The Wit and Wisdom of Irish Writers

It’s St. Patrick’s Day; which means that where I live it’s time for green beer, green frosted cookies, and green-dyed carnations; all colorfully commemorating the Emerald Isle and her patron saint who supposedly shooed away serpents from her shores, and held up the shamrock to illustrate the Holy Trinity.

Whatever else may or may not be true, the fabled Irish silver tongue manifests itself in its gifted writers – in their sparkling wit, poetic imagination, and profound contributions to Literature.

“When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” - Jonathan Swift

Here, we have the title origin of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel.

“This wallpaper is dreadful; one of us will have to go.” - Oscar Wilde

These were supposedly Wilde’s last words.

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” - George Bernard Shaw

Eccentric, but holding true to his convictions, Shaw left a sizeable amount of his estate to the creation of a new alphabet.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” - James Joyce

From Joyce’s opus “Ulysses”

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,

 A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing.”

-          - William Butler Yeats

Cormac McCarthy took the title for his book, “No County for Old Men” from the first line of this poem.

“I want you to believe…to believe in things you cannot.” - Bram Stoker

From ‘Dracula’

 “I think being a woman is like being Irish…Everyone says you are important and nice, but you take second place all the time.” – Iris Murdoch

Murdoch won the Booker Prize in 1978 for ‘The Sea, The Sea’.

 “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

From ‘Worstward Ho’

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.” - Seamus Heaney

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

“There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature.” - Richard Sheridan

Sheridan, this very witty poet and playwright is remembered most for his plays, ‘The Rivals’ and ‘The School for Scandal’. 

There Are Not Enough Words

Traditionally, French is the language of love. But apparently what the French cannot express about passion…well, the rest of the world can supplement. After all, we are talking about something too big to be voiced by any one language. Read on.

Cafune (Brazilian Portuguese): Running your fingers through your lover’s hair.

“Kissing her hair I sat against her feet,

Wove and unwove it, wound and found it sweet”

-          “Rondel” by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego): This is a look between two people each waiting for the other to make the first move. The prolonging of sexual tension hinges on neither giving in to the impulse.

'What do you want, sir" I asked, sitting. I was puzzled—we never sat together. I shivered, although I was not cold…

'Now look at me.'

I turned my head and looked at him over my left shoulder.

His eyes locked with mine. I could think of nothing except how their grey was like the inside of an oyster shell.

He seemed to be waiting for something. My face began to strain with the fear that I was not giving him what he wanted.

'Griet,' he said softly. It was all he had to say. My eyes filled with tears I did not shed. I knew now.

'Yes. Don't move.'

He was going to paint me.

-          “The Girl with a Pearl Earring” – Tracy Chevalier

Onsra (Boro language of Assam; India): Poignant; means “to love for the last time”.

“All’s over, then: does truth sound bitter

            As one at first believes?

…Yet I will say what mere friends say,

            Or only a thought stronger;

I will hold your hand but as long as all may,

            Or so very little longer!”

-          “The Lost Mistress”, Robert Browning

Ya’aburnee (Arabic): It literally translates to “you bury me”; or in other words, you might as well kill me, because life without you is not worth living.

“I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be, when you – O God – would you like to live with your soul in the grave?”

-          Wuthering Heights”, Emily Bronte

Kilig (Tagalog): Being ‘drunk with love’; the ineffable experience of being swept away by the experience, sight, or even the very idea of romance.

“If I may express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely head over heels in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.”

-          “David Copperfield”, Charles Dicken

Koi No Yokan (Japanese): Not exactly love at first sight, but rather the presentiment at the very first meeting that the two of you are going to fall in love.

“I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you.”

-          “Clockwork Prince” Cassandra Clare