Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) (2 page)

S
OURCES AND
R
ESOURCES

Brian Ó Nualláin, “Díoghaltais ar Ghallaibh ’sa Bhliain 2032,”
Irish Press
(18 January 1932), pp. 4–5. Translated as “Revenge on the English in the Year 2032!” by Jack Fennell.

Brian Ó Nualláin, “Teacht agus Imtheacht Sheáin Bhuidhe,”
Irish Press
(13 June 1932), p. 4. Translated as “The Arrival and Departure of John Bull” by Jack Fennell.

Brian Ó Nualláin, “Eachta an Fhir Ólta: CEOL!,”
Irish Press
(24 August 1932), p. 4. Translated as “The Tale of the Drunkard: MUSIC!” by Jack Fennell. Previously translated as “The Narrative of the Inebriated Man” by Breandán Ó Conaire in
Myles before Myles: A Selection of the Earlier Writings of Brian O’Nolan
, ed. John Wyse Jackson (London: Grafton, 1988), pp. 173–75.

Brian Ó Nualláin, “Mion-Tuairimí ár Sinnsir,”
Irish Press
(29 September 1932), p. 4. Translated as “The Reckonings of Our Ancestors” by Jack Fennell.

Brian Ó Nualláin, “Aistear Pheadair Dhuibh,”
Inisfail
1.1 (March 1933), pp. 63-64. Translated as “The Tale of Black Peter” by Jack Fennell.

Brother Barnabas, “Scenes in a Novel,”
Comhthrom Féinne
8.2 (May 1934), pp. 29–30. Repr.
The Journal of Irish Literature
3.1 (January 1974), special Flann O’Brien issue, ed. Anne Clissmann and David Powell (California: Proscenium, 1974), pp. 14-18; also repr.
Myles before Myles
(1983), pp. 77–81; and
Alive-Alive O!: Flann O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds, ed. Rüdiger Imhof (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1985), pp. 34-38.

Flann O’Brien, “John Duffy’s Brother,” complete typescript (undated), box 3, folder 18, Flann O’Brien Collection, Boston College. There is also an early, incomplete typescript in the Carbondale archive dated “2.12.1938,” although we have not used it in assembling our base text. “John Duffy’s Brother” was first published in the
Irish Digest
(June 1940), pp. 69–73 (the byline describes it as being “From a Radio Éireann broadcast”). It was also published in
Story
:
The Magazine of the Short Story
[New York] 19.90 (July-August, 1941), pp. 65–68. As previously mentioned, there are minor (though interesting) variations between these two published versions. “John Duffy’s Brother” was later reprinted in Flann O’Brien,
Stories and Plays
, ed. Claud Cockburn (1973; London: Grafton, 1986), pp. 89–97; and in
Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature
, ed. Alberto Manguel (London: Picador, 1983), pp. 371–76. There is also a short film version:
John Duffy’s Brother
, directed by Mikel Murfi and adapted for the screen by Eoghan Nolan (Ireland: Park Films, 2006), 14 mins.

Flann O’Brien, “When I Met William of Orange,”
Irish Digest
(April 1942), pp. 20–23. This is the published version of “Who Won the Battle of the Boyne? Or A Dialogue in Hades,” the typescript of which is held at Boston College.

Lir O’Connor, “I’m Telling You No Lie!”
Irish Digest
(July 1943), pp. 15–18. The story in the
Irish Digest
is followed by an extract entitled “How to Play Poker,” attributed to “Myles na gCopaleen in the
Irish Times
.”

Myles na gCopaleen, “Drink and Time in Dublin,”
Irish Writing
:
The Magazine of Contemporary Irish Literature
, no. 1 (1946), ed. David Marcus and Terence Smith, pp. 71–77. Repr.
1000 Years of Irish Prose
, ed. Vivian Mercier and David H. Greene (New York: Devin-Adair, 1952), pp. 509–15.

Brian Nolan, “The Martyr’s Crown,”
Envoy
1.3 (February 1950), pp. 57–62. The original typescript (dated 1950), is logged as Brian O’Nolan / Myles na gCopaleen, “The Martyr’s Crown,” box 4, folder 1, Flann O’Brien Collection, Boston College. It was first reprinted in Flann O’Brien,
Stories and Plays
(1973), pp. 81–8. There is also a short film version:
The Martyr’s Crown
, directed and adapted for the screen by Rory Bresnihan (Ireland: Park Films, 2007), 10 mins.

Myles na gCopaleen, “Donabate,”
Irish Writing
20-21 (November 1952), pp. 41-42; repr.
The Journal of Irish Literature
(1974), pp. 62–64.

Myles na Gopaleen, “Two in One,”
The Bell
19.8 (July 1954), pp. 30–34; repr.
The Journal of Irish Literature
(1974), pp. 56–61.

Brian O’Nolan, “After Hours,”
Threshold
21 (Summer 1967), pp. 15–18. This is reprinted here for the first time.

Flann O’Brien,
Slattery’s Sago Saga, or From Under the Ground to the Top of the Trees
, unfinished novel, repr. Flann O’Brien,
Stories and Plays
, ed. Claud Cockburn (1973; London: Grafton, 1986), pp. 21–79. The original typescript of
Slattery’s Sago Saga
is held at Boston College (box 3, folder 1; 55 pages, corrections in author’s hand). This typescript is undated and has no title page or codified author, and three chapters are missing (chapters two, three, and four). There is also an early, largely handwritten version of
Slattery’s Sago Saga
housed at the Carbondale archive (box 6, folder 1, “Book Reviews—a Holograph of ‘Sago Saga’”), which is dated “15/12/64.” A stage version of
Slattery’s Sago Saga
, adapted by Arthur Riordan, was first performed by the Performance Corporation at Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, on the 16th of July 2010, directed by Jo Mangan.

Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien, “[For] Ireland Home & Beauty” (1940), box 4, folder 10, Brian O’Nolan Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. This typescript is an early draft version of “The Martyr’s Crown” (1950), and is published here for the first time. The twelve-page typescript contains some handwritten emendations by O’Nolan, which we have marked up in our base text. This is not the most readable of formats, for which we apologise, but it does demonstrate how O’Nolan assiduously revised his own work.

John Shamus O’Donnell, “Naval Control,”
Amazing Stories Quarterly
[USA] 5.1 (Winter 1932), pp. 141–43. This story, the provenance of which remains unproven, is reprinted here for the first time. Over to you, Dear Reader.

¹
For a more detailed discussion of Irish literary censorship, see Keith Hopper, “The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Flann O’Brien and the Censorship Code,”
Literature and Ethics: Questions of Responsibility in Literary Studies
, ed. Neil Murphy et al. (New York: Cambria Press, 2009), pp. 221–41.

Acknowledgments

Initially, thanks are offered to John O’Brien and Jeremy M. Davies, of Dalkey Archive Press, for their steadfast support of this venture, and for their ongoing contribution to literature that matters. Thanks too to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU Singapore, for financial support that lead directly to this volume.

Several postgraduate students helped with early drafts of the individual stories, including Tansey Tang and Esther Ng; all of their work is greatly appreciated. Zhang Jieqiang worked as a research assistant on the later drafts, and his keen eye and meticulous editorial assistance were invaluable. Donal McCay and Paula Tebay offered useful commentary on some of the stories, and their readerly responses to “Naval Control” were particularly instructive.

Colleagues far and near have been crucial sounding-boards over the past few years, most notably Dr Daniel Jernigan, Prof Ond
ej Pilný, Dr Jack Fennell, Dr Robert Lumsden, W. Michelle Wang, Annie Proulx, Aidan Higgins, Timothy O’Grady, Mikel Murfi, Eoghan Nolan, Dr Derek Hand, Dr Peter van de Kamp, Dr Joseph Brooker, Bernard O’Donoghue, Mick Henry, and Dr Jennika Baines, while Paul Fagan and Dr Ruben Borg of the International Flann O’Brien Society have been a great source of support and practical advice. Prof Joan Dean, Dr Carol Taaffe, John Wyse Jackson, Adam Winstanley, Dr Alana Gillespie, Marion Quirici and Adrian Naughton all provided important bibliographic information and materials, while Dr Seosamh Mac Muirí and Deirdre Learmont gave their expert advice on the stories in Irish. We are also very grateful to Eddie O’Kane for his wonderful artwork, and to David O’Kane for his visual expertise.

A special word of thanks is owed to Justine Sundaram, of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, who was a constant source of support in very real, practical terms, despite numerous requests above and beyond the norm. Emma Wilcox, the English subject librarian at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences library, NTU, has, as always, been extremely supportive. Thanks, too, to David Chaplin and Astrid Fraser at St Clare’s International College, Oxford, and to Prof Lance Pettitt and the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s Uni versity College, Twickenham.

Thanks are due to the Estate of Brian O’Nolan, for copyright permissions, and to Henry Thayer, at Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc., who currently represent the Estate.

Deepest gratitude, as always, is offered to Niamh Moriarty and Su Salim Murphy for their practical support and encouragement.

Short Stories translated from the Irish (1932–33)

Translator’s Note

The protean creature known variously as Brian Ó Nualláin, Brian O’Nolan, and Brian Nolan (amongst many others) spoke as many kinds of Irish as he had names. A native of Strabane in County Tyrone, he spent the first few years of his life in a household where nothing was spoken except Ulster Irish, and following the family’s move to Dublin, he joined an education system in which Irish was held in a similar regard to Latin or Classical Greek—interesting, perhaps, but of no immediate relevance to the modern world, with a grammatical system and a vocabulary (drawn mostly from old poetry) indicative of the formal speech of a vanished aristocracy rather than a living vernacular. Ó Nualláin was an adolescent during the War of Independence (or the Anglo-Irish War, if you prefer), and became an adult as the country became a Free State. Having triumphed in a bitter Civil War, the Free State government pursued the restoration of the Irish language as a means to restore their own nationalist credibility, an effort that gave rise to a hotly contested “official standard” dialect (
an Caighdeán Oifigiúil
). In a very real sense, the Dáil (or principal chamber of the Irish parliament) was attempting to create a language by committee—a situation that positively begged to be savaged by a bilingual satirist.

In addition to his native dialect and the
Caighdeán Oifigiúil
, Ó Nualláin wrote in
Béarlachas
(English-inflected pidgin Gaelic) and deliberately bad Irish, and he was not above coining new phrases for comedic effect (see “The Arrival and Departure of John Bull” in this volume for some examples). In many cases, it is necessary to have Ó Nualláin’s own grasp of the structure of the Irish language to understand a joke, and one of his favourite tricks was to write certain snippets of dialogue in Roman type, in short stories that were otherwise entirely printed in the government-approved “uncial” script. It is sometimes impossible not to lose a joke in translation, and explanatory footnotes do not really help.

In explaining the jokes, I have done Ó Nualláin’s subtle humour a disservice, but in my defence, the Irish language is bristling with linguistic traps that prompt esoteric puns—for instance, the word “francach,” written with a lowercase
f
, means “rat,” but with a capital F, means “French” or “French person.” The Irish equivalent for “There’s no place like home” (“Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteáin féin,” “There’s no fireside like one’s own fireside”) is lampooned in a pun that insightfully comments on the subjective evaluation of one’s own misfortune (“Níl aon tón tinn mar do thóin tinn féin,” “There’s no sore arse like one’s own sore arse”). It can be a tricksy, slippery language, an ideal medium for a tricksy, slippery man like Ó Nualláin / O’Nolan / O’Brien. Trying to find the English for “Seacht nGeach” nearly drove me insane, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my teacher Seosamh Mac Muirí for helping me out on that one.

Seo é mo bhus—slán go fóill!

—Jack Fennell, University of Limerick, 2013

Revenge on the English in the Year 2032! (1932)