Books

Imram: from John Prine as Gaeilge to Gabriel Rosenstock on Georg Trakl’s trail

Liam Carson on the global reach of the Irish-language festival starting this week

Liam Carson
Wed Nov 10 2021 - 06:04

“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. All that stuff about Sam Stone the soldier junky daddy and Donald and Lydia, where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that. “

So spoke Bob Dylan of John Prine, whose songs are the heart of Áit a gCannan na hAingil, Imram’s flagship music project in the Pavilion Theatre. Songs such as Lake Marie, Angel from Montgomery and Summer’s End have been rendered into exquisite Irish by Art Hughes and Gabriel Rosenstock. They will be performed live by Liam Ó Maonlaí (vocals, piano, harmonica), Peter O’Toole (guitar) and Hilary Bow (vocals). Margaret Lonergan has created screen projections of the lyrics featuring archive images of Prine fused with art and photographs reflecting the content of the songs.

Imram has always celebrated literature in Irish within a multi-lingual and international framework. It’s a mistake to think literature in Irish is confined to Ireland, or to people born in Ireland. Thus this year’s programme features work by Finnish writer Panu Petteri Höglund, in which the worlds of H P Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos and Irish folklore merge to spine-chilling effect. German poet Andreas Vogel has also chosen Irish as his literary language, and in his latest collection thángamar chonaiceamar cosamar he presents micro-poetry that explores philosophy and language in a way that echoes Sappho’s fragmented poems. He will read at a special gala poetry night in the Museum of Literature Ireland on St Stephen’s Green, where he will be joined by Alan Titley, Róisín Sheehy and Áine Ní Ghlinn.

Irish language writers based abroad are the subject of a series of author interviews to be broadcast on the Museum of Literature’s Radio MoLI in December. They will include Julie Breathnach-Banwait from Connemara, a psychologist, poet, writer and mother who has lived in Western Australia for over a decade. She describes herself as a pysch-poet, and in her first collection Dánta Póca, her incantatory poems explore the emotional realms where the physical meets the psychological.

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Colin Ryan is a unique writer based in Melbourne, who has chosen Irish as his literary language and gives it a unique Australian twist. His strange and surreal short stories touch on travellers, criminals, soldiers, the dead, people who have gone missing, people who are searching for others, and those who are being searched for. His poems in Corraí na Nathrach are haunting explorations of colonialism, history and landscape.

Series presenter Tristan Rosenstock also talks to Diarmuid Johnson. A poet, novelist, musician and visual artist, his latest book is Seacht dTír, Seacht dTeanga, a travel memoir that tells of his life wandering Poland as a traditional musician, studying in Germany, and seeking his destiny in Rome and Brussels – and a story of life on the margins, one of poetry and song.

The Covid pandemic has inevitably fed into literature and into Imram’s programming. During the Covid-19 lockdown, Rody Gorman wrote a series of more than 100 remarkable poems in Scottish Gaelic and English that form a lyrical diary. Within lockdown on the Isle of Skye, Gorman found himself attending to nature – from the sounds of the cuckoo to the flourishing of violets and bluebells on the hillsides. There are comic moments where social distancing becomes a “wee ceilidh at the two ends of the shop” or “telling stories to dusk” on zoom. Within these poems there is a keen sense of life and community surviving against the odds, and a celebration of days of silence and beauty.

The online film Glasadh features a selection of these poems recited by Gorman himself, and accompanied by music and sound effects composed by Liam Grant, and photos which Margaret Lonergan took during lockdown in Dublin.

During lockdown, I found myself immersing myself in all manner of poetry, and came across the weird work of Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Born in 1887, he lived in an age with echoes of our own – one of pandemics, looming threats of war and the rise of dark nationalisms. During the first world war, he volunteered as a medical orderly on the Eastern Front. Haunted by the horror of war, he died in a military hospital after taking an overdose of cocaine.

If his poems were apocalyptic, they were also uncannily beautiful in their use of symbolic colours and signs, and in the appearance and vanishing of dreamlike figures and strange angels. Of his work, Herbert Lindenberger commented “the haunting music of Trakl’s poetry now mark him, with Rilke, as perhaps the last great representative of what could be called the sublime tradition in German”. On discovering his work, I dropped a note to Gabriel Rosenstock, wondering if he’d ever heard of Trakl. Not only had Gabriel heard of Trakl, he had translated his work in the early nineties, and had been filmed by Fergus Daly as he travelled across a snowy Austria to Salzburg, on a journey to find the soul of Trakl. This year’s Imram will feature the debut broadcast of that remarkable film, titled Craorag or Crimson: An Irish Trakl.

Imram’s programme of events for November and December is a hybrid of live and online events. We have eschewed the Zoom option, and invested in creating films of a high quality. But we are delighted to be back in a pub again with the bilingual spoken word club REIC. The line-up featuring poets Dairena Ní Chinnéide, Eva O’Connor and Eoin McEvoy, as well as Súíl Amháin is a new hip-hop project created by poet Séamas Barra Ó Súilleabháin in which he joins forces with DJ and musician Rob Mulhern. This night will be hosted by REIC founder, broadcaster, and poet Ciara Ní É.

As winter deepens, we are delighted to present The Snow Project online film. It features three poets – two in Irish, one in English – exploring the theme of snow. Mícheál Ó hAodha's Leabhar Dubh an tSneachta explores themes of loss, memory and snow. Helen Ivory is a poet and collage artist, and the author of Waiting for Bluebeard and The Breakfast Machine. Penelope Shuttle has described her work as creating "a troubled yet beguiling world rich in irony and disquiet". Gabriel Rosenstock reads Irish versions of a selection of haiku by Issa inspired by the snowy landscapes of Shinano in Japan.
Imram's winter programme of events begins on November 11th. Further information and booking at imram.ie