Irish Language: One of Michael Cronin's back-to-back essays on the situation of the Irish language in a globalising world is written in Irish, the other in English. They appear together in the second dual-language, upside-down/downside-up book from the innovative Irish-language publisher Cois Life, now almost 10 years old (the first was James McCloskey's Guthanna in Éag: An Mairfidh an Ghaeilge Beo?/Voices Silenced: Has Irish a Future? (2001).
Attractively designed, neat enough to slip into a pocket or bag, yet stitched in signatures so they won't fall apart, these little books are designed to be carried around and talked about - modern versions of that most urbane genre, the pamphlet. Intended to provoke and inform debate, they are packed with ideas, examples, international perspectives and clues to wide reading, yet they manage to be admirably lucid and succinct.
Cronin identifies in Irish public discourse, with a few honourable exceptions, a "repeated emotional inability to deal with the language dimension to Irish experience". He invites his readers, therefore, to set aside the cliches, pieties and fulminations that so often characterise discussions of Irish in both languages, in favour of an informed, thoughtful, "intercultural" approach that will embrace questions of nationality, globalisation and the transition to a "knowledge society".
He prompts us to recognise the complexities surrounding language use, instead of reducing them to simple oppositions. The thinking that underpinned the political importance of Irish in the 19th century, he points out (languages as the souls of emerging nations), has given way to other formulations and preoccupations, notably in the new, multi-ethnic, multilingual Ireland.
If life on this island is to be all it can be in the diversified "knowledge society" of the new century, he suggests, the Irish language must be recognised and embraced as a unique aesthetic and cognitive resource. But Irish has a global dimension too, not just in the number of native speakers and learners worldwide, but also in what a single language possessed of a rich literary heritage and long cultural memory brings to cultural diversity as a vital resource for the human species.
These essays inquire: what is required of a national language in the 21st century? How can citizens best have access to it? What is, or should be, the role of translation into or out of Irish? How can translation work to redress imbalances of power and mitigate damage to cultural ecologies?
Centuries of this island's history remain occluded because their documents are illegible except to specialists, while chairs in the relevant disciplines remain unfilled in Irish universities. But those who know Irish and want to see it survive, Cronin argues, must show others its value, instead of merely telling them.
He challenges scholars to prepare new literary translations (in Irish and English), which will allow readers a more immediate, intimate access to the rich vividness of early literature in Irish, and liberate poetry and prose from the trappings of moribund antiquity and colonial condescension that hang about so many 19th-century versions in English. "We must find a way to mediate between the archive and the society," he writes.
Differences between his two essays bear witness to what Cronin calls "assymmetrical bilingualism". Since there are no readers of Irish who can't read English, almost anyone living in Ireland can read his English-language argument, but only readers of Irish will have access to both essays.
This offers a neat objective correlative for both the hermetic quality of a language we don't know and the added value of knowing more than one. Bilingualism implies a mostly one-language society, however, so that a refusal to translate from Irish to English (one thinks, for example, of the poet Biddy Jenkinson) may, paradoxically, be a move towards rather than away from openness and diversity.
More adults are learning Irish than ever before, and not just in Ireland. Some of them will certainly read the English side of this book first, then use a dictionary to make their way through the Irish. Many who have strong opinions about Irish can't read it, and every Irish speaker has friends who don't speak Irish. Passionate, engaging and persuasive, this book offers to facilitate discussion across the divide: a "both/and" rather than "either/or" approach.
Angela Bourke's books include The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (Pimlico, 1999), and Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker (Cape, 2004). She is senior lecturer in Irish at UCD
An Ghaeilge san Aois Nua/Irish in the New Century By Michael Cronin Cois Life, 63pp/64pp. €12