnold, Ben Franklin, agus General Richard Montgomery i thaobh éagsúla, triu shúile na Fraincis Cheanada, dílseoirí Mheiriceá, nó Breataine ina ionad.

To French Canada

Traveling north, Layne and I drove from New York State to old town Montréal. We first arrived at a fine hotel named after a Symbolist poet of Irish/French-Canadian origin, Emile Nelligan. I learned after returning home that Irish Quebecers were about five percent of immigrants there: most Irish assimilated with the French Catholics there.

The meaning of "village" for Canada is in Iroquois, but it's a very large land, no doubt; there were maple leaves galore but empty roads off-season. Indeed, in New York State in the Adirondacks and in Québec to past the Maine border, we listened to no radio transmissions at all. Of course, we heard the French language often as the mother tongue normally all over Canada.

Now perhaps, I'll have to learn some French before the next time that I return back there. I've always meant to do so. I started through Duolingo on my smartphone already.

We walked around Montréal on stony narrow streets under gas light, and in shopping malls underground. Layne and I peered down on the Saint Lawrence River from the tower of the chapel of St. Marguerite Bourgeoys and her Notre Dame de Bon Secours. We also visited the informative Chateau Ramezay too: there's a "dog-powered rotisserie" in its vaulted kitchen below.

We went off to another old French city, the town of Québec. We saw the grand Museum of Civilizations and the steep steps of the old center of the city. It was Halloween, but there was lots of rain; after an hour's journey by horse-drawn calèche around the fortress and battleground of the Plains of Abraham we passed the lonely festival lights in the mist near the cold river. We ate Canadian cuisine during the chilly night at the venerable restaurant Aux Ancien Canadiens, naturally.

We slept at the Manoir d'Auteuil. There, similar to other places that we saw before, (Montgomery Place in the Hudson Valley and Chateau Ramezay for example), at present the Revolutionary War returned. Moreover, we were presented with Benedict Arnold, Ben Franklin, and General Richard Montgomery from a different side, through eyes of French Canadians, Loyalists, or British instead.

Ag foghlaim faoi Galicia

Faoi deireadh, bím ag léamh mír faoi na Gailíse sa Spáinn. Deirtear finscéal go raibh ndúiche Cheilteach fadó. Ach, níl mé cinnte mar scoláire, ar an drochuair.

Mar sin féin, thósaigh mé fuarthas ar iosacht leabhar leictreoneach le David Hoffman. Is treoirleabhar aísiúil é. Scriobh sé go soiléir agus gonta.

Tá mé ag gheofar ar iosacht leabhar eile leis filiochta aistrithe ó Gailísis go Béarla-- agus roinnt Gaeilge. Beidh mé sé ag thaispeáint ar bealach spraoiúil a foghlaim beag as Gaeilge agus Gailísis a chéile. Is cosúil Portaingéilis go fírinne.

Is maith liom an suíomh seo ar an nghréasán Turgalicia freisin. Tá tú in ann ag dul ag imeall an réigiún agus ag fheicéail an tír féin. Tá bealaí taistil eagsulaí ann.

Go minic, d'fhéadhfadh go mbeadh mearbhall nuair a lorg de reir "Galicia" i mBéarla. Tá sé freisin réigiún arsa sa Pholainn. Bhí conái Giúdaigh ann, go dtí go chéid seo caite. Fada ó shín, rinne Ceiltigh ansin.

Learning about Galicia

Lately, I'm reading a bit about Galicia in Spain. It's said in legend that it was a Celtic heartland long ago. But, I'm not sure as a scholar, unfortunately. 

All the same, I started with borrowing an electronic book by David Hoffman. It's a useful guidebook. It's written clearly and concisely.

I am borrowing another book about poetry translated from Galician to English--and some Irish.  It will show me a fun way to learn a little in Irish and Galician together. It's like Portuguese, certainly.

I like this site on the web Turgalicia too. You are able to go about and the region and to see the land itself. There's various itineraries there.

Often, there may be confusion when searching regarding "Galicia" in English. It's also an ancient region in Poland. Jews lived there, until the last century. Long ago, Celts did.

(Photo/Grianghraf: Cristina Pato leis bratach na Gailíse agus píopaí/with a flag of Galicia and pipes.)

Nataly Kelly & Jost Zetzsche's "Found in Translation": Book Review

As a contributor to the Huffington Post as well as a court interpreter and market researcher, Nataly Kelly and her co-author, the technically oriented linguist and translator Jost Zetzsche, start off the volume with lively anecdotes and interviews gleaned from political, legal, multicultural, diplomatic and military situations. A couple of early [Amazon] readers of this accessible and casual but learned book offered in-depth reviews, so mine will be briefer.

The pace is casual, full of pop culture, and very rapid, perhaps suited to those skimming these short factoids and small features within each chapter. Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Google Translate, TED, IKEA mix with biblical, literary, sports, and musical lore. It's similar in tone and insight to what you'd peruse online or as a sidebar in a magazine. This proves a refreshing counterpart to the stodgier academic treatments of translation studies.

Sometimes I wished for more depth. Even in the snippet on how "adult" content challenges "search engine optimization," certainly an intriguing topic, the lack of "hardcore" examples puzzles. It's a brisk look rather than exhaustive investigation, however, pitched more at the casual language buff or curious bystander who may happen on this in a bookstore. I admit that's what pulled me in!

I picked this up, as one who likes language but never learned another one easily. As a longtime, struggling adult learner of Irish, the inclusion of Gaeilge here early on delighted me. It even shows how Shakespeare borrowed in his themes and lyrics from the Gaelic. But this entry comes right after life-and-death issues of translation in the first chapter that had begun with court cases and interpreters within predicaments of danger, so I was unsure why the sudden entrance of my ancestral language.

Also, a statistic as to speakers in 1890s New York City refers to the edition of essays in which the scholarly article appeared which analyzed this case study. But the endnote only gives the general editors and the book title, not the actual essay by another professor, and it's uncited as to the page itself to back up the claim of 75,000 Irish speakers in the city back then. This may be overly picky, but given other references are paginated, to be noted for those using Found in Translation to track down the primary sources the authors list.

Overall, I enjoyed this. I wondered about diacritics and keyboards, and how users of other languages who must mix them in one document fare. I have seen Kindle texts unable to insert Greek, for instance, into older English works from a time more learned than ours. I figure, as the text ends with futurist Ray Kurzweil, that soon we will figure out many problems that challenge and stimulate us by the medium we share online here. (11-28-12 to Amazon US.)

(P.S. Nataly Kelly posted there on 11/30:
... thank you so much for your kind review! I am glad to know that you enjoyed the book and in particular the story about Irish, a language close to my heart as well. The page in the book referenced is Page 274 (in Chapter 10). I will send the page reference to the publisher so we can update this in time for the next printing. Appreciate your careful reading!)

"Wales Is Our Concern": 2 books on Welsh Nationalism

I examine two titles about 20th century efforts, one by a prominent novelist, the other by a shadowy faction, to rouse English-speaking Welsh citizens to fight, by mostly peaceful but sometimes violent means in the latter case, for their cultural, linguistic, and territorial survival. Originally, this was composed in 2009 for the journal Epona: A Journal of Ancient and Modern Celtic Studies, but as that publication appears in hiatus, I preserve my critique here in the meantime.

(Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist?

Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.

290 pp. 978-0-7083-2217-8. £19/€20/$25.

John Humphries, Freedom Fighters?: Wales's Forgotten “War”, 1963-1993.

Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008.

228 pp. 978-0-7083-2177-5. £20/€21/$25)

 

Can one "speak Welsh in English?" Embattled cultural and linguistic identities from Wales conveyed through our dominant language capture this novelist's struggle for articulation. Diane Green, basing this on her doctoral thesis on "narrative patterning," stops in 1998, but five decades out of the six that still see him writing provide plenty, given his steady output for a man born in 1919, for her study.

Its postcolonial contexts comprise the theoretical foundations for Green's explanations of how myth-- not only Celtic but Etruscan, set in Wales but also in Tuscany and Benin-- combines with history, often filtered via discontented intellectual males caught between a secularized homeland and relentless anglicization. How can one live in Wales as Welsh? His breakthrough novel, A Toy Epic, (1958) contrasts the rural, impoverished religious pacifist Iorwerth with Albie the ambitious, assimilating, Marxist emigrant, and Michael as uprooted intellectual.

Humphreys given his own status as a teacher and BBC producer may represent a combination of Michael's social mobility with Iorwerth's organic and linguistic allegiances. Learning Welsh as a young man, inspired as a teenager by the Penyberth burning of the bombing station by three Welsh activists in 1936, Humphreys chose to write in English to educate and appropriate the best of what Welsh identity could transmit to a wider audience. Green emphasizes the difficulty of using the "language of the oppressor" (15) to proclaim the "language of the tribe" (12). Fiction offers, citing Humphreys, a "supranatural language which is detached from the cultural problem" as "one of the escape routes" (27). The tension between "his political ideals and his creative talents" energized his long series of novels in which he delved into the same conflicts within his Welsh characters.

This entry in the Writing Wales in English series expects close familiarity with a body of work not well known even within Britain. His books from 1946 to 1991 were printed in London. However, as the 1990s progress his new novels get published only in Wales, and his older ones depend on reissues by the University of Wales Press. Humphreys may have sensed this fall-off in broader support when in 1987 he wrote an essay "The third difficulty."

He explains how he chose the role of "People's Remembrancer." He gives his readers the feeling of Welsh through English. He uses the novel, already feared as giving way to other mass media, as his method of proclamation. He figures that Welsh culture within British society for him can best be transmitted by fiction. Still, confronted with a formidable series of interlinked novels demanding considerable grounding in mythic archetypes, the result of a small-press minimal audience for his works may not be surprising.

Bonds of Attachment (1991) includes episodes from the controversy over the investiture of Charles Windsor in 1969. This novel offers rich material for investigation, but Green prefers to pursue the mythic and historiographic aspects. She largely limits her study to postcolonial theory. Given this book presumably represents a revision of her dissertation and not a reproduction of it, this narrowed focus may not satisfy a reader seeking cultural relevance as well as critical theory.

Green elides a more pressing and less academic application. This analysis lacks attention to the political contexts in Wales at this time when the Penyberth impact, however long delayed, threatened to burst into renewed protests. These continued what Saunders Lewis, at Penyberth in 1936, called upon his countrymen to continue, and they broke his heart when none rose up. This episode was fictionalized in Humphreys' début The Little Kingdom (1946).

The complexities of a peaceful Christian ethos that may have led to the relative marginalization of Welsh republicanism as opposed to its physical-force Irish variety surely must have factored into Humphreys' fiction more than Green's work establishes in a few asides, mostly very early on. While the slow disintegration of non-conformist religious conventions surrounds Outside the House of Baal (1965), the pacifism and Christian idealism Humphreys shared with Lewis and other nationalists appears very muted in Green's critique. For study in literary criticism, her book fills a need. But it may leave an inquirer still wondering about Humphreys' semi-imaginary plots in relationship to the real-life Welsh predicaments faced by his neighbors and colleagues and readers since Penyberth. Three decades of frustration erupted into protests in 1969.

Bombings, jailings, censorship, arson against holiday and second-homes, marches demanding rebellion, calls against terrorism: these rocked Wales if on a small scale the past few decades. This is where the force of myth, after all, lands heaviest. History as lived and not only dramatized must run through Humphreys' work, determined as it is to convey Welsh implicated in postcolonial society. The subject of Green's work deserved more attention as a chronicler of these decades.  The Taliesin Tradition (1989) delves into the place of Welsh nationality within culture and language; Green understandably concentrates on the novels rather than this elegant study, but if she had expanded its role as a summation of Humphreys' ideological evolution, it would have enriched her theoretical and literary bases.

How did Humphreys invest his energy-- not only as mythologized, historically framed, or channeled overseas-- within his fictional inquiries about his native land under such pressures? Did Humphreys weary of protest and step aside into fiction as an escape? Did this "supranational language" succeed or fail him over half a century's output? How did his Welsh colleagues and English critics react to his efforts over these changing decades? What growth or retraction did his readership show? Her book elides such questions; it leaves one wondering the worth of some installments in a long series of demanding novels for an apparently small audience. 

Perhaps more immediacy comes not in novels, but what the news reports, or does not report, as John Humphries' Freedom Fighters?: Wales's Forgotten “War”, 1963-1993 narrates, starting with his walk-on role as a Cardiff Western Mail night-desk editor who took a call one night in 1966 that explosives were set at Clywedog reservoir. These detonations signalled that the spirit of Saunders Lewis would lead to the practical action and symbolic resistance begun at Penyberth. Thirty years on, protests against the British presence would reignite.

Nationalism revived in the early 1960s; postcolonialism proved more than theory. Underdeveloped, made redundant by mine closures, exploited, ignored, Welsh natives resented the English thirst for water. So close to Liverpool, the reservoir at Tryweryn inundated the village of Capel Celyn near Bala. In 1963, three men gathered to detonate the transformers. They represented Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, the Movement for the Defence of Wales (MAC).

MAC2, for Clywedog slightly reformed after its original members went to ground, continued what the Free Wales Army (FWA) then propagandized as a counterpart to Breton and especially Irish republicans. One of the bombers, Welsh-speaking farmer Owen Williams, had to flee during the mid-1960s to Ireland, to evade police capture. There, the FWA made contacts with Irish republicans. 

This episode has given rise to legendary tales that the Marxist-directed IRA sold off its arms to the Welsh, leaving the Irish ill-prepared to fight back when “the Troubles” returned three years later. Yet, Humphries downplays the actual exchanges of weaponry or explosives. Denis Coslett attracted too much attention to the FWA. He boasted of killer Alsatians ready for suicide missions, and he courted John Summers, a journalist inveigled in the fight for funds for the victims of the Aberfan coal-tip disaster in 1966. Summers appears to have finagled himself on behalf of the FWA to demand redress for the Aberfan claimants. Curiously, Humphries—who reveals Summers informed the authorities about his Welsh activist contacts-- ignores Summers’ 1970 paperback, The Disaster -- slightly revising his 1969 potboiler The Edge of Violence -- which dramatizes Summers’ involvement in Aberfan and sensationalizes the potential of FWA rebellion. 

The media, quick to leap on connections claimed (if satirized by such as Summers) between Fenians and Welsh hotheads, brought the Special Branch, founded to fight against Irish republicans a century earlier, to arrest and jail many innocent nationalists. Both the activists and the authorities stoked the fires that threatened, as the investiture of Charles Windsor as “prince of Wales” loomed in 1969, to kindle militarism in Wales similar to the Irish resurgence.

Humphries cites John Jenkins that Seán MacStiofáin, in 1968 soon to be “the founder of the breakaway Provisionals,” took from Jenkins the concept of a cellular structure for the PIRA. The conversion of the Provos to this non-hierarchical organisation took place nearly ten years later, after MacStiofáin had stepped down from his leadership role. Whatever impact Jenkins’ model had on the Irish campaign appears indirect and at considerable remove. 

This episode of Irish-Welsh contacts remains little investigated in Humphries’ book, perhaps due to reticence from those involved, perhaps out of a legend inflated out of a few casual contacts. This topic merited more attention. The pan-Celtic and Welsh countercultural milieus in which pop and folk musicians along with language activists revived political radicalism likewise gain scant coverage here. 

Any pan-Celtic contentions in Humphries' account stint on the details of what such alliances sought. He barely quotes from Roy Clews' To Dream of Freedom (1980 ed. cited; but rev. 2001). Humphries  glosses over Keith Griffiths (Gethin ap [ab?]Iestyn)  in his roles as propagandist for the Patriotic Front and Cofiwn. (Not to mention his role, recalling Emyr Humphries’ commemorative stance, via Gethin’s spirited website and republican-related archives at Welsh Remembrancer.) 

Such scarcity of firsthand testimony may also reflect a largely more self-effacing Welsh movement determined to avoid infiltration and informers, which had repeatedly weakened their Irish counterparts. The Welsh campaign’s two spokesmen tended towards grandiosity, while its operatives kept hidden. Griffiths, Jenkins, and a few others, perhaps no more than twenty-five identified members of the FWA, fronted a silent majority of grassroots sympathisers. Detectives were clueless about many who fought back. The authorities fumbled and followed many false trails. 

The FWA was “living on a legend of newspaper cuttings,” Griffiths admitted to its “commandant” Cayo Evans. (qtd. 98) Humphries compares their outbursts to a flailing by “a drowning man.” He lashes out in desperation to alert those long assimilated, too long complacent to danger from constant English in-migration and Welsh abandonment of its heritage. (65) 

This small band of Welshmen, some far more anglicized than Welsh-speaking, also split along political vs. linguistic necessities for their strategy to revive their embattled land’s culture. Luckily, a visit from “Red” Rudi Dutschke with MAC2 was aborted; British surveillance expelled him before links between German revolutionaries could be forged. Coslett and Evans, the self-proclaimed leaders, by their love of the limelight brought Griffiths to warn them of their antics. “There is nothing substantial behind us at all,” he warned in a letter found in a police raid at Evans’ farmhouse. (qtd. 98) 

Did these “freedom fighters” valiantly sustain the example of Penyberth’s fire-setting trio against the British bomber station on venerated Welsh land? Or, did they perpetuate the futile gestures of desperate cultural nationalists driven to protest the only way they could for attention, faced with an indifferent audience of those who had surrendered to the English incursion and the Welsh erosion? 

Early on Humphries pins blame. “But while the campaign of violent direct action had its genesis in nationalist virtues and goals, it was the failure of the patriotic foot soldiers to articulate their cause that allowed government to marginalize Welsh extremism as the action of crazed fanatics.” (15-16)

Two activists blew themselves up the night before the investiture ceremony; the bomb went off near the tracks that would carry the royal train to Caernarfon Castle, icon of imperial domination over the Crown’s first colony.  Charles was crowned; as crowds of his countrymen cheered, “MAC2’s chief bomb-maker, Sgt. John Jenkins, providing dental care for the troops on ceremonial duty, “ was the perfect mole, “at other times wandering around Caernarfon and being abused by locals on account of his uniform.” (127)

The next day, July 2, 1969, nine of Jenkins’ FWA comrades were sentenced. Griffiths alone refused what Evans and Coslett promised the court: to distance themselves from militant activity. They kept their word. A year later, Jenkins was captured and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. He refused to name his accomplices. 

Faced with these men’s actions, Humphries examines if they were terrorists. He admits that “for all its eccentricities and blurred message,” their restrained response constituted the “only authentic Welsh uprising since Owain Glyndŵr.” (146) However, the caricaturing of Welsh republicans as “mad dogs,” Alsatians aside, contributed to the media’s defeat of nationalist-fueled radicalism. The language issue was left to Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, and many who fought for Welsh freedom lacked fluency in a language foreign to their upbringing. The political base, furthermore, never was allowed to emerge, unlike Sinn Féin’s role for the IRA. Republican traditions emerged more from the southern valleys as opposed to Y Fro Gymraeg, the Welsh-speaking northern and western heartlands under cultural assault. 

Welsh saboteurs lacked the popular if again reticent support afforded those a decade later. After the momentous defeat of devolution in 1979, shadowy guerrillas, as Meibion Glyndŵr, rallied under cover of darkness. For a third time this century, a few Welsh asserted themselves. Their linguistic heartland faded. Wealthier English bought its quaint dwellings, “Sons of” this leader (who resisted Westminster for fifteen years after declaring himself in 1400 Prince of Wales), decided to fight back with fire.  

Contrasted with those who took the fall for the pipeline bombings and attacks on buildings in the 1960s, why were any arsonists undetected for another ten years? They had clandestine backing, Humphries reasons, from the people. Folk heroes rather than incendiaries, they were not feared-- as were the 1960s bombers-- for importing leftist revolution.  Invented for Northern Ireland, the Prevention of Terrorism Act brought down its force upon Welsh suspects; again many were taken in without cause. The perpetrators eluded the law. Over two hundred holiday and second homes (often turned permanent residences, thus undermining Welsh culture even more) were burned over twelve years. 

Dignity despite destruction permeates this story. Imagine protests during the 1960s elsewhere with such polite signs as Capel Cefyn’s residents carried to Liverpool in vain: “Your homes are safe. Save ours. Do not drown our homes.” Or, “Please Liverpool, be a great city not a big bully.” (17) After the first attacks on homes in 1979, a note written in ballpoint pen was found:

“The houses were burnt with great sadness. We are not ferocious men. It was an act of despair. The rural areas are being destroyed all over these islands. Wales is our concern. These homes are out of reach of local people because of the economic situation. We call upon individuals of goodwill to take action before these sorry steps take place.” (qtd. 163) 

Emyr Humphreys sought to escape by fiction his homeland’s strife but his mythic models revived within his novels’ depictions of his neighbors and colleagues, caught in an anglicizing land that meant the author himself had to use “the language of the oppressor” to speak on behalf of his Celtic tribe. For a second author with nearly the same surname, also raised in an assimilated Welsh home and working for London’s mouthpiece, the “paper of record” in the Welsh capital, a similar journey back to the heartland occurs. Humphries does wander, during the 1980s, into his own entertaining but digressive stints abroad as a foreign correspondent, but he comes back to his homeland in 1988 aware that swerves away from the anglicized complacency of the Anglo-Welsh establishment may represent renewal. Under Margaret Thatcher’s closing of the mines and privatization of steel, the Welsh workers capitulated, as despair fueled reaction vs. resignation. One-third of North Walians are English-born.  Cohesive communities-- to where Lewis and Humphreys as young men had left their cities to learn Welsh-- have dispersed. 

Humphries closes his study integrating his own reflections. His own transformation from editor for a pro-British, anti-Walian Cardiff newspaper into a critic of Westminster demonstrates a telling shift. He supports Welsh autonomy and welcomes his grandson, raised speaking Cymraeg. He critiques the pacifism of Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans as “fundamentally incompatible with Welsh freedom.” (191) Whereas Emyr Humphries shared with Evans and Lewis the traditional non-conformist avowal of a Christian socialism (an aspect deserving here as with Green more than a cursory nod) refusing to countenance rebellion by armed means, Humphreys allies himself with those tired of Plaid’s careful retreat into quietism. He backs (if for awhile) Cymru Annibynnol/ Independent Wales Party and its refusal to support the 2001 census which denied Welsh their ability to tick a box for their identity. 

This editor, now retired from the fray, ends with a recapitulation of flashpoints for Welsh resistance. In-migration from England, the concomitant reduction of the Welsh-speaking heartlands, and the recurring water demands from its larger, thirstier neighbor add up. They summarize grim assurances that the seven million sterling spent to crush a few dozen rebels in the 1960s may pale before the costs accrued by those complicit in cultural, linguistic, political, and ecological destruction of a long-exploited nation.

Slightly revised and altered for Amazon US 8-14-12:Freedom Fighters and  Emyr Humphries