Life
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[ top ] Criticism
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[ top ] W. B. Yeats, Autobiography, in Memoir, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan 1972): Then there was John OLearys friend, Dr Sigerson, who had edited a patriotic paper in his youth and lost patients through some theological opinions. At first I was impressed by him, though never without a sense of comedy. He spoke with a curious broken accent, cut his hair as if after [the] frontispiece of Sartor Resartus [by Carlyle], and made upon me the impression of having played before ignorant men the part of a great savant, a great Foreign Servant. Some newspaper, indeed, had just published an essay upon some Danish Sigerson because, as the editor told me, it was a cousin of his, and he would become hot in defence of the Danish invaders of Ireland and deny that they had burned churches. His family had come to Ireland in the ninth century with those invaders, and had no other connexion with Denmark. He flew into every argument, always evading its thought, and one soon discovered that he never disclosed any conviction of his own and that he was exceedingly timid in action. He burned his fingers long ago with liberal Catholicism, people would say. I always found him kind and even generous, but soon discovered that he had, whenever I could follow him, erudition without scholarship, and that he had among historical events the thoughts of a child. He thought himself a judge of art and returned always from his rare visits to the Continent with portfolios full of forgeries. / Those with whom I was to have the most lasting sympathy were [54] a rule the least effective, the least honoured in the world of hard logic. (pp.53-54.) See also Autobiographies (1955) , on Sigerson : learned, artificial, unscholarly, a typical provincial celebrity, but a friendly man (q.p.). [ top ] W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (1894), A meeting was held at the Rotundo [sic] in June, 1892, to formally inaugurate the National Literary Society. Dr George Sigerson ... was in the chair. Miss Maud Gonne, WB Yeats, the Chairman, the Rev TA Finlay SJ, John OLeary and John T Kelly explained and urged the new departure. ... Dane, Norman and Celt were here represented, and difficult it were to tell which was the most Irish [127]. In August, 1892, the inaugural lecture was delivered by Dr Sigerson at the Ancient Concert Rooms, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, then on his visit to Ireland (already noticed) being in the chair. The origin, environment and influence of Irish literature formed the subject of the Doctors address - in all respects worthy to be taken as indicative of the studies and lines to be pursued by the new association in the metropolis [129]. Dr Sigerson may well have the first place [among society litterateurs] ... He is the strong right hand of the movement in Dublin today, but his labours for our national lore have extended over some four decades. Erionnach is an honoured name with those who have followed the Irish muse through our periodical literature since the fifties. The Poets of Munster (second series) which say the light in 1860, exhibited Dr Sigersons powers as a Gaelic translator ... contributing to the Harp in 1855 [at sixteen] ... [The] Nation ... The Irishman ... Duffys Hibernian Magazine ... [191] ... anthologies ... The fine poem signed Patrick Henry in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland was from him. His prose works deal with Irish land questions, political prisoners, and other home subjects ... he has driven home of late the influence for good of which the Danes, their thought and literature exerted upon [Irish literature] in early stages ... the Danes ... an elevating force in Irish life. Most Irish readers are inclined to question this at first, but the Doctors facts are not to be lightly thrust aside. The Danish strain is strong in him, and he is proud of it. We could well make room for many such Danes in Ireland. [132] [ top ] F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (1971), [Sigerson] author of Poets and Poetry of Munster (1860), the sequel to Mangans work, and was later to produce Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897), which Lyons calls an astonishing feat of exact, yet musical, translation from Irish into English. (p.223n.) [ top ] Richard Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (Oklahoma UP 1962; Newton Abbot: David Charles 1972): Dr. George Sigerson compared the discovery of the ancient Irish heritage to finding a buried treasure, and it must have been with considerable pride that members of the newly formed Irish National Literary Society in Dublin heard him advance the claims of this literature, including that of the introduction of rhyme into poetry. In his lecture, reprinted in The Revival of Irish Literature (1894) and in his anthology Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897), Sigerson outlined some of the varied rhythms of early Irish verse, with its wide use of assonance and consonance, alliteration, and combinations of internal and end rhymes. Except for the pioneer anthology of Charlotte Brooke, the Reliques of Irish Poetry (1788), the richness of this literary heritage had been untapped. Miss Brooke had remarked that It is scarcely possible that any language can be more adapted to lyric poetry, for the language itself is indeed already music, because of the smoothness and harmony of its cadences. [ top ] Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde (1974), on Sigerson, for Hyde the outstanding figure of the early revival group; had succeeded James Clarence Mangan as a translator and versifier of Irish poems which John ODaly published in Poets and Poetry of Munster, Second Ser. (1860); completed medical studies in Paris; published several medical tracts and treatises; Bards of the Gael and Gall (London 1897), which Hyde described as a contribution to the so-called Celtic revival the importance of which it would be difficult to over-estimate, adding his translations may be better [84] relied on by the English reader for their accuracy than those of any other who has ever attempted to turn Irish into English verses. (Hydes Introduction to a selection of Sigerson in A Treasury of Irish Poetry, ed. Brooke and Rolleston, London 1900). In the dedication to Love Songs of Connacht, Hyde wrote, Allow me to offer you this slight attempt on my part to do for Connacht what you yourself and the late John ODaly, following in the footsteps of Edward Walsh, to some extent accomplished for Munster, more than thirty years ago [...] not for its intrinsic worth, if it has any, but as a slight token of gratitude from one who has derived the greatest pleasure from your own early and patriotic labours in the same direction [...]. [84]. Sigerson dedicated Bards of the Gael and Gall to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, President of the Irish Literary Society of London, a representative of the Gael, and to Dr Douglas Hyde, President of the Gaelic League of Dublin, a descendent of the Gall. [84] Further, Daly makes it clear that in the alignments of the Irish Library quarrel, Yeats and OLeary were confronted by Taylor and Sigerson - hence the animosity of his profile of Sigerson in the Autobiographies, an unkind portrait. [n., 219] [ top ] Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures (Cork UP 1996), quotes Sigerson on an Irish poet in translation: The following is a production of OLionan [Ó Lionáin], a man who could appreciate how much beauty and tenderness might eb lost having the opportunity he ad of hearing the inflexible, un-endearing language of the porker Saxons jarring upon the ear of his country (The Poets and Poetry of Munster, John ODaly, 1860, p.viii; here 117.) Quotes further, prejudiced foreigners, looking at the squalor in which their iniquitous laws have placed some of our people, and the exaggerating basely and lyingly that misery (Ibid., p.xx.) In fact, every rural district where the Irish is spoken, curious gems of quaint humour, flashing of wit, and a keen knowledge of men and morals adorn that golden casket - a Celtic peasants heart (Ibid., xxiii.) Sigerson calls himself an Ulsterman and of Viking race and professes it his only reason in publishing translation to gain an increase of respect and love for the delicacy, devotion and chivalry of a much-maligned people (Ibid., p.xxvii; here 118.) Also quotes: Many bards bear foreign names. their Fathers had crossed with the Norman, or with later settlers, yet they claimed the countrys history as their heritage, and they make appeal to all its ancient tradtions. So evey generation fuses with the great Past, in the adopted land they loved. (Bards of the Gall and Gael, 1897, p.91; here p.118), and comments: Rather than seeing Ireland prior to the English Conquest as shackled by backwardness and underdevelopment, he sees the society as anticipating the ferment of modernity. Quotes: the activity and restlessness of our own days were in their blood in all known time. Their contemporaries sometimes noticed this trait and complained of it. It is vain to blame them for outrunning their age. They [110] were in truth the Moderns of the Past - perhaps they are also fated to be the Moderns of the Future. (Bards of the Gall and Gael, 1897, p.2.) Cronin remarks: His attempts, therefore [...] to reproduce the elaborate metrical structures of the original Irish poems in English could be seen not as a self-indulgent archaism but as offering the reader poetic materials for the construction of a new Irish modernity. The fact that Austin Clarke [...] responded to the challenge of Gaelic prosody [...] shows that the [Sigersons] ambitions were not totally without foundation (p.120). [ top ] Willa Murphy, Throwing everything into the Irish mix, review of George Sigerson, by Ken McGilloway, in The Irish Times (4 June 2011), Weekend Review, p.10: "[...] Sigerson belonged to that genus of Victorian scholar who discovered, or invented, the idea of the family tree across multiple disciplines. Darwins On the Origin of Species and Schleichers work in comparative philology are just two famous examples of a 19th-century explosion of root-and-branch thinking to explain everything from plants, rocks and animals to languages, cultures and races. Looked at from a distance, a tree diagram mapping connections between Sanskrit and Greek looks a lot like another showing that the tobacco plant and the potato belong to the same family. / It was this kind of thinking that inspired Romantic nationalists in Ireland and elsewhere to join in a race to excavate and chart the unique characteristics of their people. This helps explain the frantic dusting-down of the language and myths of Celtic Ireland during the Revival. If you can climb down the branches back to your roots, then your essential Irishness is as undeniable as the existence of the oak tree or the elephant. Despite his nationalist leanings, Sigerson, a true polymath, rejected any such arguments from blood. The Irish, like their poetry, are a mix of styles and forms. It is difficult not to hear echoes of Sigerson in Joyces later assertion that in the vast fabric of Ireland it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin and without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread. / So while many of his Revivalist counterparts were busy seeking out the clean roots of Irish identity, Sigerson was always more concerned to show the tangled branches. He once compared Ireland to the multiple interlocking colours of an illuminated manuscript, another place where threads are difficult to unravel and roots remain hidden. [ top ]
How to Deal with Fenianism, in Modern Ireland [ &c.] (1869): The surprise occasioned by the recent Fenian outbreak at Manchester is not a hopeful symptom Men have been anxious to accept any view that could plausibly relieve them from the duty of studying what might reveal painful objects, and make action necessary. But the oftener the rebellion has been broken the more frequently the bubble has burst, the more palpable it has become that those causes remain which can send other like bubbles to the surface from the fermenting elements beneath. (pp.44, 41-42 [sic]; quoted in Luke Gibbons, op. cit., 1997, p.21.) [ top ] Bards of the Gael and Gall (London: Fisher Unwin 1907): It has not hitherto been observed that a great catastrophe may influence the character of a whole nation. Yet, I would attribute the pathetic strain in Scottish poetry largely to the cruel consequences of the Jacobite defeat [...] There can be no doubt, I believe, that the sad dirges of Ossian - continued as the note was by other bards and generally spread - did influence the character and sentiment of the Gael, and probably infused that tone of melancholy which, renewed by recurring disasters, is supposed to be an essentially Celtic peculiarity. Fortunately, there was a burst of sunshine when the Christian faith came forth upon the waters. Otherwise the refinement which sorrow produces might have been carried to enervation. (p.41; quoted in Luke Gibbons, op. cit., 1997, p.19.) There are passages here, as in other ancient Gaelic legends, of interest to the physiological psychologist. Unwittingly, the writers have enumerated many signs of extreme nervous excitability in Cuchulainn, such as the distortion of his face in battle, his convulsive leaps, his long inexplicable debility [...] from which he rouses of induced lethargy or hypnotic trance. (ibid., p.395; Gibbons, p.20.)
Lives of nations: If our nation is to live, it must live by the energy of intellect, and be prepared to take its place in competition with all other peoples ( Irish Literature, &c., in The Revival of Irish Literature, 1894, p.12; quoted in Mark Storey, Introduction, Poetry and Ireland since 1800, A Source Book (1988), p.18.) [ top ] References Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979), notes that ten of his poems were printed in Ralph Varians Harp of Erin (1869), among them On the Mountains of Pomeroy; MacDonaghs Literature in Ireland (1916) dedicated to him. [ top ] Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2; Thomas MacDonagh dedicated his Literature in Ireland to Sigerson (1916) [and see comments, Deane, ed., MacDonaghs critical writing is an abortive attempt to absorb Sigersons wide tolerance within a too rudimentary theory], 723; Deane, ed. quotes at some length Sigersons opening lecture to the Irish National Literary Soc. in 1894, called Irish Literature, [I]ts Origin, Environment and Influence, in which he declared that Irish literature is of many blends, not the product of one race but of several and confessed dismay that some of my patriotic young friends were ready to decide what is and what is not the Irish style in prose and the Irish note in poetry. We all know what is meant. But it is scarcely too much to say that you may search through all the Gaelic literature of this nation, and find many styles, but not this. If it ever existed, it existed outside of our classic literature, in a rustic or plebeian dialect. It must be counted, but to make it exclusive would be to impose fetters on literary expression. As in other countries, there were not one but many styles, differing with the subject, the writer, and the age.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 - cont.: Sigerson gave details on the number of prisoners who died or were driven insane by the treatment meted out to them and described the administrative and other changes that gave jailers, rather than legislators, the power to govern the penal regime [Deane, ed.], 281; Douglas Hyde, [...] Dr Sigerson has already shown in his opening lecture the debt of gratitude which in many respects Europe owed to ancient Ireland, 529; the first epigraph to George Sigersons Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897; 2nd ed. 1907) is a quotation from Spensers A View of the Present State of Ireland in which the beauties of Irish poetry are lauded by Iren[a]eus ... the imputation seems to be that in the 16th c. the two civilizations come together in mutual literary appreciation ... the origin of the tradition of Gael and Gall, a conception very difference from the notion of the Anglo-Irish tradition [Deane, ed.], 721-23. Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 - cont.: Aodh de Blacam cites Sigersons theory of the earliest immigrations as Teutonic; and ftn adds, Sigerson was among the first to attempt to sever Gaelic culture from the racial underpinning of Celticism, seeking to establish Teutonic as well as Mediterranean origins, a project not unrelated to his own northern European background [Luke Gibbon], 983; counted among poets of the Irish Mode by Thomas MacDonagh, 990; [a further ref., ibid., 992];
Belfast Public Library holds Bards of the Gael and Gall (1897, 1907, 1925); History of the Land tenures and Land Classes of Ireland (1871); Last Independent Parliament of Ireland (1919); Modern Ireland (1869); Political Prisoners at Home and Abroad (1890); Poets and Poetry of Munster, by Erionnach, attrib. (1860); Saga of King Lir (1913). Also Seapray: Poems from German and Irish (?n.d.) University of Ulster Library holds Bards of the Gael and Gall, examples of poetic literature or Erinn (Fisher Unwin 1897) 435pp.; The Last Independent Parliament of Ireland, with an account of the survival of the nation and its lifework (Gill 1918) 207pp. [DA948.4.S5]; Songs and Poems (Duffy 1927); also History of the Land Tenures and Land Classes of Ireland: with an account of (Dublin: McGlashan & Gill; London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer 1871). [ top ] Notes [ top ] |