Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) Read Free Page A

Henry Thayer, at Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc., who currently represent the Estate.
    Deepest gratitude, as always, is offered to Niamh Moriarty and Su Salim Murphy for their practical support and encouragement.

 
    Translator’s Note
    The protean creature known variously as Brian Ó Nualláin, Brian O’Nolan, and Brian Nolan (amongst many others) spoke as many kinds of Irish as he had names. A native of Strabane in County Tyrone, he spent the first few years of his life in a household where nothing was spoken except Ulster Irish, and following the family’s move to Dublin, he joined an education system in which Irish was held in a similar regard to Latin or Classical Greek—interesting, perhaps, but of no immediate relevance to the modern world, with a grammatical system and a vocabulary (drawn mostly from old poetry) indicative of the formal speech of a vanished aristocracy rather than a living vernacular. Ó Nualláin was an adolescent during the War of Independence (or the Anglo-Irish War, if you prefer), and became an adult as the country became a Free State. Having triumphed in a bitter Civil War, the Free State government pursued the restoration of the Irish language as a means to restore their own nationalist credibility, an effort that gave rise to a hotly contested “official standard” dialect ( an Caighdeán Oifigiúil ). In a very real sense, the Dáil (or principal chamber of the Irish parliament) was attempting to create a language by committee—a situation that positively begged to be savaged by a bilingual satirist.
    In addition to his native dialect and the Caighdeán Oifigiúil , Ó Nualláin wrote in Béarlachas (English-inflected pidgin Gaelic) and deliberately bad Irish, and he was not above coining new phrases for comedic effect (see “The Arrival and Departure of John Bull” in this volume for some examples). In many cases, it is necessary to have Ó Nualláin’s own grasp of the structure of the Irish language to understand a joke, and one of his favourite tricks was to write certain snippets of dialogue in Roman type, in short stories that were otherwise entirely printed in the government-approved “uncial” script. It is sometimes impossible not to lose a joke in translation, and explanatory footnotes do not really help.
    In explaining the jokes, I have done Ó Nualláin’s subtle humour a disservice, but in my defence, the Irish language is bristling with linguistic traps that prompt esoteric puns—for instance, the word “francach,” written with a lowercase f , means “rat,” but with a capital F, means “French” or “French person.” The Irish equivalent for “There’s no place like home” (“Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteáin féin,” “There’s no fireside like one’s own fireside”) is lampooned in a pun that insightfully comments on the subjective evaluation of one’s own misfortune (“Níl aon tón tinn mar do thóin tinn féin,” “There’s no sore arse like one’s own sore arse”). It can be a tricksy, slippery language, an ideal medium for a tricksy, slippery man like Ó Nualláin / O’Nolan / O’Brien. Trying to find the English for “Seacht nGeach” nearly drove me insane, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my teacher Seosamh Mac Muirí for helping me out on that one.
    Seo é mo bhus—slán go fóill!
    —Jack Fennell, University of Limerick, 2013

 
    Revenge on the English in the Year 2032! (1932)
    by Brian Ó Nualláin
    With regard to the business of nourishment, the worldly man who earns his crust from the sweat of his brow more often experiences the lack of hunger than its excess, and it is true that this state of affairs is to be preferred; and it is also true that deliverance should be granted to the bag of bones who is empty but for the scrapings of the porridge-pot, or a couple of seed-potatoes with a drop of milk; but when a man is full to bursting point, he truly is in a sorry state. There is nothing left for him to do but