INTO THE WEST, PART I . . .

Into the West--that's the title of an Irish film from 1992 starring Gabriel Byrne. It seems like a good title to borrow to headline the first of our two days of travels and adventures in County Galway in the west of Ireland. . . .

We set off by bus from Dublin at 9:15 a.m. for the city of Galway, two-and-a-half hours away. Galway is a bustling center with a lot of interesting shops, restaurants, and pubs--by all accounts it is a great city in which to be a student. So, aptly enough, our first stop was the National University of Ireland-Galway. But there were two details we didn't factor in: the half-hour walk from the bus station to the campus and the heavy rain that we had to walk through. Rain has been general all over Ireland (an echo of Joyce's "The Dead," of course) during our time in the country so far--but this was rain of a higher power: we arrived at NUI-G's Centre for Irish Studies utterly soaked to the skin. . . .

But we were warmly greeted there by Director of Irish Studies, Louis de Paor--though not in his administrative capacity per se; rather, Louis first put on his scholar's hat to walk us through the tormented history of the Irish language--Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic)--from the first threat to its existence during the Elizabethan Conquest through the Cromwellian Invasion of the later 17th century then through the period of An Gorta Mór--the Great Hunger (the Famine caused by potato blight) of the 1840s--and its aftermath and on into the 20th century, when the vitality of the language was sapped by State and Church trying to force it down the throats (as it were) of the general populace who, if I may borrow and move forward by a century or two the words of iconoclastic bilingual poet Michael Hartnett, had found in the previous century "English a necessary sin / the perfect language to sell pigs in." (Writing in the 1970s, Hartnett was referring specifically to the so-called "dispossessed" Irish-language poets of the 17th and 18th centuries; but his description resonates forward to the dark days of the 19th century as well.)

And then Louis de Paor put on his other hat--that of a major practitioner of poetry in Irish--and proved that the language is still alive and well despite the constant and ongoing threat of extinction over the past 400 years. Louis engaged us for a full hour with his talk and then his rich and wonderful poems (written in Irish but translated by him into poems that any English writer would be proud to claim) and then generously took questions from our group for another 20 minutes or so--really good questions that responded both to his poems and to the implications of poetic language in general and of the Irish language in particular. I think that everyone came away from our visit with Louis both deeply informed by his impromptu lecture and deeply enriched and provoked by his dazzlingly agile and remarkably substantive poems.