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      ‘Synge’s travel writings are particularly fascinating’

      The Irish Times

      ‘Synge’s Ireland will always strike an echo’

      Times Literary Supplement

      J. M. Synge, playwright, poet, essayist and translator, was a key figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance. Born in County Dublin in 1871, he studied at Trinity College Dublin and then at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. With Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and others, he was a co-founder and later a director of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for The Playboy of the Western World, which famously provoked a riot on its opening night, and his travel writing – notably, The Aran Islands and Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara. He died in 1909, aged thirty-seven.

      Paddy Woodworth was for many years an Irish Times journalist and is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy and The Basque Country: A Cultural History.

      J.M. Synge

      Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara

      ❖

      Foreword by Paddy Woodworth

      Serif

      London

      This e-book first published 2015 by

      Serif

      47 Strahan Road

      London E3 5DA

       www.serifbooks.co.uk

      First published, in a slightly different form, by Serif in 2005

      This expanded edition first published by Serif in 2009

      Originally published as In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara in 1911 by Maunsel & Co. Ltd, Dublin

      Foreword copyright © Paddy Woodworth, 2005, 2015

      Corrections to this edition copyright © Stephen Hayward, 2005, 2009, 2015

      This edition copyright © Serif, 2005, 2009, 2015

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

      ISBN 978 1 909150 49 2

      e-book produced by Will Dady

      Cover design by Will Dady

      Contents

      ❖

      Foreword by Paddy Woodworth

      In Wicklow

      The Vagrants of Wicklow

      The Oppression of the Hills

      On the Road

      The People of the Glens

      At a Wicklow Fair

      A Landlord’s Garden in County Wicklow

      Glencree

      In West Kerry

      In Connemara

      From Galway to Gorumna

      Between the Bays of Carraroe

      Among the Relief Works

      The Ferryman of Dinish Island

      The Kelp Makers

      The Boat Builders

      The Homes of the Harvestmen

      The Smaller Peasant Proprietors

      Erris

      The Inner Lands of Mayo

      The Small Town

      Possible Remedies

      Publisher’s Note

      Serif Travel Library

      Foreword

      ❖

      You’ll find no poetry here,’ a Wicklow farmer told me when, aged twenty, I was rash enough to tell him about my literary ambitions. His tone was matter-of-fact, utterly lacking in ironic intent. He was speaking just as a fiery dawn extended its mantle from behind the Great Sugar Loaf mountain and down onto the Calary Bog, where we had already started mending a ditch in the half-light.

      Poetry is not entirely a product of leisure, but the beauty in a landscape certainly becomes less visible when the land demands twelve hours’ manual toil every day, and even then barely provides enough to feed your children. This farmer was a man of deep if discreet feeling, and he was not myopic: he simply could not afford to take his eyes off the damp ground.

      Few writers have been so sharply aware of this clash between literary perceptions of the countryside and the real lives of country people as John Millington Synge. The abundant poetry he found during his wanderings in the Wicklow Mountains, in Kerry and in Connemara is constantly qualified by a deep sensitivity to the conditions of the people who had no choice but to live there. The beauty itself is constantly shadowed by a melancholy that seems to drift like a sinister mist across the land itself and is inherent in a human world on intimate terms with hunger and typhus:

      When the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural radiance, and even the oldest men and women come out into the air with the joy of children who have recovered from a fever. In the evening it is raining again. This peculiar climate, acting on a population that is already lonely or dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness ... [pp.28–9]

      Or again:

      Near these cottages little bands of half-naked children, filled with the excitement of evening, were running and screaming over the bogs, where the heather was purple already, giving me the strained feeling of regret one has so often in these places when there is rain in the air. [p.34]

      Almost every page of this book is pervaded with a sense of ‘splendour that was almost a grief in the mind’. [p.139] This is, in fact, a sensibility remarkably similar to Seamus Heaney’s world where ‘nature is suffused with foreboding’, as Elmer Andrews has put it.1 Curiously, Heaney has written much of his poetry – see especially the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ in Field Work 2 – while living in what was once the Synge family’s gate lodge at the Devil’s Glen. For those who like to pursue such connections, Heaney first rented and then bought this house from Ann Saddlemyer, the eminent Synge scholar who co-edited a previous edition of this book.3

      While today’s reader will be moved by the spare lyricism of Synge’s descriptions of natural beauty, it is his accounts of encounters with local people that are likely to be most memorable, and perhaps most problematic. The question that has often been asked about his plays – did any Irish peasant ever speak like this? – is amplified in these prose pieces.

      ‘Ah, Avourneen, the poor do have great stratagems to keep in their little cabins at all,’ says one woman he meets. [p.45] ‘Glory be to His Holy Name,’ she continues, ‘not a one of the childer was ever a day ill, except one boy was hurted off a cart, and he never overed it. It’s small right we have to complain at all.’ Lines like these have led to accusations that Synge over-egged the cake of the Hiberno-Irish dialect with folksy inventions. St John Irving’s allegation that the writer was ‘a faker of peasant speech’ has been well dealt with by Declan Kiberd, who, unlike most Synge scholars, is fluent in both of that creole’s constituent tongues. While Kiberd concedes that ‘No peasant ever talked consistently in the cadenced prose employed by Synge,’ he insists that the language is heightened, not faked.4 Synge’s peasants ‘continue to think in Irish even as they speak in English’, he adds, arguing that they tend to speak a language

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