Reporter | Xu Luqing
Edit | Yellow Moon
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The fairies and the purer of the elves dwell there, mourning our fallen world with the sighs of the reeds swaying in the wind, with the singing of the birds, the groans of the waves, with the tender cries of the violin.
Yeats created an ethereal, natural Irish aesthetic in his masterpiece "Celtic Twilight", which still influences the imagination of popular culture for Ireland - in the game "World of Warcraft", the character "Druid" can use the power of nature to maintain balance and protect life; Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" uses Irish legends to construct the image of the elves, elegant and light, inhabiting the forest.
In addition to Yeats, there are many other Irish writers on the shelves of classic literature, Joyce, Beckett, Colm Tobin... The popular new generation of writers, Sally Rooney, also from Ireland, wrote about the city, materialism, and class status, far from Yeats's old world of lush trees and elves. "I hate Yeats!" She once said this to the media. Is the search for a coherent thread in Irish literature just wishful thinking? After all, Tolkien said of Irish culture at the inauguration of Oxford University: "The word Celtic is like a magic bag, you can stuff anything into it, but it will not provide anything of its own." ”
At the recent launch of the book "Snow Ling Chasing Deer: Legends of Ireland", qiu Fangzhe, the author of this book, Assistant Professor of University College Dublin in Ireland, Dai Congrong, Professor of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University, and Bao Huiyi, Associate Professor of the Department of English at Fudan University, started from Irish legends to explore how "Celtic culture" and "Irishness" were shaped by folk tale anthology, and whether we can find a continuing motif among Irish writers from Joyce to Sally Looney.
Snowy Ridge: Legends of Ireland
Written by Qiu Fangzhe
Rouge + Yan | Lijiang Publishing House 2022-1 sees the collision of multiple cultures outside of pure "Irishness"
In his masterpiece The Twilight of Celtic, Yeats collects and organizes Irish folklore. The ambition of this book is not only literary, but also political, Yeats is the leader of the "Irish Literary Revival Movement", a cultural movement that originated in the late 19th century and extended into the 1920s, echoing the national independence movement in Irish politics, and strives to prove that Irish culture is rooted in the Celtic culture of Wales and Gaul, which is very different from Greco-Roman civilization and the British and French cultures of the time, providing a basis for shaping the "Irish nation". Writers during this period worked to create de-Anglicized works that were in keeping with the spirit of Irish culture.
Yeats believed that ancient and folktales could be used as a cultural resource, using literature to "shape the soft wax of Ireland". Qiu Fangzhe pointed out that most of the Irish legends currently published in China are mostly influenced by the "Irish Renaissance Movement", often deliberately abandoning the elements of Christian and Latin culture and pursuing pure "Irishness", but these selected collections of stories "do not present Ireland comprehensively enough, and Ireland does not only mean Celtic twilight elf culture". "It's hard to sum up what kind of culture Ireland's ancient culture really was, it's like Chinese culture," he said. If you read their legends, they are the result of a multicultural collision, native beliefs, a linear view of History of Christianity, a story template of continental Europe and the Far East, and the influence of the British invaders, all of which were combined to form the native culture of Ireland. ”
Qiu Fangzhe mentioned that the writers in the Irish Literary Revival Movement tried to make Irish culture related to the sun and the breeze, "like the beauty of a blonde woman walking slowly through the woods". In fact, there are many bloody and vulgar stories in Irish folklore, such as the battle of the wilderness of the ancient Irish gods depicting scenes of brutal war, extramarital affairs, wild unions, and bloody massacres. For example, in the "Story of the Pig of McDassault" included in "Snow Ridge Chasing Deer", the protagonist and people eat pork and quarrel, killing each other until "the corpses are piled up into mountains and learn to flow out of the seven gates"; "The Fall of Eva's Only Son" describes the story of Ireland's most famous hero Kuhulan, in order to gain the king's admiration, killed his own son Conler, "The blood left on Conler's body evaporated in a moment on my hand", "He struck a blow from the water, and the spear in his belly fell into Conler's belly, and then pulled it again." His intestines were flowing all over the place. ”
"Snow Ling Chasing Deer: Legends of Ireland" book launch (Image source: Photo provided by the publisher)
Isolated islands and remote countryside are also one of the stereotypes of Ireland. However, in many legends, Ireland is closely associated with towns and materials, and is also a place of frequent communication between Countries in Europe and even the Far East. For example, The Life of Mongan mentions the king's close dealings with allies on the island of Britain, and the Story of Tuan, son of Carril, is a story of British monks who came to Ireland with gospels to preach. Qiu Fangzhe pointed out that in the Middle Ages, Ireland and Europe and other countries in the world intersected frequently, Irish monks ran schools in many parts of Europe, and many foreign scholars came to conduct academic exchanges.
Irish legends are not only ethereal, ethereal texts that focus on the universe and spirit, but also many stories that criticize current politics and satirize reality. In The Portrait of McKanglin, a tale ridiculing the bishop's cruelty and the king's incompetence, a poor scholar satirizes the bishop for giving too little food, and the bishop beat him in the name of discrediting the church and hanged him in total with the monks, and later comes to the king who is tormented by the gluttonous demon, and the king has ruined the life of the kingdom because of his huge appetite.
From Joyce to Sally Rooney, does the Irish literary motif exist?
In the Chinese world, Irish literature was initially neglected. In the 1990s, Most people did not realize how Irish literature differed from English literature, and in her Doctoral Defense, she was questioned why Writers such as Yeats and Wilde, who had long been among British literature, were specifically classified as Irish writers. Nowadays, Irish literature as an independent discipline has been faced and respected by the academic community.
As a scholar who translated Joyce's work Finnegan's Vigil, Dai believes that Joyce's writing has experienced a return from Irish culture to old age. In his youth, he was ashamed of Ireland's backward economy, chaotic political system and ignorant culture, and only returned to his hometown twice in the twenty years he lived in Paris. In his earliest work, The Dubliners, Joyce wrote about the sluggishness and numbness of the Irish spirit, Ulysses showed the poverty and boredom of Dublin in all its aspects, and by the time finnegan's Vigil, he returned to irish cultural traditions, collecting the legends of irish legends such as "The Story of Tristan and Isser", O'Connor and St. Patrick. Day calmly deduced that Joyce might have wanted to write an Irish epic at first, but later decided to develop Finnegan's Vigil into a "history of the world."
Finnegan's Vigil
Translated by James Joyce
Shanghai People's Publishing House 2013-1
For Bao Huiyi, the two-way rumination of island experience and world experience is the motif of Irish literature. Many Irish writers love and hate their homeland islands, and the nostalgia and homesickness are in the writing. Joyce always had a sense of exile in the face of Ireland, but he carried the Book of Kells, the book of the Irish nation, with him everywhere he went. He once said, "This is my only constant baggage, the intricate images of animals and devoured vines in the Book of Kells, like a chapter in my Ulysses." Tobin also deals with the home experience in many of his works, such as the extensive depiction of the beaches and waves of his hometown of Enniscorthy in Blackwater Lighthouse and The Empty Home, and how the sea he sees after leaving his hometown is different from the sea of his hometown. In Empty Home, the characters wander between their dark homeland and their empty homeland:
"Perhaps this is the reason why I am here at this moment, away from the darkness of Ireland, away from the long harsh winter that has mercilessly descended upon me in my birthplace, away from the east wind. I'm in an empty place because it's never been filled..."
The homeland complex does not apply to Sally Rooney, and Bao Huiyi believes that Rooney's attention to political issues, radical and trendy language styles, and film and television adaptations of her works have all gained her a lot of attention and exposure, trying to find the context and history of Irish literature from her but finding the wrong place. "Sally Rooney is just a tiny piece of the puzzle in Irish literature, and I believe she will go further and wider in the future and will definitely deal with things beyond the urban experience, school life and love life." I'm also wary of letting a young writer carry such a heavy burden on the Irish literary tradition," Ms. Pao said.