A lovely new anthology was launched in the Cervantes Institute in Dublin on Wednesday. To The Winds Our Sails: Irish Writers Translate Galician Poets, edited by Mary O’Donnell and Manuela Palacios, (Salmonpoetry) offers introductions to the work of 10 Galician poets – all women – and the twelve Irish poets who have translated their work into English and Irish.

Great idea.

In her introduction, Mary O’Donnell writes about the extent to which Irish poets have become ‘accustomed to being the focus of literary research and scholarship from abroad’. When she went to Galicia in 2006, to give a lecture on Irish women writers, she became curious about the ‘dearth of information and interest in Ireland regarding Galician poets.’ This anthology is the wonderfully constructive outcome of that curiosity, a collaboration between Mary O’Donnell, the Galician academic Manuela Palacios, and the inimitable Jessie Lendennie at Salmon – not to mention the poets involved, both Galician and Irish.

Speaking at the launch of To The Winds Our Sails, Michael Cronin carried Mary’s observation a little further, remarking on a narcissistic trend in Irish literature, whereby we accept international interest in Irish literature as our due, but do not reciprocate that interest to anything like the same degree. He also remarked on how any debate on the EU focuses on financial, economic and political dimensions but rarely includes the literary, and never extends to an exploration of how European literatures might influence us, as opposed to the other way around.

Of course individual writers engage with international literature, but in a broader cultural sense, I think this observation is depressingly close to the truth – apart from the odd festival here and there – and is certainly worth thinking about. I’d love to be wrong, so if anyone reading this feels motivated to correct me, go ahead, be my guest. With examples, please.

In other news: the Dublin Writers’ Festival begins on Tuesday, 1^st June and runs until Sunday 6^th. The conversation between Tom Murphy and Conor McPherson (in the Abbey @ 4 pm on 6^th) has been billed as a memorial event for Eithne McGuinness, who died after a short illness last December. Eithne, a playwright, actor and short fiction writer, worked on the festival for several years.

Some events have already booked out, so what are you waiting for? For more info, go to: http://www.dublinwritersfestival.com/

Where are the Women?

People who know that I spent ten years+ researching, teaching and writing about women’s writing (especially Irish women’s writing) would be justified in asking this question as they look back through my blog to date (all 6 entries). A survey like the ones I used to conduct on book review pages would reveal an overwhelming predominance of references to men in this blog to date. I believe this is accidental, but I’ll admit that it’s interesting, given the accusations of gender imbalance that I used to fling around with such abandon – and justification, it has to be said.

On the other hand, a blog lends itself to spontaneous, random and occasional observation, so should it be constrained by ideology or bias one way or another? I think not. This blog began in a spirit of responding to whatever stimulus came my way, and that's how I've written it. Nevertheless, being aware of the slippage has brought me full circle, back to Virginia Woolf. Or maybe it’s the slow progress of that room of my own that’s done it, causing me to delve into past essays, articles and stories, teaching and research notes, minutes from various committee meetings, reminding me of past convictions. It could even be the strong appeal of the circular form that brings me back to Woolf, who wrote that ‘ a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.’

... and then there’s Yeats.

A friend who is too shy - or maybe too busy - to leave a comment (re Colum McCann) sends an email reminding me that Yeats said it’s easier to break stones than to write.

And so he did. Here it is, in “Adam’s Curse”

“ ... 'A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kind of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.’ ...

Yeats is a man who’d know quite a bit about the turgid and the overblown; but he’d also know everything worth knowing about the sublime, and about revelation, vision, ambition. But, poor man, he often comes in for criticism. I was on a guided tour of the city once (yes, Dublin – there’s no law against Dubliners doing this; in fact, I’d recommend it - you’d be surprised what you might learn) when the guide began to mock him. Ah, leave Yeats alone, I said. The tourists were surprised. I’d listened with pleasure while various other figures from the national pantheon were derided by this guide, a witty and impassioned person, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I always feel that Yeats needs defending. Being posh and shortsighted and prone to wearing his heart on his sleeve makes him an easy target – look at George Moore, comparing him to an umbrella left behind at a party. And let’s face it, Moore didn’t have much to crow about in the physique department.

Another time, I heard a woman giving out yards about Yeats.

Ah, leave him alone, I said - it's getting to be a bit of a habit, this - What have you got against him? He was a terrific poet.

But a terrible person! she said.

How did she know this? She'd read Roy Foster's biography, both volumes, and that was the conclusion she'd drawn from them. So there.

The dead are terribly vulnerable to this sort of judgement; especially dead writers, don't ask me why. Yeats is the very one who wrote, 'Let them be, they're dead and gone ...'

I’ve always had a soft spot for Yeats. His poetry, which is the one thing we know for sure about him and the only thing that matters, helped me through those hidjus teenage years when No-One-Understood. I used to copy his lines onto sheets of paper and carry them around. He had his struggles, his failed loves and disappointments, his wilderness years. But he was the real thing. He came back, time after time, better than ever. We should all be so committed. And so lucky.

By the way, the poet Stephen James Smith has a words-and-music version of ‘September 1913’ that’s well worth a listen: http://www.stephenjamessmith.com/Audio.html

He and Enda Reilly are making an ep of old Irish poetry, including this track.

On viewing the page with loathing

Going through these old boxes of notes is a chastening experience. I’d forgotten how bad my early attempts at writing were. I suppose it’s progress, of a kind, to be able to recognize putrescence in your own work. There are writers I know who hold on to successive drafts of manuscripts in the hope that some day someone – preferably a wealthy university in America – will buy them for their archive. Personally, I’d be more likely to pay to keep mine OUT of an archive – of any kind.

And yet. It’s comforting, as Margaret Atwood says in her introduction to The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 3 (ed. Philip Gourevitch) to know that even the immortals write what she calls ‘clunkers’ from time to time. One of the joys of reading the interviews is, as she points out, the knowledge that ‘I am not the only one who has viewed the page with loathing’ (ix). One of the tenets of any writing workshop for beginners is the reminder that nobody gets it right first time. Talent isn’t everything, we say, we all have an apprenticeship to serve. Even Joyce and Beckett wrote some pretty turgid stuff in the beginning: they had trouble finding publishers. Nobody bought their early books except their families and friends, who weren’t always thrilled about the contents. They had no money. They lived on handouts, they borrowed money and clothes and places to live, felt despair. I think it's safe to say that they sometimes drank a little more than is now considered healthy. It’s not all prizes and book tours and glamorous readings, you know. You learn it by doing it, and that means you have to be willing to embarrass yourself. Over and over again. It takes time. It might take years.

There’s a great story about Pablo Cassals: After a concert, a fan came up to him and said, “I’d give anything to be able to play (the cello) as well as you do.” Cassals said, “I gave it my life.”

Still and all, I don’t feel inclined to offer any of my own personal tat to future readers just so that they can feel better about themselves, thanks very much. There’s something wonderfully exhilarating about shredding it, bringing it to the recycling centre and leaving it there. It’s probably not ecologically sound to be driving all that distance to recycle paper, but there, that’s twenty-first century Ireland for you. And there’s a pleasing symmetry to the notion that my most earnest and clunky confusions will be compacted and recycled, along with zillions of other ideas, statements, queries, opinions and the odd shopping list; that it might even return to my desk in some future ream of paper: virginal, expectant. Ready.