Ogham, Irish and English
Inhabited for so long that human memory can scarcely conceive of it, the Irish island is most closely associated with the Celts. It is generally accepted that their arrival began around the5th century B.C., and it is even more accepted that here, more than anywhere else, their civilization was able to fully flourish, as the Romans did not see fit to venture so far. Their king dominated, of course, but he could not have exercised his powers if society had not been structured around two trinities: craftsmen, warriors and scholars, who in turn broke down into three castes: the druids - jurists, theologians - the vates - soothsayers and physicians - and the bards, known as filid(fili in the singular), the poets already elevated to the role of important advisors.
Although a persistent romantic rumor would later associate these cultured men and women with the secret use of the ogham, a mysterious script whose appearance is still difficult to date today, Celtic tradition actually lent itself more to orality. It was not until the emergence of Christianity, embodied in the tutelary figure of Pádraig (4th or5th century), that legends began to be transcribed, no doubt because the filids supported the conversion of the kingdom and joined forces with the monks who excelled in their clerical functions, as the magnificence of the Book of Kells would prove. It is customary to divide legends into four cycles known as Ulster, Historical, Fenian and Mythological, and certain manuscripts are particularly noteworthy, such as the Lebor Gabála Érenn, of which there are five versions, which describes the rich cosmogony of the pre-human peoples who lived on the island before the Flood, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge, whose Old Irish suggests that it was composed from the 8th century onwards, and which features one of the most famous characters in Irish mythology.
Unfortunately, barbarian invasions followed this fertile period, with the Vikings multiplying their assaults in the disastrous 9th century. The Vikings were to gain a lasting foothold until Brian Boru drove them out of the country at the Battle of Clontarf on April 23, 1014. He conquered a fragile independence that would not, however, survive the arrival of the English at the end of the following century... The interminable times to come would be painful for the Irish, who had their land confiscated, were forbidden to practice the Catholic religion and had their language, English, imposed on them. It was in this language that literature began to flourish again in the 17th century, thanks in particular to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), whom it would be simplistic to equate with a youth writer. A future dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, Swift was no less political for all that, and one of his earliest texts, The Tale of the Barrel, displeased Queen Anne so much that a few years later he was forced to leave England, where he had settled. His best-known work, Gulliver's Travels, is also not to be taken lightly, although its first, expurgated version may have disguised the irony of which the writer was so fond.
Satire was also an avenue explored by the descendants of the old Gaelic bards, as demonstrated by Brian Merriman's (1749-1805) long poem, Cúirt An Mheán Oíche, which, until 1946 (!) was still considered too sexually explicit. But this was no time for laughter for Irish-language authors: they resolved to go into exile, such as Geoffrey Keating, who wrote his Farewell to Ireland in France before returning to the country to write his major work, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn; or they were severely downgraded, such as Aogán Ó Rathaille (1670-1726), who, even on his deathbed, wrote verses that upset even Yeats, or were simply hanged, like Piaras Féiriteir in 1653, who had tried to oppose the dark Oliver Cromwell..
Renewal and effervescence
Despite the second civil war that brought the 17th century to a close, the 18th saw the emergence of some fine writers who did not hesitate to conquer the English stage, such as Laurence Sterne who, although born in Clonmel in 1713, spent most of his life on the Big Island and died in London in 1768. He was to make his career in Holy Orders, but was no less sensitive to the humor of Rabelais and Cervantes, a lever he used in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (retranslated into French by Tristram!), an "anti-novel" in which he did not hesitate to play with narrative codes to produce a resolutely modern work. An innovator, he ensured his success throughout Europe, which was not necessarily the case for his contemporary Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), who didn't gain recognition until he was in his forties, when he tried his hand at theater. However, it was his novel Le Curé de Wakefield (published by Le Livre de Poche) that became a classic, rather than the plays by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), The Rivals or L'École de la médisance, which are still performed today.
The Age of Enlightenment was favourable to philosophers - Edmund Burke and George Berkeley, for example - but also saw the emergence of the Romantic movement, epitomized by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), whose Irish Melodies revitalized the soul of his country. Set to music by John Andrew Stevenson, they became anthems of the nationalists to whom he was close, and he continued the fight by writing a biography of revolutionary leader Edward Fitzgerald, or justifying peasant revolts in The Memoirs of Captain Rock. A friend of Lord Byron, he made headlines by burning the diary the latter had entrusted to him, no doubt to protect it, but that's another story..
The Romantic movement takes a less expected turn when it turns Gothic with Charles Robert Maturin, born in Dublin in 1780 to a family of French origin, as his name emphasizes. Encouraged to pursue his career by Sir Walter Scott when he published Fatale Vengeance in 1807, the young man turned his hand to the theater, which led to serious disagreements with the Church. It was his novels that earned him his reputation, but alas, his posthumous fame was only inversely proportional to the misery in which he lived, and some would even see his premature death at the age of 42 as a sign of suicide. His flagship title was Malmoth (published by Libretto), in which a man is commissioned by his dying uncle to destroy a portrait whose eyes are far too penetrating. This novel would go on to inspire writers from Lautréamont to Baudelaire, Balzac and, of course, Oscar Wilde, his future grand-nephew by marriage! With the road to the fantastic now open, some writers took the plunge, such as William Carleton (1794-1869), who drank in the Gaelic legends that had lulled his childhood, or Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), whose Carmilla inspired Bram Stocker (1847-1912) to create another vampire character, the inescapable Count Dracula.
The 19th century, mourned by a terrible famine and a veritable exodus, was no less fertile in literary terms. It saw the emergence of the talent of a non-conformist, Oscar Wilde, who went from exile to exile, breathing his last in Paris on November 30, 1900. Beyond a life made up of scandals and vicissitudes - the time judged that his homosexuality should be paid for by imprisonment - Wilde was a sensitive writer, his poetry(The Ballad from Reading Jail) only barely rivalling his theater(The Importance of Being Constant), and not forgetting the power of some of his novels, including the famous Portrait of Dorian Gray, in which the story of a painting is told..
Born two years after him, in Dublin in 1856, George Bernard Shaw was just as atypical, demonstrating the same pithy, devastating humor in his plays, which were often satirical(Pygmalion, The Billionaire) but won him the Nobel Prize in 1925. In a completely different genre, William Butler Yeats (1865-1935) had also received the award two years earlier. A poet and playwright, he started out in the nationalist Romantic vein, driven by his taste for symbolism and his endless love for the committed Maud Gonne. He wrote The Celtic Twilight in 1893, The Land of Heart's Desire in 1894 and Deirdre in 1907. Towards the end of his life, he found himself yearning for other aesthetic satisfactions, and was introduced to the modernist movement, for such is the common thread that seems to unite all Irish writers - the ability to constantly reinvent themselves, something that would certainly not have been denied by the greatest of them all, and the most internationally renowned - although his masterpiece remains hermetic in many respects - James Joyce, who was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. Like so many others, he took paths that led him far from his native island, and it was in Paris in 1922 that Ulysses, an experimental novel using the " stream of consciousness ", was published in its entirety for the first time.
It was also in the French capital that his friendship with Samuel Beckett, another Nobel Prize winner, blossomed. Beckett's psychological turpitude was matched only by his formidable intelligence and incomparable literary predisposition. Beckett is remembered as the author of a play whose absent character has become almost proverbial, but it would be a great pity to confine him to Waiting for Godot, when his entire body of work is powerful and, what's more, not devoid of a certain humor that barely conceals his despair. His novel trilogy, written in French: Molloy, Malone meurt, L'Innommable, remains, for example, a fundamental reading experience. Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), a political poet preoccupied by the situation in Northern Ireland, is still being honored with a Nobel Prize in the 20th century, but let's wager that the years to come will not be satisfied with these already fine accolades, with the new generations already showing as much promise as the old. In fact, it's easy to see that women's authors have become a fixture on bookstore shelves, mastering to perfection the art of surprising us in the same way as their male peers. Edna O'Brien, for example, who was born in 1930 and is now of respectable age, demonstrates an impressive acuity to the contemporary world when she publishes Girl in 2019 (éditions Sabine Wespieser), a painful tale inspired by the true story of the young women abducted by Boko Haram in 2014. In Ce genre de petites choses, published in 2020 by the same publisher in French translation, Claire Keegan also shows her sensitivity to women's issues, and demonstrates the same willingness to call attention to the violence suffered. When her character Bill Furlong visits a convent to deliver coal in the winter of 1985, he has no idea what he will find behind the closed door..
Finally, Sally Rooney, a very young author born in 1991 in Castlebar, seems poised to give nothing less than a new impetus to literature. In a very sober, almost white writing style, but with an unrivalled sense of psychology, she focuses in her books (the first of which, Conversations Between Friends, was written in three months!) on the preoccupations of her generation, the millennials. In May 2022, the novel was adapted into a TV series. An adaptation that is less popular than that of her second novel, Normal People (2018), the most popular with 1 million copies sold in France. At the end of 2021, she published her third novel, Beautiful World, Where are You.
Another Irish author has shaken up world literature in recent years. Northern Ireland-born Lucinda Riley (1965-2021), author of several bestsellers including The Seven Sisters saga, whose 8 volumes have already sold over 50 million copies since 2014, became the third most-read foreign author in France in 2023.
The final volume of the saga was released posthumously in 2023, bringing the story of this addictive family saga to a close, and will soon be seen in the form of a TV series.
