“Unremarkable” Ireland is full of good stories

looking for lifeboats

When did you first notice Ireland? Perhaps through Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Beckett, Shaw and other literary masters? Perhaps a tinge of wonder while reciting “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”? Maybe watching the 2020 hit TV series Normal People or something else?
Compared with other Western European countries, this island with a small area and a small population rarely appears on the front page of our news, let alone in daily conversations, but it bursts out amazing cultural creativity—not only in ” Anxiety of Influence” still thrives on contemporary Irish literature, where there is a steady stream of good stories being told in music, film, theater and more. Maybe you have been exposed to them before, but because of a more dominant narrative, you always pass by Ireland.
If you want to talk about Irish culture, it is difficult to avoid the geographical, historical and political issues of Ireland. Today, we walk into the details and depths of this island through eight “non-keywords” about Ireland, hoping that they can be used as a guide for you to enter and understand the novels included in “Single Reading 32·Looking for a Lifeboat: Special Collection of Irish Literature” Guidance, as an important historical memory, reminds us where pain and regret come from, and the so-called good things are born from the courage to face reality.

Zombie

In your head, in your head

Zombie, zombie, zombie

Released in 1994, Zombie is still often heard, mentioned and covered today. This classic song comes from the rock band The Cranberries (The Cranberries), their other better known song is Dreams, Faye Wong’s “Dream Man” It is a cover of it. Perhaps many people don’t know that the Cranberries are actually an Irish band, and Zombie was made by the lead singer Dolores O’Riordan for an explosion in 1993 .

dolores the cranberries

On March 20, 1993, the Irish Republican Party dropped a bomb in a garbage can in the center of Warrington, England. The explosion killed a 12-year-old boy and a 3-year-old child, and dozens of others were injured. British and Irish society. At the time, the Cranberries were on tour in the UK, and lead singer Dolores was even on a sightseeing bus in London.

Twenty-four years later, Dolores told Classic Rock: “I remember there were a lot of bombings in London, ‘The Troubles’ was pretty bad. I was touring the UK when the kids died. , I am very sad about it. The explosion can happen anywhere, anyone could be there, you know?”

Back in Limerick during a brief break from the tour, Dolores wrote the Cranberries’ “most aggressive” song late one night alone in her apartment. Zombie has the line “It’s the same old theme / Since nineteen-sixteen” (It’s the same old theme / Since 1916). The bombing was just one episode in a long-running conflict between Ireland and Britain, a harrowing story that spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

“Wind Shakes the Barley”

“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is an Irish folk song that is named after Ken Loach’s film “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” (released in 2006), which also appears at the beginning of the film .

“The Wind Blows the Wheat Waves” sings a story about the Irish uprising. In 1798 , influenced by the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution, Ireland’s political organization, the Society of United Irishmen, launched an uprising against the British. The lyrics use a young man who is about to leave his lover and set foot on the battlefield as the narrative point of view. Soldiers fought bloody battles, while “the soft breeze still blows the wheat fields”. Because the pockets of the rebels are often filled with grains of wheat as rations, when they die, the grains of wheat fall into the soil and thrive, and the newly emerged wheat fields have also become the unnamed graves of the Irish rebels. Every spring, the wheat fields will grow as scheduled, and it is said that this symbolizes the never-ending resistance of the Irish people to the oppression from Britain, and the Irish people will always fight against the British who occupy their territory.

The time came to Easter week in 1916, and Ireland once again launched an uprising, wanting to end the British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic. The most important uprising in Ireland since 1798, it was organized by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which merged with the Irish National Army to form a volunteer army. But the uprising lasted just six days — April 24 to April 30 — before it was crushed.

The Easter Proclamation, 1916

The film The Wind Blows the Wheat follows the events of the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922-1923 ) that followed. A pair of young brothers from County Cork in the south of Ireland joined the Irish Republican Army to fight for Irish independence, but their differences about the Anglo-Irish Treaty later led them to take very different paths in the Irish Civil War.

The movie “The Wind Blows the Wheat Waves”

The Belfast Agreement

The Belfast Agreement, an agreement reached in 1998 between the Northern Ireland Self-Government, the Irish Government and the UK Government, was an important milestone in the peace process in Northern Ireland. Because the agreement was signed on Good Friday, April 10, it is also known as the Good Friday Agreement.

After the Irish War of Independence in 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty divided the formerly united island of Ireland into two parts . The 26 counties in the south became the Irish Free State, and the 6 counties in the north (now Northern Ireland) belonged to the United Kingdom. The Free State enjoys the full power of self-government and self-determination in name, but its foreign policy and part of its internal affairs are still under the supervision of the United Kingdom.

This division of Northern and Southern Ireland, combined with pre-existing religious strife, led to a long period of violence from the late 1960s to the late 1990s . Nationalists , mainly Catholic , believed that Northern and Southern Ireland should be united , while Unionists, mainly Protestant , agreed that Northern Ireland should remain in the Commonwealth of Nations . A series of violent clashes between the two factions ended with the Belfast Agreement of 1998, which reaffirmed Britain’s position, long not fully endorsed by successive Irish governments, that Northern Ireland would remain a member of the Union. Kingdom territory until a majority votes to secede. On the other hand, for the first time, the British government recognized the principle: from the so-called “Irish factor”, the people of the island of Ireland as a whole have the right to resolve the North-South issue on a voluntary basis without any external interference.

The Belfast Agreement

In “Single Reading 32 · Looking for a Lifeboat: A Special Collection of Irish Literature”, Louise Kennedy’s “Silhouette” is taking the violent conflicts of about three decades as the background, wandering in Northern Ireland and London in a chaotic time sequence Broken families, hearts filled with hatred; Lisa McInerney’s “Bury My Father and Will You Die?” “, the protagonist “I” who harbors resentment towards his father is in the Republic of Ireland, while the father who abandoned his wife and daughter is in Northern Ireland. Such tragedies abound in Ireland.

“Single Reading 32·Looking for the Lifeboat: A Special Collection of Irish Literature”

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“Dubliners”

Guest editor Yan Ge wrote in the preface of “Single Reading 32”: “In my opinion, Irish writers have a complicated relationship with English. Beginning with Joyce, they always want to subvert and deconstruct the English language that originally came from the colonists. language.” The Irish not only resisted physically, but literature was also their way of preserving their memories, healing their wounds, and regaining their self-definition.

Dubliners is a collection of short stories published by Irish writer James Joyce in 1914. Fifteen stories are set in Dublin in the early 20th century.

Located in the center of the east coast of Ireland, Dublin is the largest city on the island and the capital of various ruling regimes since the Middle Ages – from the end of the 12th century, the Anglo-Normans gradually occupied the land of the island of Ireland by war and purchase Since the beginning of British rule in Ireland), it has gone through the Kingdom of Ireland (1541-1800), the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801-1922), the Republic of Ireland (1919-1922), the Irish Free State (1922- 1937), to what is now the Republic of Ireland.

The image of “Dubliners” reproduces the social reality of Ireland under British rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries . In a letter to the book’s publisher, Grant Richards, Joyce himself concluded that “this book is all about the moral history and mental state of Dubliners”.

Joyce (James Joyce, 1882-1941)

A group of portraits included in “Single Reading 32″——Niamh Cunningham’s “Walking Rock” is based on the tenth chapter of Joyce’s other work “Ulysses” In practice, she recreated the characters she met while living in Beijing and Ireland as different characters in “You Yan”.

irish renaissance

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Ireland set off an upsurge of the Irish Renaissance in the field of language and literature. This process not only involves the excavation and re-recognition of ancient Irish literary classics such as Celtic myths and legends and Irish (“Gaelic”) classics , but also includes the rewriting of Irishness in the discourse of the British Empire .

In 1893, the “Gaelic League” with the main goal of revitalizing the Irish language was formally established under the call of the Irish writer DeGrasse Hyde, advocating the preservation of Irish as a national language, promoting it as a daily language, and vigorously developing the Irish native language. literature. Today, this Celtic language is still spoken as the main language in some areas on the west coast of Ireland – the second group of novels in “Single Reading 32” comes from writers in West Ireland, readers can appreciate their unique language .

In this wave of literature with distinct nationalism, Yeats, Singer, Joyce and other world-class literary masters and a large number of outstanding local writers have risen, and the activeness of literary creation has attracted the attention of the world. There has been an unprecedented boom in drama, poetry, novels, biographies, essays and other genres, “more books on Irish subjects have been published in the past eight years than in the previous thirty years” .

Former residence of Yeats (Senator Yeats, 1865-1939)

At the end of 1923, after accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yeats delivered a speech titled “Irish Dramatic Movement” at the Royal Swedish Academy, summarizing the original intention of the Irish Dramatic Movement, which is in line with the origin of the entire Renaissance movement: “The theater in Dublin There is nothing that can be called our own. It is empty buildings leased by the British tourist company. We need Irish plays, Irish actors.” Therefore, Yeats, together with his friend Mrs. Gregory and others, The Irish Literary Theater was established in 1899. The theater then underwent several reorganizations before eventually establishing itself at the Abbey Theater in Dublin in 1904. With the growing reputation of the Abbe Theater, the Irish national theater movement has also entered a golden period of development.

In addition, many of Yeats’s own works are also based on Celtic mythology and ancient Irish literature. Legends; and famous works such as “Usin’s Wandering Notes”, “Fergus and the Priest”, “Countess Catherine” are mysterious chapters formed by the poet’s delicate sensibility into ancient Celtic myths and legends. .

Trinity College Dublin

The 2020 hit TV series “Normal People” (Normal People) is set in Trinity College Dublin, which is also the graduation school of the original author Sally Rooney.

TV series “Normal People”

Trinity College Dublin, or “University of Dublin”—although it implements the same college system as Oxford University and Cambridge University, but there is only one college under it, Trinity, so it is usually called Trinity College Dublin— It is the oldest university in Ireland, founded and chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592.

Many well-known writers and scholars came from this school, such as Oscar Wilde, Beckett, Jonathan Swift, author of “Gulliver’s Travels”, Bran Stoker, author of “Dracula”, and 1951 Ernest Walton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, Mered Corrigan McGuire, winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, and William Cecil Campbell, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Wait.

In addition, Ireland’s national treasure, the ancient hand-written hand-painted Bible “The Book of Kells”, is preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The Book of Kells (Book of Kells, also translated as “Kelan Book”) was drawn by Celtic monks on the Isle of Iona in western Scotland around 800 AD, transcribing the four Gospels of the New Testament in Latin. The origin of this codex is told in the Irish animation The Secret of Kells.

celtic mythology

In BC, the Celts were active in a large area of Western Europe, and the polytheistic worship and legends in their Celtic language and culture formed their own system. However, under the influence of Christianity, many Celtic myths and legends gradually disappeared, and only the British Isles still retain many Celtic myths and legends.

However, compared with other regions, the Christian missionary process in Ireland after the 5th century AD had fewer conflicts with native religions. While preaching Christianity, the monks also collected orally passed down myths and legends from poets and farmers, and recorded them in Latin. Therefore, Celtic mythology and culture still remain in many areas of Ireland and Wales.

Movie “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”

Today, the influence of Celtic mythology can still be seen in many novels, games and film and television works. For example, researchers believe that the Noldor elves in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” are based on the “Tuatha Dé Danann” (Tuatha Dé Danann) in Celtic mythology, while the wizards and wizards in “Harry Potter” Animal metamorphosis, key imagery and even the patron saint of the stag are inextricably linked to Celtic mythology and folklore.

The movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (released in 2001), based on The Lord of the Rings, also featured Irish musician Enya ‘s May It Be as its soundtrack. Enya is a representative musician of modern Celtic music, almost in a semi-reclusive state, full of mystery, but this does not affect her music being loved all over the world.

Guinness World Records

In Kevin Barry’s “Killary Fjords” (collected in “Single Reading 32”), a poet facing a mid-life crisis and creative bottlenecks bought an old hotel in the Fiordlands of Ireland’s northwest, Behind the bar are Guinness and Smithwick beer taps. The “Guinness” mentioned here is actually the mysterious force behind the world-famous “Guinness World Records”.

“Guinness” (Guinness, “Guinness” is also transliterated here) is a brewing company established in Dublin, Ireland in 1759. Smithwick’s is also a well-known beer brand in Ireland.

In 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, then director of the Guinness Storehouse, was hunting in County Wexford, Ireland, arguing with his colleagues about which bird flew the fastest. Since the references at the time were not sufficient to answer this question, Biver decided to publish a book on the world’s best to solve the problem that people would argue about when they bragged about betting. The Guinness Book of World Records was first released on August 27, 1955, and the response was overwhelming, topping the Christmas sales charts. Since there are new records every year, a new edition of this book will be released every year. As of 2003, the Guinness Book of World Records has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.

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