North American Gaels by Sumner Natasha;Doyle Aidan;

Author:Sumner, Natasha;Doyle, Aidan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

“Agus cé’n chaoi ar thaithnigh na Canadas leat?” (And How Did You Like Canada?): Irish-Language Canadian Novels from the 1920s and 1930s

Pádraig Ó Siadhail

Kenneth E. Nilsen’s posthumously published essay on the Irish language in eastern Canada in the years 1750 to 1900 showcased his extensive research into, and expansive knowledge of, the presence of Irish speakers and their literary footprint in that region.1 It may seem strange to commence this discussion of early twentieth-century Irish-language novels about Canada by referring to a work noted by Professor Nilsen, namely, a mid-eighteenth-century macaronic poem set in Newfoundland, part of the earliest body of extant work in Irish from North America.2 In Donncha Rua Mac Conmara’s “As I was walking one evening fair / Is mé go déanach i mBaile Sheáin” (And I lately in St John’s), the English-language lines relay the narrator’s positive experiences of the town and its inhabitants, including the womenfolk, as well as his loyal sentiments toward the British Crown and, particularly, George II and the House of Hanover. But the material in Irish subverts these statements, most tellingly in its pro-Jacobite closing lines, “Is a Chríost go bhfeiceadsa iad dá gcárnadh / Ag an mac seo ar fán uainn ag dul don Fhrainc” (Christ, may I see them pounded / by your son separated from us in France).3 Key to the poem is the sense that bilingual Irish- and English-speaking insiders would understand the context, the subtext, and the poem’s political message, whereas unilingual anglophone outsiders would miss the satire and the poet’s true intention. As we will see, this issue of different languages and different messages represents a significant point of divergence between Irish-language novels about Irish immigrants in Canada published in the 1920s and 1930s and similar-themed English-language texts published from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In the former, the main Irish-born characters return to Ireland; in the latter, their counterparts remain in Canada.

In this chapter, I outline and discuss the Canadian content in novels in Irish from the early decades of the twentieth century, compare these with Irish Canadian novels in English, and attempt to explain their contrasting approaches to settling in Canada.4

IRISH-LANGUAGE CANADIAN NOVELS

There are two main categories of English-language novels about the Irish immigrating to Canada. The first, historical fiction, has two subgenres. Patrick Slater’s The Yellow Briar (1933) and Kathleen Coburn’s The Grandmothers (1949) are examples of what Jason King terms “Irish-Canadian immigrant memoirs,” in which the narrators recount their own lives or the lives of their families.5 A larger group of historical novels is set against the backdrop of the Great Famine and the consequent communal upheaval and emigration of the novels’ characters. Prime examples of these texts include Robert Sellar’s “The Summer of Sorrow” (1895); Don Akenson’s At Face Value: The Life and Times of Eliza McCormack / John White (1990); Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993); and Peter Behrens’s The Law of Dreams (2006), winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award. There was a lengthy gap –

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