Heinz Kosok writes: For Irish studies in Germany and throughout Europe, the 1996 Frankfurt Book Fair (2-7 October) was an important venue since Ireland had been selected as 'partner country' in tandem with its EU presidency in the same year. Whatever the funding difficulties in Ireland, the venue was a triumphant success for Irish publishers and their authors. Besides the commercial side of the Fair, which included 34 Irish publishers' stalls among 8,000 others from 105 countries, the event included an Irish café and an Irish pub, as well as small but well-presented display of Irish writing. A truly remarkable exhibition called "Books on Ireland and Its Diaspora" included some 1,800 Irish books in translation from publishers in Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and, of course, Germany-as well as some in English from Britain, the US, Canada, and Australia. President Robinson, who took in the opening ceremony during a state visit to Berlin, did the honours in along with Chancellor Kohl, an unlikely combination. [You can explain that when we meet.-Ed.]
Seamus Heaney delivered the introductory lecture, and in the ensuing presentations, a whole covey of Irish writers and critics read from their works or pronounced on the Irish literary scene, among them Edna Longley and Edna O'Brien, Anthony Cronin and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, John Banville and Ulick O'Connor (who attained a kind of stardom with a vibrant if factually shaky lecture on the Irish Literary Renaissance). All of these were caught up in a round of appearances in and about Frankfurt, many of which were broadcast on radio or television. There were also, however, some conspicuous absences (Brian Friel, John McGahern, Thomas Kilroy, Jennifer Johnston, to name a few), and it was not clear whether the omission was on their side or the organisers.
Not all of the guests-writers were entirely happy either. Some complained that they had been dragged from bed at an untimely hour for live interviews on breakfast TV, while others resented the German journalists' unfamiliarity with every small detail of the Irish literary scene. Edna O'Brien in particular reacted with bad grace to some harmless questions put to her on the prestigious 'Kulturreport' programme on ZDF television. Yet the popular reaction throughout Germany was widespread and enthusiastic. Nearly every major newspaper and magazine carried lengthy articles on Ireland and Irish literature, and there was an amazing series of more than one thousand events across the country-readings, lectures, discussions, concerts, slide shows and theatre performances billed under the joint title "A Day of Irish Life in Germany".
A German première of Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney in Düsseldorf was scheduled to coincide with the Book Fair, and book stores in many towns and cities around the country laid out special exhibitions of Irish writing in translation-naturally including those of the out-an-out best-seller Maeve Binchy. Again and again, the commentators remarked on the extraordinary richness and diversity of Irish literature, and for many it was a revelation to find that writers whom they had innocently associated regarded as 'English' come in fact from Ireland. The Irish publishers seem to have established numerous useful new contacts which are expected to lead to further translation-editions in the near future.
Despite some minor organisational hiccups, the whole affair was a huge success, not only as a commercial venture but also as an exercise in increased understanding between two partner states in the European Community. One could wish that such an event will not remain a one-way street. Would it be possible, for instance, to hope for a similar reception of German literature in Ireland?
Professor Kosok asks a fair question. We ask ourselves, what are the prospects of an Irish audience digging into any German book less eminently-famous than The Magic Mountain or The Tin Soldier, or less gratifying to themselves than Heinrich Böhl's Irish Notebook? The answer may be when Irish citizens start buying deserted farmhouses on the left bank of the Autobahn. In the meantime, let us stress that we are not indifferent to the enormous labour of love performed by recent German translators in regard to Irish writing, in testimony to which we cite that remarkable bibligraphical monument, Jürgen Schneider and Ralf Sotscheck, eds., Irland: Eine Bibliographie selbständiger deutschsprachiger Publikationen 16 Jahrhundret bis 1989 (Verlag der Georg Büchner [1989]).
Scholarly contributors to this 400-page compendium include Fritz Senn on Joyce; Rüdiger Imhof on Laurence Sterne and J. M. Synge, Heinz Kosok on Swift, and Laura O'Connor on W. B. Yeats; as well as Richard Ellmann on Oscar Wilde-unfortunately illustrated by that discredited photograph of Oscar Wilde as Salomé, now known to be Alice Guszalewicz (see TLS, 22 July 1994). Also included are thematic essays by Eva and Eoin Bourke, Pat Burke, Dorothea Siegmund-Schultze, and others less familiar to IASIL members, along with reprinted essays on Moore and Shaw by Büchner and Bertolt Brecht.
Among the works especially acknowledged in the introduction are Brian Cleeves' Dictionary of Irish Writers and the updated 'Bibliographical' [sic] version of the same issued with Ann Brady (1985), as well as Robert Hogan's Dictionary of Irish Literature, mentioned elsewhere in this Newsletter, and Patrick O'Neill's Ireland and Germany: A Study in Literary Relations (1985). In the wake of the Oxford Companion and the Hogan Dictionary reissued, it is fashionable, if not indeed mandatory to demonstrate close reading by citing errata in such compilations. On this occasion, I count a very slender handful: under Walter Macken, 1916 for 1915; under Bobby Sands, 'Moorison' for 'Morrison'; under Richard Steele, b. 12th March for bapt. 12 March; under Wm. Thompson, Conductive for Conducive; under J. B. Lyons, 1920 for 1922; and under Richard Kirwan, 'Benficial' for 'Beneficial'. That is a remarkably like a clear round in the bio-bibliographical stakes that give rise to so many editorial nightmares. [That'll be 10 guineas, please.-Ed.]
A recent German publication of likewise Hibernophilic bent is Hans-Christian Oeser's Treffpunkt Irland: Ein Literarischer Reiseföhrer (Reclam 1996), which does the usual work of a literary guide but also gives the names, addresses and telephone numbers of organisers and organisers in the field.
Finally, from the land that gave us Meyer and Zimmer and Zeuss, Rüdiger Imhof and Jochen Achilles have edited a collection of essays on contemporary Irish dramatists in English under the title of Irische Dramatiker der Gegenwart (Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1997). The playwrights treated are Hugh Leonard (Heinz Kosok); J. B. Keane (W. T. Rix); Brian Friel (R. Niel); Thomas Kilroy (Imhof); Tom Murphy (Achilles); Graham Reid (Achilles); Stewart Parker (Elmer Andrews); Frank McGuinness (Imhof), with two additional chapters on 'Northern Voices' (Lynda Henderson & W. Wylie) and 'Southern Voices' (Gerry Fitzgibbon). A revised and enlarged edition of Imhof's Critical Introduction to John Banville (first published in 1989) comes out this year.
Jacques Chuto writes: The festival L'Imaginaire Irlandais which lasted from March to August brought a flock of Irish writers and artists to France. To those mentioned in a previous Newsletter may be added, among others, the names of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and John Montague, who read poems at the Paris Book Fair and/or the 'Maison de la Poésie'.
There were 'Irish Weeks' or, more modestly, 'Irish days' in Caen, Lille, Dijon, Rennes, etc. There were symposiums in Rennes ('De l'Irlande á l'Europe: rêves et réalités'), in Caen (where Dermot Bolger, Eoin MacNamee and Anne Enright spoke of their wrtings), and at the Irish College in Paris ('Entrelacs franco-irlandais').
The yearly conference of the French Association for Irish Studies, established by Patrick Rafroidi (SOFEIR) took place at the University of Lille where delegates were addressed from two Irish guests, Thomas Kilroy and Paul Muldoon.
[Safely home again, the returning exiles had tales of monorailing à grand vitesse through France aboard the TGV, and not a few amusing narratives about each other on the way. John McGahern caused deep satisfaction to many in answering a TV interlocutor, 'To tell you the truth, I'm sick of the North of Ireland!' The Director of the Derry Arts Centre was so little pleased with this that he purportedly offered the kind of indignant reaction that makes that city the ... well, the world capital of steam in search of parity that it is. Ed.]
Among recent publications from the Presse Universitaires de Caen is Agnès Maillot's IRA: Les républicains irlandais (1996), broadly viewing the lads concerned in the context of the 'general perception that Ireland was malgoverned by Britain' from period of the United Irishmen to the recent cease-fire, still holding when the book was finished. Headings such as 'les options politique de l'IRA', and 'La reprise de l'offensive de l'IRA' capture the tone of this able narrative, in which newspaper columns provide by far the most common point of reference. Individuals in the Republican Movement are treated in amiable detail, but no Ulster Protestant other than 'B. Faulkner' receive a mention. The English phrase for this kind of thing is 'parti pris', however that might be translated into French.
Jacqueline Genet has edited a handsome series of studies on La Nouvelle Irlandaise de Langue Anglaise (Presse Universitaire de Septentrion 1996) in the Études irlandaises series. Among authors treated in successive chapters are Yeats (Genet), Corkery (Jean Brihault), Joyce (Carle Bonafous-Murat), O'Flaherty (Sophie Vallas), O'Faolain (Maurice Harmon, trans. E. Hellegouarc'h), Michael McLaverty (Claude Fierobe), Mary Lavin (Danièle Wargny), William Trevor (Dolores McKenna, trans. B. le Gros), Friel (Jacques Tranier), Edna O;Brien (Caroline MacDonogh), Banville (Françoise Canon-Roger), Neil Jordan (Maguy Pernot).
Professor Genet and Élisabeth Hellegouarc'h have also issued a collection of the twenty-three pieces in the Collected Short Stories (Poolbeg 1978) of Michael McLaverty, translated by several hands-twelve, to be precise-here issued as Nouvelles (Presse Univ. de Caen 1996), with a similarly-translated preface by Seamus Heaney. The body concerned in this enterprise is denominated Groupe de Recherche Anglo-Irlandaises, Université de Caen.
Along with CLÉ, the Irish publishers' co-operative association, Ireland Literature Exchange (ILE) made a distinct mark at the Frankfort Book Fair. ILE, directed by Marc Caball and chaired by the poet Michael O'Siadhail, has substantiated its mission of 'translating Ireland to the world' in over 80 grant-aided translations. These include-among the most eye-catching only-Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's selected poems in Danish; Cathal Ó Searchaigh's in French; Eavan Boland's In a Time of Violence in Spanish; Patrick McCabe's The Dead School in German; Colm McCann's Songdogs in Dutch, and Michael Carroll's Moonlight in Canadian French. Peig Sayers, O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor, Walter Macken, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Michael MacLaverty, and William Trevor are also represented. For further information about translation funds, contact ILE, 19 Parnell Sq., Dublin 1, Ireland; 353 1 872 7900; fax 7875.