Tag: antigone

News and Events, The World of Bella Casey

Bella’s French Revolution

by Mary Morrissy1 Comment on Bella’s French Revolution

UneMorrissy

The French edition of The Rising of Bella Casey appears today, St Patrick’s Day, with impeccable timing!  The handsome publication comes courtesy of French publishers,  La Table Ronde.

The company was founded in 1944 and its first published title was Antigone by Jean Anouilh; it’s been an  imprint of Gallimard since 1996.  Which means, of course, that it looks lovely. It has the classy simplicity of a trademark  Gallimard edition – a plain cover with clean lines on bond paper – but it comes in a striking Cerulian blue. There’s a gorgeous wraparound flap with a strikingly expressionist illustration (by Aline Zalko) of a piano sitting tilted on the kerb of an imperial-looking street.

This is a scene drawn directly from the novel  – the heroine, Bella Casey, steals a piano she finds on a street in Dublin during the Easter Rising – but with its vivid lines and swirls of hot oranges and vivid reds, the cover manages also to encapsulate the atmosphere of a city in flames.

There were long debates about how to translate the title of the novel.  The Rising in the English title is used ironically, although it is also factual since Bella was caught up in the events of 1916, as were many citizens of Dublin. But the act of stealing the piano – as mentioned above – also resurrects  Bella’s long dormant sense of pride. In French, the novel has become Les Revolutions de Bella Casey which , I think, neatly catches the sense of Bella’s several selves explored in the course of the novel, while also referring to the foment of the turbulent times she lived through..

Alice Deon, daughter of French novelist Michel Deon, is the director of La Table Ronde. She grew up in Ireland and has been a great champion of Irish fiction in translation.  Earlier this month, Michele Forbes’ Ghost Moth appeared in a similar Quai Voltaire edition. Other translated authors in the Table Ronde stable include Norman Mailer, Dacia Maraini and Alice McDermott.

 

 

News and Events, Reviews and articles

The forgotten dead

by Mary Morrissy2 Comments on The forgotten dead

anne enright

When Ireland’s Fiction Laureate, novelist Anne Enright, (above) gave a lecture in late November with the title “Giving Voice: Antigone and the Dishonoured Dead”, the unwary might have believed she was going to talk about Greek tragedy in general, and Sophocles’ play, Antigone, specifically.

But the real subject of Enright’s lecture lay in the dis-honouring of the dead that is at the heart of the play. (Briefly, the plot goes as follows: Creon, the ruler of Thebes, dishonours the body of his nephew, Polynices, by refusing to allow his burial. The untended corpse is used as a warning to other potential enemies of the state. Creon decrees that Polynices must lie “unwept and unburied”, until his sister, Antigone, decides to ignore Creon’s edict and buries him. Her actions lead to her own execution.)

So far, so Greek.

But Enright brought the theme of dishonour back home to the Irish context. It made her lecture a gripping and, it has to be said, an uncomfortable experience. (I mean this in a good way.) For this was a sustained and thoughtful polemic on the legacy of institutional child sexual abuse in Ireland. And for the audience in Cork, where I heard Enright’s lecture, many of the references were very close to home ─ the Bessborough mother and baby home, the Sunday’s Well convent.

Enright’s focus was less on the living victims of child abuse, than the dead ones.  The 796 babies and children who died in the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam between 1925 and 1961, whose bodies are unaccounted for; the bodies of 22 anonymous Magdalenes exhumed at High Park convent in  Drumcondra, Dublin, where more than one third of the 155 deaths were uncertified; the 102 babies who died in the Mother and Baby home in Bessborough, Cork in 1944 – a death rate of 82 per cent ─ of which only 76 are recorded officially.

Where are these missing children?  Where are they buried and why is there no record of them?

In this season of centenary commemorations, Enright tellingly compared the treatment of these dead with the state funeral accorded to Thomas Kent, one of the 1916 signatories, last September.  Kent’s body was exhumed from the yard of Cork Prison and reinterred with full honours in the family plot in Castlelyons, where the Taoiseach gave the graveside oration.

Enright’s brief as Ireland’s inaugural Fiction Laureate is to promote Irish literature nationally and internationally. But her first public engagement has given a clear signal that she intends not to confine herself to Ireland’s literary identity. What a pity then that the Irish media chose to ignore her lecture almost entirely. True, there wasn’t anything “new” in it. These facts have all been laid out in the public sphere before. (Enright paid tribute to two women who have been been tireless in their efforts in this regard – local historian Catherine Corless and the late journalist, Mary Raftery.)

What was new was Enright’s collation and patterning of the facts into a powerful testament to the forgotten dead.  Lest we forget.

The full text of Enright’s lecture has been published  in the London Review of Books. While welcome, its publication there speaks of another kind of burial, in an English literary graveyard.  It can be accessed at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n24/anne-enright/antigone-in-galway