This address was given by Colm Tóibín at an Ireland Literature Exchange
event in Iveagh House. It marked 1,500 books in translation. It was published in The Irish Times on Thursday November 28th.
This country’s economic crisis may be making headlines, but a much
more serious and deeply influential image of this country emanates from
the culture we send out to the world, argues
Colm Tóibín . And now, more than ever, that mission is vital.
I
THINK it is possible to argue that both trade and diplomacy are culture
for slow learners, that what happens with music and books, with
painting and poetry, how they move and spread, how they do not recognise
borders, how they find translators, is a blueprint for what happens
later with goods and services and with treaties between governments. I
love the idea that while Afghanistan and Ireland have not yet had a
close relationship as traders, and our diplomatic ties with that country
have not as yet been close, yet the blue in the Book of Kells came to
us from Afghanistan. That blue remains a sign of culture, riding over
waves that politicians, economists and diplomats still have problems
with. As with colours, words from novels and poems move like the Danube
from country to country, create fertile plains rather than natural
borders.
In the past century, most governments have come to
understand this strange power which culture has. Some of them have been
afraid of it, have reached, as it were, for their revolver when the
words in poems or the images in paintings seem to threaten them with
their innocent power.
And others have come to realise, as the
French realised when they built their canals in the 17th century, that
trade has a funny way of following rather than leading, and that it
follows culture as much as it follows water. Thus in the century known
as the American century we have had the spread of American images and
books as a central aspect of the spread of American influence and the
growth of American wealth. In the world still, in Germany, in China, in
the smaller countries everywhere, a new American novel to this day has a
glamour, an attraction, that no other country can easily match.
In
other countries there has been a full understanding of the power and
primacy of culture, as anyone who has dealt with the Goethe Institut, or
the Alliance Française, or the Instituto Cervantes, or the British
Council knows. The governments who set up these institutions, and fund
them, have understood that culture is a human construct and, despite its
innocence and its natural ability to flow and fly, it has a strange way
of looking like a commodity – it can fail, it can thrive, it can be
competitive, it can be made powerful, it can be helped along.
These
countries have also understood, in their dealing with individual
artists, how important it is that culture be free to do as it pleases,
say what it likes. As one of the greatest Irish people who has ever
lived, Lady Gregory, said in one of the most important statements about
censorship and freedom: if it is a choice between a subsidy and our
freedom, we will always take our freedom.
Thus when the West
German government 20 years ago made a momentous decision to re-unite
Germany, the Goethe Institut, funded by the same government, decided to
respond by inviting Günther Grass, who passionately disagreed with his
government’s decision, who believed that instant re-unification of
Germany was a mistake, to make a tour to voice his objection to what was
happening in his country. When he came to Dublin to do so to a crowded
hall, it was a victory for freedom of speech, for the right of the
passionate artist to make a case against his own government’s policies,
an artist whose journey was sponsored by that very government itself.
For
many years, Irish writers basked in the glory of a great past. We lived
in a country known for its material poverty, its gnarled history and
for its famous writers. We were lucky to live in a country which
produced literary geniuses but lucky too that figures such as Lady
Gregory, WB Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, James
Joyce and Samuel Beckett either had private incomes of their own, or had
benefactors throughout their lives who had private incomes. We were
lucky also that the very first Irish government understood the need for
subsidy and state support for culture and were the first government in
the English-speaking world to publicly fund a theatre.
For many
years also we watched as other countries followed suit. We watched with
awe the power of the British Council as it made sure that British
culture was known throughout the world; we watched the Germans doing it,
the French, the Canadians, the Spanish. We allowed a myth to take hold
that Irish writers were so well known that they did not need support
until we found that there were many bookshops in which there was not a
single work by a single living Irish writer on display.
Thus the
Arts Council initiative in 1994 which gave us Ireland Literature
Exchange has been of immense practical importance for Irish writers, for
Irish culture and, by implication, for Irish trade, diplomacy, tourism,
and for the Irish economy. In every bookshop you go into now from China
to Chile, from Berlin to Bogota, there are Irish books on sale whose
translations have been subsidised by Ireland Literature Exchange. It
must be emphasised that the primary value of this is not material, it is
spiritual. Or it has not much value at all.
It is done for its
own sake. It has a right, as Harry Clifton has pointed out, to be
perfectly useless, maybe even a duty to be so. Its power derives from
that right, that duty. Writing is done alone and silently just as
reading is done alone and silently. The reader is enriched by reading,
the world enhanced by writing, in ways that cannot be measured.
But now in the world there may be those who believe that the image of Ireland comes from newspaper reports, from the
Wall Street Journal or the
Economist magazine, or from economic indicators and statistics
sent with wonder and deep puzzlement from Brussels to Berlin. And the
answer is no, the image of Ireland in Europe which is more enduring and
embedded, more serious and deeply influential, comes from the poetry of
Anthony Cronin, Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, the fiction of
John Banville, Anne Enright and Eilis Ní Dhuibhne, the plays of Brian
Friel, Tom Murphy and Marina Carr, much more than from anything in the
daily news. Literature is news that remains news. The rest is pressing
hard on us now, and that can be solved – or not, indeed – by politics.
Literature and art, culture, have, on the other hand, a way of being slippery, and that is part of their whispered power.
This
slippery news that stays news has made its way into the world via the
sterling and serious work which Ireland Literature Exchange has done,
via its funders – the Arts Council, An Comhairle Ealaíon, via its
co-funders Culture Ireland, and via the Arts Council of Northern
Ireland. For publishers all over the world who deal with it – and I know
this for a fact – Ireland Literature Exchange is known for its
efficiency, its effort to keep bureaucracy to a minimum, its seriousness
about its own mission, and its belief in that mission.
Now, more
than ever, that mission is vital. Now, more than ever, the role of
culture to delight us — to make images and offer moments which will have
strange power or even a mysterious and insistent powerlessness – is
more important than it has ever been. After the fall of Parnell, when
Ireland seemed at its lowest ebb, when politicians and church leaders
seemed to have done their very worst, when there was an abiding sense in
Ireland of darkness and despair, WB Yeats saw something which
interested him. He saw a country which was like soft wax which could be
moulded and reshaped and he saw a crucial role for artists and for
artistic activity in that remoulding. As with Günter Grass 20 years ago,
it is not our job as artists to be an arm of government, or to
represent the state. As writers we must remain an uncomfortable, and
even an unpalatable presence. We must demand as always the right to be
awkward and circumspect. When Lady Gregory wanted freedom more than
subsidy, what she really sought was both. This is a delicate time to
make such demands, and all we have to back up our demands with are 1,500
books, the books which Ireland Literature Exchange has sent around the
world. Think of the delight, the knowledge, the beauty in those books.
That is the spirit of the Ireland which Yeats recreated in the 1890s and
the early years of the 20th century. It is the country we have
inherited and we seek to re-make. For prose writers our duty and
responsibility is simple. It was outlined in France during L’Irlandais
Imaginaire 15 years ago by John McGahern. It is to our sentences.
Our duty is to make good sentences, and that is our responsibility too.
Beyond
that, nothing much. But maybe good sentences stand for other things
that are good, or might be improved; maybe the rhythms of words used
well might matter in ways which are unexpected in a dark time.
In
the meantime, we live in the real world, in real time, a world in which
there is much debate about the role and cost of public servants and
civil servants. We are in a building where we cannot talk lightly of
such matters because it was here that dedicated and inspired public
servants created draft after draft of what became the Anglo-Irish
Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement. And it is here that we
celebrate not only the role of culture in our world, and the secret
power contained in 1,500 books, but another group of dedicated and
inspired public servants — led by Sinéad MacAodh, the director — who
manage Ireland Literature Exchange with such flair and skill and
seriousness.
Comments
Post has no comments.