When IASIL travels to Barcelona in 1999, we will find ourselves hosted by a team who are currently racking up an extraordinary number of publications and related teaching and lecturing activities. Rosa González and Jacqueline Hurtley have edited Hailing Heaney: Lectures for a Nineties' Nobel (Barcelona PPU 1996), while Ireland: Interviews records conversations with well-known writers or academics including (alphabetically) Terence Brown, Edna Longley, Declan Kiberd, Jennifer Johnston, John McGahern, Paula Meehan, Glenn Patterson, &c, each conducted by Hurtley, González or Esther Aliaga. In pride of place, perhaps, there is the Diccionario cultural e historico de Irlanda (Barcelona: Ariel 1996), a 400-page compendium written and compiled by Hurtley, González, Praga, Aliaga, and Brian Hughes.
Inés Praga Terente has just published Una Belleza Terrible: La Poesía Irlandesa Contemporánea: 1940-1995 (Barcelona: PPU 1997), an exemplary text written primarily for the student. Its clearly-organised sections advance from a discussion of the Yeats/Joyce dichotomy and the transitional work of Clarke to a survey of the modern field beginning with the voice of Protestant Ireland represented by Hewitt and MacNeice and that of Catholic Ireland by Kavanagh and Montague. Heaney is accorded fullest treatment in chapter that approaches the poetry through consideration of 'Roots', 'Conflict', and 'Visions'. The 'Group' in Belfast, then Mahon and Longley ('McNeice's spiritual sons'), and next Paulin, Muldoon, and Carson ('old conflicts-new voices') round out matters north of the border. A fifth chapter on the poetic voices of the Republic, treating chiefly of Kinsella, Hartnett, Murphy, Durcan, and Kennelly, gives way to a sixth chapter devoted to women poets ('A voice of her own'), from Eithne Strong and Eavan Boland to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paula Meehan, with Ní Chuilleanáin and McGuckian in between. This handsomely produced volume is supplied with a literary and critical bibliography and a useful index to the discussion of the poets and poems. Well-made footnotes with occasionally commented bibliographical references appear at the bottom of the page.
On the teaching side, Rosa González conducts an under-graduate course on 'The Sense of Place in Irish Literature', and also a postgraduate course on 'Postcolonial Ireland' as part of an MA programme on Postcolonial Literatures in English, as well as a 10-hour summer course on 'Woman in/and Literature: Mother Ireland' for Catèdra Ramon Llull, Palma de Mallorca. Inés Praga is teaching courses on 'The Irish Comic Tradition' and 'The Irish Novel in the Twentieth Century' in the PhD programme of the University of Burgos.
Esther y Aliaga Rodrigo has given papers resulting in forthcoming publications on Glenn Patterson's and Robert MacLiam Wilson's, and Fiona Barr's novels in Atlantis, and is also preparing a translation-collection of short stories by Jennifer Johnston, Anne Devlin, Barr, and Brenda Murphy, all dealing with the contemporary Troubles in Northern Ireland. Murphy was the object of special consideration in Aliaga's lecture on the depiction of violence before the XXth Conference of Asociación Española de Estudios Anglonorteamericanos (AEDEAN), in early December 1996.
Among other lectures, near and far, given by the Spanish IASILers, is Jacqueline Hurtley Grundy's ingeniously alliterative paper, 'From heroes to Hybridity: Hope in Ireland at the End of the Century' (July 1996), put before the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia. [Apologies and thanks to Jacqueline for this information.-Ed.]
... Meanwhile, in Portugal, a colloquium on Seamus Heaney held at the University of Coimbra during April 1996, where Michael Allen (QUB), Terence Brown (TCD), and Rui Carvalho Homem (Univ. Porto) were the keynote speakers, has been followed by the publication of two collections of his poetry in versions by Rui Carvalho Homem (Univ. Porto) and the poet-translator Vasco Graça Moura. A seminar on 'Irish Poetry: From Yeats to Heaney' is part of an MA course on Anglo-Amencan Studies offered at the University of Porto in 1996-97.
Brian Friel's Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa have been translated into Portuguese by IASIL member Paulo Eduardo Carvalho (Univ. Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro) and were staged by two Lisbon companies in the course of 1996. Translations premiered Teatro da Malaposta in February, while Dancing at Lughnasa (translated as 'Dances to a Pagan God') was performed by Escola de Mulheres last September. Both productions enjoyed considerable public and critical acclaim. [Thanks to Teresa Casal for this report.-Ed.]
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