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The sudden death of Professor Adele Dalsimer, a long-standing member and generous supporter of IASIL, gives us occasion to celebrate the intellectual energy and human warmth that she brought to Irish studies. Her many achievements connected with the setting-up of the Boston Irish Studies Centre—a beacon to Irish Studies everywhere and alma mater to so many of our colleagues and—stand as a monument to her extraordinary abilities and dedication.
In 1999 Adele was awarded a honorary DLitt. of the University of Ulster —an event reported in the last IASIL Newsletter where a photo-portrait appeared. Our heartfelt sympathies go to her husband Jim Dalsimer, who was with her at the IASIL Conference in Barcelona last summer. Adele’s good cheer and unfailing courtesy lent new meaning to Hemingway’s famous definition of courage.
At the Boston College memorial service held in April, Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill read poems in her honour, while Maureen Murphy has written a tribute to Adele in the latest issue of the Irish Literary Supplement and testimonies to her spirit from friends at the forthcoming IASIL Conference in Bathspa University College will not be wanting.
Ann Saddlemeyer
Ann Saddlemyer received an Honourary Degree at the Spring convocation of Concordia University in Montreal. The degree has been awarded in recognition of her lift-time contribution to Irish literary studies and as part of the current programme for developing in Irish Studies at the university and in Canada at large. Aside from her many scholarly publications, and her long-term engagement in a keenly-awaited critical biography of George Yeats, expected from the press next year, Ann, who has served as IASIL Chairperson in the past, was the first woman ever to Master of Massey College, the distinguished graduate college at the University of Toronto. Her immediate predecessor was the novelist Robertson Davies. Ann, who has now received six honourary degrees in Canada, has been recipient of many International and Canadian awards, including the Order of Canada.
Sean Ronan
IASIL members will note with sorrow the passing of Sean Ronan on 27th Feb. this year. Sean (b.1924) was a long-standing member of this Association and a strenuous promoter of the life and and works of Lafcadio Hearne. At one time the most senior Irish civil servant in the European Commission and at head of the political and cultural sections of the Dept. of Foreign Affairs during 1964-1972, he spent many years as consul consul in New York and Chicago, and later as ambassador in Athens, Bonn, and Tokyo. He was an enthusiastic Irish speaker and a vigilant advocate of the cultural rights of smaller nations in the European Union. Sean distinguished himself in Irish history by drafting a Foreign Affairs protocol arguing that a united Ireland should be sought with the consent of the Unionists of Ulster and not otherwise. He was instrumental in the return of Roger Casement's remains to Ireland and was also commissioned the Paddy Carey's film on The Yeats Country.
Some years ago he and Toki Koizumi published Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo): His Life, Work and Irish Background (Ireland Japan Assoc. 1991), a short work which reprinted three times to 1996. More recently he followed this with Irish Writing on Lafcadio Hearn and Japan (Folkstone: Global 1997), a magnum opus of 350 pages. Sean will be long remembered by those of us who have been favoured by his heart-warming bulletins on the Irish-Japanese connection. Our sympathies are due especially to Sean's wife Brigid and his daughters Deirdre, Maeve and Emer whom he always mentioned with such pride in the seasonal greetings that flew forth from his home at Waterloo Road in Dublin. We shall not see his like again.
Eilzabeth Malcolm
Congratulations to Elizabeth Malcolm of the Irish Studies Institute in Liverpool who has been appointed to the newly-created Chair of Irish Studies at Melbourne University. She will take to Melbourne her distinguished share in the experience of developing Irish Studies to a high pitch in Liverpool.
Michael Hartnett
The death of Michael Hartnett (14th Oct. 1999) robs Irish literature of a profoundly important figure both in the quality of his poetry and in the intensity of his commitment to the struggle between Irish and English in modern Irish culture. Michael famously said 'Farewell to English' when he went to live with his young family in Gleann Timpeall, Co. Limerick to 'court the language of [his] people' in 1974. That attempt was rewarded in profusion. In 1985 he returned to Dublin and issued Inchicore Haiku (1985).
Michael's caricature of Anglo-Irish literature as 'the celebrated Anglo-Irish stew' concocted by Willie Yeats is well-known and no less representative of his outlook than his pungent verses in "USA": 'Why are they afraid? / They live upon burial ground ... They chained the land and pulled her down ... She does not love this race.' His greatest achievement was in his mastery of what he called "an ealaíon ársa' - the ancient craft - which led him to make his translations of O'Bruadair (1985) and Haicéad (1993) as well as his finest poems in English which reflect the fecundity of linguistic interaction between two languages in Ireland.
In a life tragically curtailed by alcoholism, Michael Hartnett displayed the courage and determination of powerfully focussed affections and transgenerational loyalties which led him to say that he belonged to the Gaelic poets as they belonged to him. Along with Michael Longley, he was the guest writer at the IASIL Conference of 1994, organised by Guiseppi ('Pino') Serpillo of Sassari University in Sardinia and was deeply loved and respected by the Irish cultural community.
It was a measure of the conditions for serious Irish writers in a by-gone age that he worked on the Dublin International Telephone Exchange in Malborough St, Dublin, in the 1970s - a fate not entirely dissimilar to that of the spailpeen poets of the eighteenth century. The sympathy of IASIL members will flow out to Angela Liston, his partner in later years, and to his children Lara and Niall with his wife Rosemary. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill read poetry at the burial.
Don Morse
Donald Morse, a long-standing IASIL member, has been awarded a D.Litt. (hon. causa) from Kossuth University (Hungary) in recognition for his services to that University , as the encomium presented with the strenuously award avers.
Donald held the Fulbright Chair of American Studies at Kossuth in 1987-1989 and again in 1991-93, and was the first Soros Professor of American Studies in 1996-97. In 1993-1994 he chaired the English department there. Throughout his time associated with the University he advanced Irish studies along with American by raising grants for library acquisitions as well as through in a wide range of teaching in all centuries. His parallel career in American education led from a primary degree at Williams College in New England in 1958 to M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at University of Connecticut in 1963 and 1965. In 1967 he settled at Oakland University (Michigan) and took the Chair of English in 1974. For many years he also held the Chair of Rhetoric, Communications, and Journalism in a department that he inaugurated there.
Professor Morse was centrally involved in extending the ambit of the Fulbright Scholarship system to Hungary and served as Chairman of the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission in 1992-93, organising the largest programme of its kind in Europe and the first to be established in Central Europe. He has been an editor and regular contributor to the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies since its inception, and carved out a distinctive niche in Irish studies over the years, beginning with a noted essay suggesting emendations to the 'St. Kevin' episode of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in John Ryan's Bash in the Tunnel collection of 1970.
Reflecting a keen interest in the matter, Donald has chaired the annual International Conference in the Fantastic in the Arts since 1995 and has been a frequent contributor to the Journal of that association. Among eight titles on various subjects including recent American and Irish drama, and the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, he recently edited A Small Nation's Contribution to the World (1993) with Dr Csilla Bertha - another IASIL faithful - and Professor István Palffy. Concurrently there appeared his monograph entitled Worlds Visible and Invisible written with Bertha - his partner and another IASIL stalwart. These, the first two volumes from the Kossuth University Press, were co-published by Colin Smythe.
Donald retired from Oaklands University this year but continues to teach at Kossuth, where he enjoys a special place in the hearts of students and colleagues. His well-deserved honour is a reminder of the power of an enlightened and enthusiastic sense of the place of literature in the life of nations. IASIL members need no reminders about his enthusiasm for Irish literature and the power of the imagination that he finds instilled in it.