Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (21 page)

On the other edge of the Atlantic there is an island roughly the shape and size of Manhattan, called Árainn, one of the three Aran Islands, off Galway Bay, where I lived for many years. From it I could see the quartzite peaks of Connemara, on the north of the bay, and the grey limestone plateau of the Burren, on its south. It seems strange now to be talking about those quiet little places, here in this roaring city, on the edge of this vast continent. And to be discussing in New York the language, Irish or Gaelic, that is still spoken in Aran and Connemara, but only by a few thousand people, in fact to be bringing you merely a few words from the local dialects of that language, words that are falling into disuse – perhaps that needs some explanation. My excuse must be that I came to that narrow island and that dying language from the great cities and the great languages of Europe, and found in them
something
that I am still trying to understand, and am anxious to pass on. Heard something, I should say, rather than found. The
language
and the place, the landscape, spoke with one tongue, and spoke of something that is in danger of being forgotten by the busier languages and places of the world.

To get over an initial embarrassment about it I should also explain that the fairly fluent if grammatically limited Irish I picked up when living in Aran has decayed a good deal over the last few years when I have been living in an English-speaking part of Connemara and although I have no difficulty in reading and understanding Irish I fear to speak it in public, lest my pretention to know something about Irish placenames look absurd. If I am to declare what the Irish language, and in particular the placenames, have meant to me as a wanderer in that language’s natural habitat, I must rely on your forbearance.

I’ll begin with some moments – which in my memory have
become
symbolic – of my first encounters with Irish, after M and I moved from London to the Aran Islands twenty years ago. One of the first remarks the village blacksmith, Mícilín an Gabha, made to us after showing us round the bare, damp, cottage we had rented from him in Árainn, was that the wild geese flying southwards over the island in the autumn make every letter of the alphabet in the sky; first a huge A, then a B, and then, as he put it, ‘a burst of them’ make a C. He thought this was remarkable, since those geese had never been to school. I would have thought it
remarkable
too, but the best I ever saw the wild geese do in all the autumns we spent in Aran was the occasional
síneadh
fada,
the stroke marking a long vowel in Irish writing. But the idea of the sky’s teaching us the language remained with me. The Irish
language
as an emanation of the land of Ireland, of that segment of the earth’s surface and its moody skies, is the theme I want to explore tonight.

Micilín spoke English competently, but his sentences, sparse, short and sturdy, seemed to rise up out of a continuum of
sotto-
voce
murmurings like jutting rocks in a foaming sea. This flux of obscure phonemes, I realized by degrees, was Irish, from which his English was being translated, with great loss. By listening to him, and to the men chatting with him at the forge while their ponies were shod, I began to pick out words, and so identify topics, even if what was said about these topics was still carried away from me by the streams of sound. I remember a significant step towards acquisition of understanding. I had asked an old man the name of a certain well – for the absurdity of my
curriculum
vitae
is that I started collecting Irish placenames before I could understand Irish – and he had told me it was Tobar an Asail, the well of the donkey. And then he added:
‘Thit
asal
isteach
ann
fadó.
’
(‘A
donkey
fell into it long ago.’) It was the first sentence of spoken Irish, outside the classrooms of Irish courses, that I completely
understood
.
Thit
asal
isteach
ann
fadó.
As dense and foursquare as a limestone block, a stone from the ruins of the past – but with that mysteriously evocative momentary prolongation of the word
fadó.
The voice of history itself, telling how all things fall.

Another moment, from a later stage of the process: I was going into Inis Oírr, the smallest of the Aran Islands, in one of the local
boats called currachs – flat-bottomed canoes that can be run up onto a sandy beach. At that period the old cargo ship that served the islands used to hang about off shore while the currachs came out and ferried both goods and passengers to the beach. A very calm, silent afternoon – it must have been out of season as I was the only non-islander in the boat. As we neared the strand the men lifted their oars and the currach hung motionless, little waves running in under it, clucking, like chicks under a hen. The islanders were exchanging murmurs, so quietly that if I had not learned some Irish I might not have realized anything was being said at all. They were discussing the individual waves, looking for one a little bigger than the rest on which to run the currach up onto the beach so that I could leap out dryshod. I heard the man in the prow whisper to the man in the stern,
‘Fan
nóiméid,
tá
ceainnín
beag
eile
ag
gobadh
aníos
fút
anois’
(‘Hold on, there’s another little one pushing up under you now’). A still moment, drifting on a neaptide of time – and then a surging stroke of the oars and they were shouting at me to jump:
‘Anois!
Amach
leat
go
tapaidh!’

These images I am offering you – the wild-goose chase of the alphabet in the sky, the waves whispering to each other under the currach, the donkey uttering
seanchas
from the well – are little myths, to tempt you to hear the language as if it were spoken by the landscape. For me it was so from the beginning, as I shall explain. But is there any more defensible, objective truth in the idea of a deep connection between a landscape and its language? Is it in any way more true of Irish than of, say, French or German? An Irish philosopher, John Moriarty, recently told me that among the things that had not happened to the Irish language were the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. If this be true it is so only with many partial exceptions and qualifications. But, letting ourselves be swept along with the huge generalization, it would mean that Irish is a language less dominated by the
prestige
of the book, less individualistic in its stance towards the absolute, less hospitable to analysis, than those neighbour
languages
which were the immediate sites of these cultural upheavals. And these upheavals, these floods of thought, not only left rich deposits in those languages, but swept much away that had come to be seen as obsolete and valueless, and which we now feel the want of. So the obverse of these limitations might be that Irish is
more eloquent by the fireside than in the lecture hall, more apt to conviviality than solitary self-definition, happier in the phenomenal and emotional world than among abstractions. Of course in any living language there are speakers and writers who swell its
vocabulary
and bend its structures. Life, for a language, is continuous self-transcendence. Nevertheless, each language has its own core of native strength and sweetness, and perhaps in the case of Irish this is to be identified with its immediacy to experience, and in
particular
with its closeness to the land. If in the following examples I concentrate on land of a stony nature it is because of Ireland I only know Aran, the Burren and Connemara, which are all of stone, and if in the Irish language I concentrate on nouns, it is because I only know nouns, having picked up them up like so many coloured stones.

Stones, then.
Clock
(stone) is a fine word, a solid, lumpy
two-fistfuls
of sound. I love also the expressive suite of words for
different
sorts of stony place:
clochar,
clochrach
or
cloithreach,
creig
(in Aran a
creig
is an area of bare limestone pavement; the plural is
creigeanna,
but I have heard the magnificent form
creigre
achai
),
cragán
or
criogán
(which is something between a
creig
and a field),
leac
or
leic,
meaning a flagstone or flat sheet of rock, with the plural
leacrachai,
and
leacht,
which usually means a cairn or
monument
but in Connemara can mean the same as
leac.
Also:
scairbh
and
screigín,
both meaning rough stony places, and
scailp
(in Aran a
scailp
is usually a fissure in the limestone, but can be any sort of stony declivity or hole), with the marvellously rugged plural
scal
prachaí
.
Aran is of course the headquarters of these harsh words in
cr
and
scr
and
cl,
the islands being totally composed of
creigeanna
and
scalprachai.
Many of the little green fields of Aran have been reclaimed from bare rock by spreading sand and seaweed on it year after year to build up the soil. Tomás Ó Direáin, brother of the well-known Irish language poet from Aran, Máirtín Ó Direáin, has a little poem about an Aran man reclaiming a
leic,
a flat sheet of rock, beginning

(See him standing on the flag/ which is grey and bare)

and ending with nursery-rhyme simplicity:

(With the sweat of his brow, with the blood of his heart, he will make land out of the –
scalprachaí
!
I defy anyone to find an
adequate
translation for the word.) Nursery rhymes can be explosive, though; they have to be handled carefully. Here we have ‘land’, the earth, being made out of the blood of the heart – the blood of self-sacrifice through labour, not the blood of self-sacrifice in battle, the blood Patrick Pearse thought would warm the heart of the earth, but disturbingly reminiscent of it. In talk about land and language, there is always a whiff of this third element, blood, and the three have historically made up a deathly stew. This dark context of my theme is one that, having glanced into, I must now step around – with perhaps this note of caution to myself: When talking about the land or the landscape speaking, do not forget that this is only a metaphor, suggestive in some contexts and baleful in others, and that in fact the speaking is made up of the speech acts of countless individuals, each one in its unique historical and social setting. My own ‘listening to the landscape’ has included listening to hundreds of farmers, housewives, fishermen, shopkeepers, and the odd professor of Irish too.

The most immediate connection between language and reality, the one first made by children and by language learners, is that of naming things. Placenames are the interlock of landscape and
language
. As mentioned, I started collecting placenames in the Aran Islands before I could understand a word of the language; this was perhaps because Micilín the blacksmith was so anxious to impart his knowledge of them. This zeal for communication of the lore that it seemed was no longer finding an audience in the local
community
, and so was discharged on me, demanding of me that I take note and record it for ever, is an imperative force I have felt again and again over the twenty years of work that grew out of those initial conversations in the smithy of Aran. This work was not what I had in mind when I came to Ireland; there is an element of compulsion in it, something I did not know of in
myself, perhaps still do not know of, which answers to something in this landscape. Or perhaps the landscape saw me coming. So in my diaries for that first winter in Aran I find notes on the
boundaries
or mearing walls of villages whose names I have spelled out in
ad
hoc
English phonetics, with scrappy explanations of the names, some of them completely misunderstood. It is usual to have a degree in Irish, and to know something of Old Irish too, before tangling with the complexities of placenames. Of course as I became aware of the difficulties I took to consulting experts. Most of the obscure or arguable cases have been submitted to the
judgement
of several specialists – the result often enough being several different opinions, or rather suggestions, for no one who knows the subject would be dogmatic about interpreting a name without visiting the place itself. Armchair speculations about the meaning of placenames, without visiting the locality to hear the exact
pronunciation
and to observe the topography or any other salient characteristics of the place, are necessarily inconclusive.

This is because placenames are semantically two-pronged; they not only have a referent, like any proper name,
i.e.
the place they denote, but most of them also have a connotation; they make a condensed or elliptic remark about the place, a description, a claim of ownership, a historical anecdote, even a joke or a curse on it. And so they may only reveal their meaning in the physical and historical context of the place. When I was mapping Connemara I was puzzled by the names of two uninhabited townlands out in the wide expanses of the bog: Tullaghlumman More and
Tullaghlumman
Beg. A
tulach
is a small hill – in Connemara most
tulacha
are sizeable drumlins in fact – but these areas were labyrinths of lakes in level bogland. According to John O’Donovan, who was the Ordnance Survey’s expert on placenames for the first survey in the 1830s, Tullaghlumman meant ‘Lomán’s hill’ – for whenever O’Donovan could not otherwise interpret a placename he would derive it from some personal name, and he invented an amazing number of peculiarly named persons in the process. But one day I was out walking the bog with a shepherd from Roundstone, and when we stopped to catch our breath and admire the view he pointed out a rocky knoll in the distance, and said ‘That’s Tulach Lomáin.’ It was a very small eminence, only noticeable even in the huge encircling flatness of bogs and lakes because of a large
outcrop, a sheet of bare rock, on one side of it. Back at home, in the dictionary I found the word
lomán,
rock outcrop, evidently from
lom,
bare. So a very minor feature, but one visible from afar, a useful landmark to shepherds, had given its name to a large area. On that same day we passed a small lake up on the side of a steep hill, called Loch Roisín na Róige, a name nobody could explain or translate for me. Climbing beyond the lake, we followed a little ravine cut by a streamlet that flung itself down waterfalls, which my companion told me was called the Róig. And that solved the crossword puzzle of the landscape, as if a ‘down’ word had given me the vital letter in the ‘across’; for
róig
means a sudden rush or attack, and where this aggressive little stream drops into the lake a little peninsula or
roisín
has been built up out of the stony material it has ripped out of the mountainside. Loch Roisín na Róige, the lake of the little point of the Róig or onrush; it encapsulates the dynamics of the geography. For me it is also a memento of a
vigorous
day’s walking and talking with one of
Connemara’s
mountainy
men.