Alan Titley

Life
1947- ; b. Cork; ed. Coláiste Críost Rí, Cork City, St. Patrick’s College TTC, Drumcondra; taught in Nigeria [West Africa] during the Biafran War; taught deaf children in Dublin while studying for a degree at UCD: appt. lecturer in Irish at St Patrick’s, Drumcondra, 1974, and appt. head of Irish Dept., 1981; appt. Professor of Modern Irish at University College Cork, 2006; contrib. reports on Irish culture to Eire-Ireland, 1982-83; received Irish-American Cultural Institute Award, 1988; author of An tÚrscéal Gaeilge (1991), and a novel, An Fear Dána (1993); edited the Irish side of Books Ireland; his Leabhar Nóra Ni Anluain (1998) celebrates the Gaelic of a grandmother;

issued a play, An Ghráin agus an Ghruaim [The Hate and the Horrors] (1999), winner of Stewart Parker Award (BBC); followed by Tagann Godot, dir. by Tom´s Mac Anna in the Peacock Theatre [Abbey], 1990 [var. 2002] - a sequel to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; broadcast Scéal na Gaeilge [The Story of Irish’], a 2-part film (TG4, 2012); also wrote documentaries on Liam O’Flaherty, Máirtín Ó Direáin and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; contribs. Irish-language column on contemporary affairs to The Irish Times, from 2003; his selected essays in English gathered as Nailing Theses (2011); elected MRIA, 2012; Titley gave the first Robert A. Welch Memorial Lecture at the University of Ulster in 2014. FDA OCIL

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Nailing Theses: Selected Essays (Belfast: Lagan Press 2011), 453pp. + Index [18]pp. CONTENTS: Introduction; The Dregs of the Pot of Gold: The Irish Experience of Exchanging Dignity for Racism; The Lava of Imagination and the Secret History of Words; The English, Respectability and Football: Gaelic Games Before the Founding of the GAA; ‘Craz’d in Her Intellectuals’: The Case of Goody Glover, the Irish-speaking Witch; The Queer Mind and Sean O’Faolain; The Reshaping of Tradition: The Case of Frank O’Connor; The Wordsmithiness of Austin Clarke; The Irish Language and Synge; Gnawing on the Same Old Bone: How Ireland Has Not Changed At All; The Return of the Native; the Plebs and Parnell; The Quick and the Croaked: Aspect of Irish-Gaelic Tradition Between Two Worlds; The Summons of The Midnight Court; Literacy and the Irish Book; The Prose of the Twentieth Century; The Expectations of Irish Literature; The Turning Inside and Out: Translating and Irish 1950-2000; ‘Neither the Boghole Nor Berlin’: Drama in the Irish Language from Then until Now; The Writer and Agitator that Was Mairtin O Cadhain; The Novel in Irish; The New Poetry in Irish: Innti and Out; The City of Words; The Disease of the Irish Short Story; ‘The Rough Rug-Headed Kerns’: The Gunman in the Popular Novel; ‘The Ravelling of Narratives’: Irish and Scottish Life Stories Compared; The Russians and Us; The World, Wittgenstein and Ireland; Index.

[Note: Excerpts from this work and quotations given in it have been copied at various points on this website - e.g., Frank O’Connor, (q.v.),]

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Criticism
Seán Ó Tuama, ‘An Domhan a chruthaigh Titley’, in Comhar (Nollaig 1987); also, Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, review of An Fear Dána (1993) in Fortnight (July-Aug 1994), ‘Summer Books’ sect.; Máirtín Coilféir, ‘Alan Titley, Tagann Godot (1990) & An ghráin agus an ghruaim (1999)’, in Drámaíocht na Gaeilge: ón Dara Cogadh Domhanda ar aghaidh, ed., Philip O’Leary & Brian Ó Conchubhair ([Spiddal: Co. Galway]: Cló Iar-Chonnacht 2022) [Chap. 11]. 

See also Brian Ó Concubhair, ed., Why Irish? Irish Landugage and Literature in Academia (Arlen House 2008), which incls. sect. on the novels of Alan Titley.

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Commentary
Máire Mhac an tSaoi, review of Méirscrí na Treibhe, in Comhar (Meitheamh 1978); ‘Rug-headed Kerns, The Irish Gunman in the Popular Novel’, in Eire-Ireland (Geimhreadh 1980), pp.15-38.

Éamon Ó Cíosáin, Buried Alive: A Reply to The Death of the Irish Language [Hindley] (Dáil Uí Chadain 1991), pamphlet, observes that in a Books Ireland review Titley judges the assumptions about the oppression-free abandonment of Irish by its speakers to be a simplification, given the different social status of the two languages (p.12), but further cites Titley with Ó Drisceoil as claiming that Hindley’s methodology is impeccable. (p.14).

Kevin Barry, review of The Dirty Dust [translation of Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain], in The Guardian (15 April 2015): ‘[...] Titley’s introduction provides context superbly and is notably feisty. He rages against the stage-Irishness of many translations that “make Irish speakers sound like peasants and idiots and simpletons”. He sounds instead a very fresh note - the talk in The Dirty Dust sounds like the talk of an Irish town now, and it is gloriously profane. Terms like “bonking”, “fuck me pink”, “scum bucket”, “slag bag”, “piss flaps” and “cunty gash” may not quite have been on the lips of Irish-speakers in Connemara in the 1940s but Titley’s rendition feels right, and that’s the best you can say of any translation. / So if you do find yourself some lost midnight in a graveyard in the west of Ireland, under a browsing moon, and if you think that beneath the breath of the wind you perceive voices, I believe they will sound very much like the voices in this book.’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

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Quotations
1916: ‘Our own 1916 has given us a creation story as good as any we were ever likely to get and has shown us men and women more worthy of respect as revolutionaries, poets, social philosophers, and educationalists than all the other loony tools of the running bow-wows of boorjoie adhocracy of then and now. They have given us the Good of Knowledge of Ourselves, and what else is there? [...] Pearse and Connolly and the boys tell me it is better to light your own candle than curse the eternal darkness that another World War would bring.’ (Dermot Bolger, ed., Letters from the New Island, 16 on 16: Irish Writers on the Easter Rising, 1988, p.27)

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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, p.816, ‘An Síscéal de Réir Eoin’, from Eiriceachtaí agus Scéala Eile, translated by author as ‘The Gobspiel According to John’, in Translation, Journal of Literary Translation, Vol. XX (Fall 1989) [870-80]; BIOG, 933-4 [as supra].

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Notes
Tribal scar[s]: Note that Michael Hartnett speaks of the ‘tribal scar’ in a pome of his 1992 collection: ‘I have survived the tribal scar, / the decorative tattoo. / What I say is what I am / and is not open to tirades from you: / trying not not [sic] to be is what I do.’ (The Killing of Dreams, 1992, quoted in Gerald Dawe, review, Irish Times, 3 Oct. 1992.)

Word-play: In his Nailing Theses: Selected Essays (2011), Titley is very prone a form of writing in which a degree of phrasal ineptitude is mixed with some whimsical word-play - viz., ‘Although Frank O’Connor was never one to shirk a good row or hide his heart up his sleeve, it appears that his wrestling with this problem of one or two Irish literatures was a genuine one’ (p.012; italics mine), or ‘hutments’ for peasant dwellings in another place where he presumably knows that no such dictionary word exists though ‘hut’ and ‘tenement’ are servicable names for the rural and urban dwellings of the Irish poor in earlier days (p.105.) This little torques in the language are so commonplace and so characteristic of the writer as to call for explanation. This appears to be a involve a kind of testimony to the existence of a kind inter-language as resulting from a bilingual context - in his case actual bilingualism - but it is also the result of the primary context of delivery of the essay as lectures with audiences who he is intent on amusing by comical inflections of thought and expression. One of the effects of this is a rather relentless reiteration of examples - Fr. John O’Reilly’s observations about the moral’ purity of the Irish mind and language contrary to the evidence of the iterature and even 17th-century confessional handbooks in Irish - and another joke which can be variously applied to the satirical target of the moment: ‘Just because X says it, it isn’t necessarily untrue’. Here X stands in for Kevin Myers in one place, or the Irish Independent in another.