i. Joyce's Knowledge of Modern Irish

It is well known that Joyce, like many people in Ireland at the turn of the century, spent time learning Modern Irish. The pressure to learn Irish is thematized in A Portrait of the Artist in Davin's conversation with Stephen Dedalus: "Then be one with us, said Davin. Why don't you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the first lesson?" (202). In the last decade of the nineteenth century the Gaelic League had made learning Irish a nationalist act—an act that distinguished the "Irish" from "West Britons." This is the point behind the conversation between Miss Ivors and Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead" when she reproaches him for his reviews in the Daily Express and criticizes his vacation plans and his language learning as well:

[1] It is well to remember Clive Hart's warning that Joyce was not often a great reader, particularly later in his life, and that it is wise to be guarded in one's assumptions about the depth of his literary background (Power, Conversations with James Joyce, foreword 5). Garvin (227) notes as well that Joyce got people to summarize or mark books for him.

—And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?

—Well, said Gabriel, it's partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.

—And haven't you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish? asked Miss Ivors. (D 189)

The language movement was a central feature of Irish cultural nationalism, and study of Irish became a test of an individual's nationalism, as Joyce indicates in these passages.

Not a great deal is known about Joyce's engagement with Modern Irish. In My Brother's Keeper Stanislaus Joyce says: "First among [Joyce's friendships] was George Clancy ('Davin'), who became a teacher of Irish. . . . As a student, Clancy was an Irish language enthusiast. . . . It was under his influence that my brother studied Irish for a year or two" (175). Joyce's instructor was Patrick Pearse, the Irish nationalist and future martyr of the 1916 Easter Rising, so it is reasonable to suppose that Joyce got a good deal of politics along with his language tuition, much of it nauseating to Joyce, as the portrait of Hughes in Stephen Hero indicates. Joyce engaged in these Irish lessons at the time when he was busy acquiring a number of modern European languages, including French, Italian, German, and Dano-Norwegian (cf. JJ 2 59–61, 75–76); his interest in Irish can thus be related as much to his major area of university studies as to an interest in cultural nationalism. Indeed, it would have been strange had a student of modern languages totally ignored the Irish language movement burgeoning around him in view of the intrinsic linguistic interest of Celtic languages in general and Irish in particular. It is probably not irrelevant that in Stephen Hero Daedalus, lured to Irish classes by his attraction to Emma Clery, gives as his acknowledged reason for learning Irish, "I would like to learn it—as a language" (55).

Joyce gives a rather dismal picture of Gaelic League Irish classes in Stephen Hero (59ff.), and the portrait of the teacher Hughes—bad poet, monomaniacal hibernophile, and artistic philistine—is not an attractive view of Pearse (59–63, 82–83, 103–4). Joyce later told Budgen he stopped attending classes because Pearse insisted on denigrating English in favor of Irish (Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce 323), and the picture of Hughes as Pearse offers sufficient reason to quit the classes. But Joyce also notes in Stephen Hero that the books used were those of

Father O'Growney, the standard Gaelic League grammars; these are very simple chapbooks whose tuition hardly goes beyond the simple declarative sentence.^[2] Moreover, although most students learned quickly and worked very hard, the progress of the class "was retarded by the stupidity of two of the young men" (SH 60). An able language learner like Joyce would have found such a learning environment stultifying at best and more like maddening. What Joyce's real mastery of the language came to be remains difficult to assess, but it must be remembered that he was gifted at languages: he graduated from University College in modern languages and worked professionally as a language teacher. He lived and worked comfortably in foreign-language environments, switching from English to Italian, German, and French with ease. He taught himself Norwegian so that he could read Ibsen in the original. With this sort of orientation, it would have been extraordinary had Joyce not learned a credible amount of Modern Irish in "a year or two," especially considering the political import of the language movement, even given the obstacles of the depressing classes Joyce portrays.^[3]

Joyce's accomplishments in Modern Irish can be judged by a number of indices largely related to the Irish that he incorporates in Finnegans Wake. Not only is there a large Irish lexical repertory in the Wake, but it is clear from the puns on other Irish words, and also interlingual puns, that Joyce had Irish "in his ears": he had more than a bookish knowledge of the language. His usage of phonetic spellings (O Hehir xi) fits with this hypothesis. There are grammatical constructions in the Irish in Finnegans Wake (including errors that may have been intentional, as similar errors in English are; cf. O Hehir ix) and some idioms as well, indicating that Joyce knew more than just Irish words: he had some facility with the morphology and syntax of the language, including an understanding of the initial mutations.

Many of the Irish expressions in Finnegans Wake are proper names, including place names, tribal names, and personal names. Joyce and his brother had the practice of etymologizing names during their walks in Dublin (O Hehir viii), and that interest in names is reflected in Joyce's naming in his literary work as a whole, his verbal realism in Ulysses and

[2] A line from O'Growney is quoted in Ulysses 9.366; cf. Schutte 38–39.

[3] Cf. O Hehir (vii), who comes to a similar conclusion.

elsewhere, and the punning on Irish names in Finnegans Wake. There are other stray indications of Joyce's facility in Irish in his other works, including the punning on Banba discussed in chapter 4 and, curiously, the triad of things that, Stephen remembers, an Irishman ought to avoid: "Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon" (1.732). Although Joyce may have known an English version from oral sources, the Irish source may be the Irish column in the Freeman's Journal entitled "Le h'aghaidh na nGaedhilgeoiridhe," which appeared during the period Joyce was working on his Irish; on 3 March 1902 the column gives an English translation accompanying the Irish text, and the translation reads, "Shun the smile of the Saxon, the bull's forehead, the snarling of a dog, and the hind-part of a stallion," and goes on to comment, "The Irish cannot avoid the deceitful smile of the Saxon."^[4] Joyce knows enough about Irish senchas to pare the saying down to the traditional form of a triad and to translate it in a way that captures the pithy quality of the original. His translation also introduces alliteration, which is common in many Irish precepts. In Ulysses Stephen is presented as one who knows Irish expressions, who can understand simple Irish when it is spoken, and who has Irish words and phrases come to mind in appropriate circumstances.

Citing the growing number of Irish words in Joyce's texts between Dubliners and Finnegans Wake, Kenneth Nilsen observes, "It might seem reasonable to assume that Joyce's knowledge of Irish was at its high point in the early years of this century but a look at his writings seems to indicate exactly the opposite" (24). After writing Ulysses Joyce continued his interest in Irish, and in 1939 he retained in his possession two dictionaries of Irish, including an abridgment of Patrick Dinneen's standard dictionary of Irish, entitled A Smaller Irish-English Dictionary for the Use of Schools (1923; Connolly #58 and #271; cf. O Hehir vii–viii).^[5] Though the possession of these works indicates a significant interest in

[4] The Irish text reads, "Seachain gáire sacsanach, éadan tairbh, dranntadh madaidh, agus deireadh staile"; cf. O Hehir (337), who also gives the Irish of this tetrad. Cf. Thornton (Allusions in "Ulysses" 26) and Gifford (27) for additional English sources for the expression.

[5] In July 1924 Joyce also wrote to Larbaud some simple observations regarding features of Irish orthography and phonology and indicating that the borrowings from Latin and Norman French are relatively restricted. The content of the letter does not say much for Joyce's Irish, but his willingness to speak with some authority does. See Letters 1: 217–18.

the language, the fact that he added the Irish to Finnegans Wake after the first draft suggests that Irish was not natural to him (O Hehir ix). O Hehir concludes that he had "elementary and common Irish," though the fact that it is the second of the languages listed as contributing to the Wake indicates its importance to Joyce in that work.

Although Modern Irish is very different in its morphology from Old and Middle Irish, the syntax of the three states of the language has much that is continuous; moreover, the lexis of the three periods of Irish overlaps to a great extent. Thus, even the sort of facility in Modern Irish that Joyce seems to have acquired serves to make some elements of an early Irish text accessible to an attentive reader of a facing translation. The accessibility of the early texts was still greater when Joyce was learning Irish than it is today since the spelling reforms had not yet been instituted; thus, the spellings Joyce learned were those inherited from the medieval orthographical conventions, making the early texts more approachable from a lexical point of view than they are to those who currently learn Modern Irish. It follows, therefore, that any scholarly editions of medieval Irish texts that Joyce would have used for their translations would have offered partially transparent texts to him as well. If it is correct, as some scholars have suggested (Kelleher, "Irish History" 419), that Joyce read scholarly editions and facing translations of some early Irish stories at the time he was studying Irish or later in his life, thereby familiarizing himself with certain texts that he later used in the mythic structuring of his own works, he may have been able to make determinations on his own about certain of the more obvious features of the style of early Irish narrative. The argument that he knew the content or poetics of much of the early literature does not turn on this possibility, however. In any case the inclusion of a considerable Gaelic lexicon in Finnegans Wake indicates that Joyce did not forget his Irish once he went to the Continent: to the contrary, he seems to have augmented his knowledge. And where original Irish texts or scholarly sources are indicated for his architectonic structuring, it is not necessary to restrict Joyce's reading of these materials to the time before his departure from Ireland nor to restrict his knowledge of the texts purely to translations. Joyce seems to have renewed his interest in Irish materials whenever he had need of them for his own writing and whenever he had access to suitable collections of books, as he did both in Zurich and Paris.