mairéad - thank you, I'll follow up those lines...!
yes, ian, that line of thinking had occurred to me too - that poetry
around a minority language wd naturally tend to underline the language's
own traditions (which might, of course, be very different from one's idea
of the traditional) and might also tend to find itself bedding down with
mainstream poetry's characteristically high valuation of heritage,
authenticity, voice, ruralism and localism.
On the other hand nothing is more sure than that if a kind of poetry can
be imagined then someone somewhere is going to have a go at it: surely in
this case the possibilities are exciting.
I hadn't thought of it when I asked my question but one starting point for
experimental Irish could be Finnegan's Wake. From Brendan O'Hehir's
introduction to A Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegans Wake (1967): "To attempt
Such a Lexicon as this of the Gaelic or Irish in Finnegans Wake probably
seems today, even in the abstract, less derisory a task than it might have
seemed a decade ago. The actual extent of the present list may occasion
some surprise, but certainly not so much as it would have when the fashion
still was to assume that Joyce knew little or no Irish. Partly Joyce
himself is to blame for the prevalence of that assumption, for he
intimates in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that Stephen Dedalus
dropped the Irish course in which he had enrolled after only one lesson.
Taking fiction for fact, readers were content in the comfortable belief
that the Gaelic in Finnegans Wake could not amount to more than a
smattering--more perhaps than of Basque or Albanian, but not a great deal
more. The belief was all the more comfortable in that Irish is a difficult
language with a thorny orthography and opaque even' to the most polyglot
of ordinary readers."
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