‘listening to this rude and beautiful poetry’: John Millington Synge as Song Collector in the Aran Islands

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-259
Author(s):  
Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
Keyword(s):  
John Millington Synge ◽  
Lady Gregory ◽  
Aran Islands

To date, little attention has been given to the songs in Synge's The Aran Islands, items that Tim Robinson imagines are not ‘fully thought into the texture of the work’. They come from a collection of songs in Irish and in English that was created by Synge in Inis Oírr in 1901 in the company of the local poet Mícheál Ó Meachair. This essay investigates Synge's song collection and the local singers and poets whom he met, including Seághan Seoige of Baile an Fhormna, Inis Oírr and Marcuisín Mhichil Siúinéara Ó Flaithbheartaigh of Cill Rónáin, Árainn. It examines how the music of Aran impacted on Synge during his four visits between 1898 and 1901, what his collection tells us about the song tradition of Aran, and what inspired him to collect songs there. Did Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht prompt him to create his own collection? What parts did Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats play? Considering Synge was a trained musician and composer, why did he not collect the airs that accompanied the songs? Recognising the influence of sean-nós song on Synge's dramatic oeuvre, this essay questions whether or not the songs of Aran affected his work.

scholarly journals THE PECULIARITIES OF IRISHISMS IN IRISH ENGLISH WITHIN THE PERIOD OF THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL (END OF THE 19TH – BEGINNING OF THE 20th CENTURY)

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (10(78)) ◽  
pp. 211-214
Author(s):  
Nadia Makaryshyn
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
John Millington Synge ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
Social Contacts ◽  
Lady Gregory ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Irish Literary Revival ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article deals with the analysis of borrowings from the Irish language in Irish English within the period of the Irish literary revival (end of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century) borrowed in the context of linguo-cultural communication. The article also examines the factors that affect the dynamics and productivity of such borrowings, among which – the absence of competitive equivalents in English, a necessity to establish social contacts between English and Irish speakers and cultures, the revival of Irish autochthonous elements, and others. Four main historic periods of borrowings in the course of Anglo-Irish contacts are schematically outlined with the article concentrating on the third period, i.e. the Gaelic Revival. The material for the article is based on the literary texts of the English-speaking Irish authors of late 19th and early 20th cc. (William Butler Yeats, Isabella Augusta Gregory (Lady Gregory), George William Russell (alias AE) and John Millington Synge). The peculiar features of Irish borrowings, their use and functions were examined as well. The expedience for a further study of borrowing tendencies and assimilation of Irish vocabulary in Irish English was substantiated, which would contribute to understanding the mechanisms and consequences of linguistic and cultural interaction in Ireland.

Synge, John Millington (1871–1909)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paige Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Lady Gregory ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
Aran Islands ◽  
Peasant Culture

J. M. Synge (pronounced "Sing") is best known for his plays, first staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, that vividly depicted rural life in Ireland. His early intellectual interests resembled those of many modernists: he traveled throughout Europe as a young man, studying language at the Sorbonne in Paris and music in Germany and Italy; he read Darwin, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, among other innovative thinkers; he published in forward-thinking periodicals. The Irish myths and tales of Lady Gregory and the beauty of the Irish language, along with the urging of W. B. Yeats, whom he met in Paris in 1896, lured Synge home to his native Ireland, where he would study closely the language and culture of the rural west. His intimacy with the cultures of the Aran Islands and the west coast of Ireland, where he lived for short stretches of time, is recorded in The Aran Islands (1907) and In Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara (1911), both of which included images by J. B. Yeats. Synge’s ear for language and dialect helped him to craft the poetic Hiberno-English that defined his dramatic dialog, and his eye for the nuances of Irish peasant culture is evident not only in his stage directions, but also in his photographs and travel writing.

Oceans Apart: Amitav Ghosh, John Millington Synge, and Weak Comparison

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Cóilín Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
John Millington Synge ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Aran Islands

This article compares John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) and Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land (1992), travelogues, histories, and anthropological investigations of maritime societies. Both books tell of a world marked by syncretism and synthesis, and deep and unbroken time, and their narratives are fractured, fragmented, temporally promiscuous, and logically paratactical. In comparing these two books, the article asks what it means, and what it could yield, to read together two accounts of oceanic lives from opposite ends of the twentieth century and from distinct continents and oceans? What emerges is the outline of a ‘speculative practice of weak comparison’ that allows us to extend how we understand the contexts of an object of study called ‘Irish’ literature. By rethinking the scale of Irish literature, the article concludes, we necessarily decentre Ireland, and find opportunities to disaggregate Irish literature and its Irishness, setting a new agenda for comparative studies of Ireland that range widely in space and time.

Ibsen and the Irish Theatre

1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
Katharine Worth
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Psychological Process ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Social Activities ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Lady Gregory ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
George Moore ◽  
Irish School ◽  
The Way

The Irish Literary Theatre, from which a new Irish theatre was to develop, came to birth at the very point when Ibsen was about to depart from the European theatrical scene. His last play, When We Dead Awaken, appeared in 1899, the year in which Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field were produced in Dublin. They were the first fruits of the resolve taken by the two playwrights, with Lady Gregory and George Moore, to ‘build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature’ and they offered decidedly different foretastes of what that ‘school’ might bring forth. Yeats declared himself an adherent of a poetic theatre that would use fantasy, vision and dream without regard for the limits set by the realistic convention. Martyn, on the other hand, was clearly following Ibsen in his careful observance of day-to-day probability. The central symbol of his play, the heather field, represents an obscure psychological process which might have received more ‘inward’ treatment. But instead it is fitted into a pattern of social activities in something like the way of the prosaically functional but symbolic orphanage in Ghosts.

The Gift of George Yeats

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
Lady Gregory ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Relationship

Much scholarship has been devoted to the extraordinary experience of W.B. Yeats and his wife George on their honeymoon, when she acted as medium for the writing dictated by the spirits who came, they told Yeats, ‘to give you metaphors for poetry.’ Much has been made of Yeats’s adoption of the revealed symbolic system as it emerged into his subsequent poetry. And much has also been said about the sexual politics of the relationship between Yeats and George and the other women in his life, like Maud Gonne or Lady Gregory and their various functions from muse to patron. This chapter thinks again about these writers as correspondents with the poetry, as historical persons, amatory fantasies, spiritual personae and psychic practitioners. It focuses on George, though, and gives another version of Yeats the collaborator, the poet of correspondences: ‘Where got I that truth?’, the two-part lyric ‘Fragments’ asks: ‘Out of a medium’s mouth’ is the answer.

John Millington Synge. La maison, le sublime, la parole

2008 ◽  
Vol N�47 (1) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
J�r�me Th�lot
Keyword(s):  
John Millington Synge
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