Taking a rise out of us – Frank McNally on the mysterious origins of Ireland’s rising roads

Reader John McCullough sent me the attached picture of a curious sign currently decorating the Chapelizod entrance to Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

It purports to be a bilingual version of “No Through Road”.

But what seems to have happened is that a classically-educated computer has taken the English “No” to be the standard abbreviation of numero, Latin ablative of numerus, meaning “number”, and has pursued this to the logical conclusion of translating it into the Irish uimhir, before abbreviating that too.

If so, the sign is another accidentally satirical comment on Ireland's relationship with its first official language, just like that much-travelled postcard from the Gaeltacht that Dublin 9 resident John Kelly mentioned here during the week (Letters, Thursday): the one addressed to "B.A.C. 9" that inspired someone in An Post to add the direction "Try London".

Crown jewel – Frank McNally on ‘La Belle Irlandaise’, Joanna Hiffernan

---

Synonyms of the Fathers – Frank McNally on the complicated ‘fossil history’ of Irish surnames

---

Man in the Middle – Frank McNally on John Francis Condon, self-appointed star of the Lindbergh kidnap investigation

---

Orwellian Road – Frank McNally on Ukrainian echoes in Animal Farm

---

By impure coincidence, this is not the only email I've had in recent days on the subject of roads and things as gaeilge getting lost in translation. There was also one from my occasional correspondent Terry Moylan.

At issue in that case was the allegedly ancient Irish blessing, “Go n-eirí an bóthar leat”. Which, as a thousand souvenir tea-towels tell us, means “May the road rise to meet you.” Except that, as Terry says, it means no such thing.

As well as “rise”, he explains, the Irish verb in question can also mean “succeed”, while the word bóthar is clearly intended in this context to be “a metaphor for ‘journey’.” Thus, the original phrase is nothing more than the Irish equivalent of a blessing found in many languages: “bon voyage”, “buen viaje”, “gute reise”, etc.

Furthermore, argues Terry, the tea-towel translation is neither ancient nor Irish. A Google NGRAM search for the phrase suggests it first appeared as recently as 1943, and in its earliest years occurred only in the US.

Sure enough, the earliest references I find in newspapers this side of the Atlantic are from a decade later – the then standard delay for the importation of foreign fashions. The Irish Times’s quarantine was even longer, releasing the expression into these pages only in 1989.

All this might be excused as a bit of harmless linguistic embellishment of the kind that makes Irish people sound more interesting and colourful than we actually are.

But Terry, who confesses to being “exercised” by the subject, is not convinced of the English version’s innocent origins. “One shouldn’t automatically discount malice,” he says. “It is not beyond belief that the bastard mistranslation originated as a cheap attempt to ridicule the Irish language, or the Irish people, or both.”

Speaking of being exercised, and returning to the Chapelizod corner of Phoenix Park for a moment, I can confirm that – through or not – the road there does indeed rise to meet you. The last time I ran a half-marathon in the park, that stretch up towards Furry Glen was at the 12-mile mark and nearly broke me.

Which prompts a thought: whoever first decided that the concept of Irish roads rising to meet you was a thing to celebrate cannot have been a runner or cyclist. But could they have been foreign wartime agents? Perhaps working to undermine Irish neutrality, a hot topic in 1943?

Back then, for example, we had a notoriously hostile American ambassador, David Gray, who was fond of ridiculing Eamon de Valera and his neutral policies in dispatches home.

De Valera’s infamous “happy maidens” speech was also in 1943. So maybe there were agents in Washington taking Gray’s cue and fighting a propaganda war against us via deliberately butchered Irish. Or perhaps the rising roads phrase just leaked from a classified document, like the Wuhan virus, wreaking havoc on vulnerable groups such as Irish tourism marketeers.

Then again, one didn’t have to cross the Atlantic then for excessively flowery translations of Irish. Perhaps that adjective should read “floury”, what with all the self-raising roads? But as it happens, one of the people most responsible was a man named Flower – Robin, who translated Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An t-Oileánach – so we’ll stick with that.

The great Myles na gCopaleen, formerly of this parish, had an unusual relationship with Ó Criomhthain’s book. He near-worshipped the original. But of the translation, he wrote: “A greater parcel of bosh and bunk than Flower’s ‘Islandman’ has rarely been imposed on the unsuspecting public.”

Myles eventually satirised the result in An Béal Bocht, another product of the war years. That was published, with interesting timing, in December 1941. Meaning that Myles's spoof on the utter misery of life in Ireland seems to have coincided closely with the invention in America, for whatever reason, of the most famous of all old Irish expressions of good luck.