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Life
[ See also Robert A. Welch page at Wikipedia - online; accessed 11.09.2011. ] [ top ] Works
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[ top ] Criticism [ top ] Commentary
[ top ] Andrew Hadfield, The Trial of Jove: Spensers Allegory and the Mastery of the Irish, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 2, 2 (Spring / Summer 1996), pp.39-53, contains remarks as to the historical authenticity of The Kilcolman Notebook: Welchs comment on colonial domination is powerful rather than subtle and his graphic pornographic descriptions run the risk of recreat[ing] the imperial gaze - the look that seeks to dominate, subjugate and colonize. It is certainly arguable that Spensers own exploration of power, gender and colonial identity is far more complicated than that portrayed in The Kilcolman Notebook, a question that Spenser ultimately relates to the very possibility of representation and allegory. (p.40; et vide passim.) Hadfield notes that the novel ends with a bizarre dream in which he kills a hermaphrodite and argues with a woman who turns into a naked, tumescent Walter Raleigh. Quotes a conversation colonists overheard by Spenser on shipboard regarding parallels between Irish and African colonial experience: we master our Irishness by mastering the Irish. Life is all the same. We master our blackness my mastering black Africa. There is no other way. (Ibid., p.108.) [Cont.] [ top ] Andrew Hadfield, The Trial of Jove […; &c.], in Bullán (1996) - cont.: In a footnote Hadfield raises the question whether the speakers are really overheard by Spenser or part of his imaginative engagement with Ireland. (n. 3, p.50); shows reservations about the risk of recreating the imperial gaze that seeks to dominate, subjugate and colonise (quoting Kate Chedgzoky, Moralising the Colonial Body: Discourses of Difference in Early Modern Writing, Language and Discourse, 1, 1993, pp.23-43.) Hadfield points out that the constant fear of English migrants to Ireland from Gerald of Wales [Cambrensis] onwards was that Ireland would master them rather than they it - i.e., that they would degenerate (here p.41). Further, Spensers View appears to endorse the desirability of the gendered dichotomies outlined above and place Ireland as a transgressive geographical space with the potential to overturn hierarchical certainties (p.43). [ top ] John Dunne, review of Groundwork (1997), in Books Ireland (Dec. 1997), p.333: If its good fiction youre after, this is the real thing. Danny Morrison, reviewing of Groundwork, in Magill ([q.iss.] 1997), writes: Fiction, amongst its other functions, can empower through its actors the anonymous victims of the great and greedy. […] Written in taut prose, each short chapter focuses on a character and his or her times in Munster […] the backbone of the novel is the story until 1955 of three generations of a Condon family […] Welch implies, quite subtly, that it all works like a genetic booby-trap, and that those the past most dumps on are women, be they the chattels of the victor or the vanquished. (p.49). [ top ] Peter S. Prescott, review of Groundwork in NY Times Book Review (7 June 1998), quotes: Theres not a man yet thats worthy of a woman; the womans rowdiness and spunk; the mans poverty, his ineffectuality, his totally false bravado, and the miserable assumptions of certainty hed make; at the centre of Groundwork he has placed a seventeenth century scholar [Keating] who muses over the lies of history, how it is that falsehood leads to tyranny and the imprisonment of the conscience. Further, Keating depicts the pain and chagrin of event in Irish history; remarks that Welch succeeds brilliantly in dramatising 4 centuries of history in a lapidary novel with 22 characters and short chapters leaping among the decades, the centuries Reviewer notes: I tried to reconstruct Groundwork in my mind, running the chapters sequentially. It wont work. The result would have been an attenuated novel as well as a short one. Kevin Kiely, Signifying Something, review of The Abbey theatre 1899-1999: Form and Pressure, in Books Ireland (March 2000), pp.62-63: [T]here is a magnificence about the pacing of Welchs text […] Welch doesnt shrink from the linguistic complications involved in the evolution of a bi-lingual National theatre, where Yeats had the wit to choose the actors who would be less likely to pronounce Caoilte as Wheelchair. (p.62) [ top ] Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures (Cork UP 1996), quotes: All legitimate intellectual enquiry is translation […] reveals itself more completely than ever before [as supra], and remarks: In the Irish context, translation is not simply a historic fatality resulting from massive laguange shift in the nineteenth century, but is vital in freeing the culture from obsessive concerns with continuity and purity. […] Translation is both the product and champion of discontinuity. If the condition of Ireland is the condition of modernity - discontinuity, fragmentation, self-doubt - then it is only to be expected that translation will emerge as a dominant feature of contemporary Irish literature. (p.168; see further quotations, infra.) [ top ] Naomi Doak [on the language-thesis of Changing States, 1993]: Robert Welch says that to speak of tradition in the nineteenth century is to speak of an absence due to the death of [the] Gaelic language and culture and the assimilation or imposition (depending on your opinion) of the English language of the coloniser at that time. Welch asserts that the strategy of writers - not just Moore - in the nineteenth century was to invent many Irelands as possible, because there was no Ireland, no unified language, no continuity, no national assembly or system of imagery in which a community could take pleasure in the common transactions and experiences of the quotidian. (MADip. Essay, 2002-03; ref. to Welch, Changing States: Transformation in Modern Irish Writing, Routledge 1993, p.11.) [ top ] James McAuley, review of The Evergreen Road [with other poets], in The Irish Times (16 Dec. 2006), Weekend: [… Welch] is adept at shaping experience into lyrical and narrative forms, alert to the value of sharp focus and tonal moderation: The well has lain unused / for weeks, and the red ore / leached from the peat / has stained the water, / now harsh with the tang of iron … The content ranges from this type of neo-pastoral imagism to the personal lyric; from the adaptation of a passage from the Aeneid of Virgil in rollicking hexameters to The Heat, a loss-of-innocence poem in panting dimeters. Several poems address or are dedicated to other poets, reflecting fellowship rather than the usual bunkum of literary rivalry. His readers are carried along by the cadences of common speech, the quiet irony, and the unfolding narrative. This academic poet is associated more with Adrigole and Leamagawra than the groves of Academe. (See full text, infra.) [ top ] Eamon Kelly, review of Protestants, in Books Ireland (Sept. 2007), p.180: […] a one-man show that seeks to gain the perspective of the Protestant viewpoint during the early days of the peace process. Robert Welch, himself a Catholic, admits in a preface that the impulse to write such a piece was the height of temerity. The play, arising from a conversation with a Protestant, is concerned more with the history of Protestantism as dissent, from the Reformation onwards, in order to create a context of understanding present-day attitudes, rather than being a tract concerned specifically with Northern Protestantism. An engraving by William Blake, The Traveller Makes Haste was incorporated by Welch as a unifying thread to take the narrator through the history of Protestantism, from Martin Luther and Queen Elizabeth I; to a soldier in Cromwells army and a snake charmer in the Southern states of the USA. To encompass this wide range of historical and geographical touchstones the play is, perhaps necessarily, experimental in form. It concludes with the narrator finally, poetically and perhaps controversially defining Protestantism as a dissent against stories. I am free when I am free of what people want to tell me. All stories are lies. I protest against all stories. All. I protest. A Protestant. [… &c.] [ top ] Quotations
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[ top ] A History of Verse Translation from Moore to Yeats (1988): Each language is of inestimable value because it is the expression of the soil, or essence, or spirit, of a people or a nation. (p.4; quoted in Tim OFlaherty, UUC UG Essay, 1999). Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge 1993), Preface: Life shows itself as being a concrete and actual reality in its ability to transform its very self by means of what we call translation. / In certain culture, Irish amongst them, translation is a crucial activity. There are obvious reasons for this, in that before the nineteenth century to speak of Irish culture is to speak of a different language and entirely different way of seeing. Irish culture, for two hundred years, has, in this very obvious sense, been in the business of translating itself to itself and to the outside world. It has, of course, been remarkably successful in accomplishing this act of communication. But also, in Ireland, historical narratives, stories, legends, the past, have a tendency to become objects of Castenadas obsessive concern; so that translation, in the broader sense of freeing those narratives from the lock of fixed idea and petrifications of ego, becomes necessary, not just from time to time, but continually. Ireland, like some other countries, is continually in need of transformation precisely because it is so traditional. Irish people, it may be said, are amongst those who are, at one and the same time, deeply archaic and immediately contemporary. (p.xi [end].) [ top ] Changing States (1993) - cont.: From Kinsale to the end of the nineteenth century one cannot say that there was such a thing as Irish life and thought: there was English life and thought which sometimes accommodated an Irish accent for added vitality. Ireland, cut off from Europe, mastered by Britain, was not in a position to evolve modern forms of life which would develop from the pre-existent forms, patterns, social organisations and emotional predispositions that were there in Gaelic Ireland. (p.2; quoted in Una Kealy, George Fitzmaurice [PhD] UU 2004, p.68; also [verbatim] in Susan Parlour, ‘Vixens and Virgins in the Nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish Novel: MA Diss., UUC 2008.) [ top ] Changing States (1993) - cont.: All legitimate intellectual enquiry is translation of one kind or another: it takes a text, a phase of history, an event, an instant of recognition, and proceeds to understand it by reliving it in the process of re-creating it. In so doing it renews the unpredictability of the event or text by subjecting it once again to the challenges and opportunities of contingency. The thing is lived again, and it re-enacts its completeness in a new context. There is a state of change, but the thing in the course of the re-enactment, reveals itself more completely than before. (Quoted in Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures, Cork UP 1996, p.168, with comments, as supra.) [ top ] Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth [by] W. B. Yeats (1993), pp.xix-xx: For a variety of reasons, including political ones, the Anglo-Irish were intrigued by the supernatural, fairies, and the afterlife. Up to a point this interest sprang from a curiosity about [xix] the imaginative life of a subject class growing less disadvantaged with increasing modernisation; but tales of ghosts, hauntings, and fairies, provided the Anglo-Irish with a imagery that reflected their own sense of insecurity and baffled unease. [ top ] The Abbey Theatre (OUP 1999), on Thomas Kilroy: Kilroys plays bristle with implications relating to sexuality, sexual politics, gender, cultural and political amnesia, and the inherited attitudes that determine the forms of government and society we create for ourselves. This play about Wilde [The Secret Fall &c. ] is a visitation into the psyche of an Ireland at the end of the 1990s, in wihc many of the forms that protected and imprisoned Irish people were breaking up, not least among which was that form of radical separation of the different lives of the country evident in the line drawn across the province of Ulster, the border. The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde is a play about transgressions and transgressors, about the legitimacy (or not) of crossing those borders proscribed to us. Profoundly alert to psychology and personal hurt and obsession, it is also intensely political in its inferences, all the more so for holding those implications well in reserve. (p.233.) [ top ] The Abbey Theatre (OUP 1999) - OUP website: Welch recounts the experience of taking on and then researching his book on the Abbey Theatre amind 636 itemson the National Library of Ireland catalogue: […] There were many delights and shocks. But none more so when, in the National Library of Ireland, I first pressed the search-key for the Abbey and 636 items came up. One item could comprise 2000 or more separate documents. But I jumped in and got stuck into the archives: minutes, cuttings, letters, manuscripts, prompt copies of plays. Imagine my delight and stark grief when I came across the directors prompt-copy of a play called Soldier by Liam Lynch, directed by Tomás Ó Murchadha in 1967. Both of them dead, both of them close friends, the latter the closest friend of my youth. / To write a history of the Abbey is to look for trouble, in a sense. Because the Abbey is so much a part of Irish life that it is loved and reviled in equal measure. Therefore its would-be historian is in danger of annoying everyone. Previous histories are, it should be said, completely out of date; and, in some cases, daft. None chart anything like a complete picture. I am only too conscious of the gaps Ive left, but this is the first attempt to narrate the theatres history while also trying to keep an eye on its crucial activity; the plays themselves, what they mean, how they function, how they relate to Irish society. Subtitle, from Hamlet, [i]mplying focus, energy, tension, emotion, shape, and the actual physical bodies of the actors, without whom there is no theatre. [End.] (OUP [online].) [ top ] The Abbey Theatre (1999): It is sometimes said that a period of assimilation is required before an artist can cope with the immediacy of turbulent events. For example, the so-called Troubles of 1968 to 1998 in Northern Ireland are often said to have induced a jejune sensationalism in the work written during that extended period. But it would seem that while there may be some temptation to cheap exploitation of the rawness of immediate event, nevertheless it cannot be denied that the thirty years from 1968 have seen a new vigour in all aspects of creative activity in Ireland, north and south, and that this quickening of impulse has a great deal to do with the emotional and intellectual destabilization brought about by violent conflicts. Not only that, it was not unusual during this period to witness some of the finest literary achievements - such as Seamus Heaney North ( 1975) or Brian Friel Translations (1980) - arise directly out of a sense of crisis created by the piling up of specific atrocities, injustices, lies, humiliations. / Such was the case with the Abbey in the years to 1926. […] [ top ] References Biog. entries in Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (OUP 1996) and Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature [rev. edn.] (Conn.: Greenwood Press 1996); Whos Who in Northern Ireland [2000]. Books in Print (1994): Muskerry. Dedalus. 51pp. £4.95 pb 0-948268-93-X; hb £7.95 -94-8. Nov 1991; Irish Writers and Religion. ed. Colin Smythe. 256pp. £22.50(?) 0-86140-112-3. Sep.1992; Changing States: transformations in modern Irish writing. Routledge. 319pp. Stg£12.99 pb. 0-415-09361-9 (hb Stg£35 -08666-3). Sept 1993; The Kilcolman Notebook. Brandon. 128pp. £6.95 pb 0-86322-180-7.April 1994; Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth. W. B. Yeats, ed. 494pp. Penguin. £7.99 pb 0-14-018001-X. Sept 1993; The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. ed. Clarendon Press. 644pp. Stg£25 0-19-866158-4. Criticism. 69.96 Mar. 1996; New and Selected Poems of Patrick Galvin. ed. Greg Delanty and Cork University Press. 153pp. £12.95 1-85918-079-5; pb £7.95 -091-4. Nov. 1996. [ top ] Notes Ccccccritics: Kilcolman Notebook was noticed with interest in Books Ireland [First Flush] (?Summer 1994) and greeted with warmest approbation in Rüdiger Imhofs Linen Hall Review (Winter 1994), noting especially the use of intertextuality and dreams. Cormac Dean, reviewing in The Irish Times, found it impressive in scope and wrote of it as a foundation on which new historical thought can be built. (10 Oct. 1998). It was treated more dismissively in John Devitts Brief Notes in Irish Literary Supplement [during 1994]. [ top ] John Arden: Ardens novel John Bale (1988), and specifically I Am of Ireland [Chap. VI] is a probably influence precursor of Groundwork in regard to narration and style, though very different in substance. John Jordan, Irish Catholicism, essay in The Crane Bag, 7, 2 (1983), p.109, offers a riposte to the vision of Queen Elizabeth as a psychological ogress and the source of all Irish historical malaises (vide Kilcolman Notebook). Terry Eagleton: in the preface to Crazy John and the Bishop (Cork UP: Field Day 1998), Eagleton acknowledges help in invaluable ways from Robert Welch inter al. (incl. David berman, Andrew Carpenter, David Pierce, et al.) Univ. Honours: awarded the Snr. Distinguished Research Fellowship of the Univ. of Ulster in Dec. 2003 for expertise in field of interaction betweeen Gaelic and Celtic traditions and writing in English. Greg Delanty: The Lost Way, a poem in Delantys collection Hellbox (1998) - previously printed in Irish Review - is dedicated to Robert Welch. [ top ] Translation Cork: Cork poets incl. Bernard ODonoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Theo Dorgan, Greg Delanty, Robert Welch, participated in Cork 2005 European translation series directed by Pat Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre. Book Launch: 4 Dec. 2006 at The Linehall Library, Belfast, 1-9.00 pm: a reception to mark the launch of two books by Robert Welch, the Protestants [play] and The Evergreen Rd [poetry collection], with readings from the former by Richard Dormer and the latter by Welch himself. (See UU News Online.) [ top ]
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