In anticipation of a trip to Ireland next month, I have been trying to familiarize myself with the Emerald Isle, which admittedly is a near foolhardy task given the magnitude of the rich Irish literary traditions.
With the help of our private book group (the GRSG) I was able to read at least one of the books of the Irish canon – James Joyce’s Dubliners, his collection of short stories that was published in 1914. This was my first experience with Joyce and with this help of the James Joyce's Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations (1993) edited by John Wyse Jackson & Bernard McGinley (shown above), I was able to get a sense of the complexity of Joyce’s work and definitely an indoctrination into life in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century.
Joyce wrote the book after he had left Dublin in 1905 and our notes about the book include a review of the 1987 John Huston movie based on the final story of the collection The Dead. It was Huston’s last film and it stars his daughter Anjelica Huston.
Some in our group prefer Joyce’s Portrait of Artist a Young Man or Ulysses (no one favors Finnegan’s Wake), but I will have to take their word for it.
Literary Tours
Other preparation included Zoom tours of the W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) exhibits that are done through the National Library of Ireland. Admittedly, I knew very little about these two Nobel Prize winning Irish poets, but one important takeaway is how the poetry of each man captured the political upheaval in Ireland at the time. Yeats' poem Easter, 1916, commemorating the uprising led by Irish nationalists for independence of Ireland and Heaney during the more recent violence in Northern Ireland.
I know this preparation sounds paltry, (watching The Banshees of Inisherin and three seasons of Derry Girls doesn’t count) but usually after these kind of trips with my longtime partner Denise, the education continues long past after we return stateside. I am taking Colum McCann’s Transatlantic with me. A tour of the Book of Kells is planned but there are many bookshops in Dublin as well and I intend to perform my book shopping duties.
A Liam Neeson Coincidence
While researching for this piece I stumbled on to a clip of Neeson reading Yeats' Easter, 1916.
The versatile Neeson also appears in Season 3 trailer for Derry Girls
