The peninsula man

Characters, poteen and faction fights - the stories of Inishowen's Charles McGlinchey vividly capture life in Donegal before living memory. Now published in Irish, they are to the north-west what Peig or The Islandman are to the Blaskets, writes Ian Kilroy

It's not every pub in Ireland that is graced with the presence of two Nobel laureates, but recently, in Clonmany, Co Donegal, The Square pub in the village was. As Seamus Heaney ordered a drink at the bar, John Hume milled through the crowd to his seat at the back of the pub. Standing near Heaney, the cigar smoke of Brian Friel billowed towards the ceiling. Even Mark Durkan, deputy first minister of the Northern Ireland executive, could be seen knocking about earlier. A sense of occasion abounded.

That occasion was the launch of the McGlinchey Summer School - this year marked by the publication of McGlinchey's story, The Last of the Name, in Irish. The tale has had a circuitous journey - from the English language into French, and now Irish - and one that both Friel and Heaney have had a hand in.

But first things first. What is this text, The Last of the Name, Le Dernier Du Nom, or An Fear Deireanach den tSloinneadh, and how did it come into being?

Desmond Kavanagh, chairman of the McGlinchey Summer School, explains: "It represents the life and work of two extraordinary Inishowen men, the ageing Charlie McGlinchey, weaver, tailor and storyteller, who spoke his memories to my father, Patrick Kavanagh, a school teacher and local historian. He took it down in longhand during the 1940s and early 1950s and it was published quite some years later, edited by Brian Friel."

Belonging to a genre that includes works such as The Islandman or Fiche Blian ag Fás, The Last of the Name records and recounts, in colourful and authentic detail, life as it was lived in the north-west of Ireland just before living memory.

In the tradition of the old storyteller, McGlinchey paints a portrait of a society of local characters, of poteen makers and faction fights. In the most unsentimental voice, he conjures up the civilised hospitality of that society, as well as its brutality - as can be seen, for example, in the practice of fuadach, the abduction/rape of women from neighbouring villages, effectively kidnapping them as wives. Other practices described - for example, bleeding cattle and ingesting the blood for nourishment - are reminiscent of practices still prevalent among tribes such as the Maasai. This is a Donegal that would have been lost for all time, but for Kavanagh's efforts.

Before the book's publication, Desmond Kavanagh had approached Seamus Heaney with the manuscript, which he had inherited from his father, to get his opinion on it.

"He loved it and suggested that I go to Brian Friel with it, as he knows Inishowen well," says Kavanagh. "Brian fell in love with the book, in a sense, and offered to edit it for me. He was very careful in the procedure of editing that he adopted - he broke it into chapters, which hadn't been done before, and gave each chapter a title. He also eliminated some of the repetitive speech of the spoken word, but added nothing to it - he was very sensitive in his handling of it."

What resulted, in 1986, was The Blackstaff Press edition of The Last of the Name, complete with an introduction by Brian Friel. In that introduction, Friel is clear that "The Last of the Name is the work of an artist". A vital text had been brought into the public sphere. Now Donegal, and the Inishowen peninsula in particular, had what Heaney has called "a minor classic", a text to rival the likes of the much maligned Peig.

The importance of the work is clear to Desmond Kavanagh: "It's often been compared to things like The Islandman and Peig. But the south-west seems to be better covered in that respect, that's why this book is particularly welcome."

Heaney is also clear that this is a significant work. In the margins of the McGlinchey Summer School, he spoke of how, when he first encountered the book, he thought it "was really wonderful material, the speech completely authentic".

He added that "what McGlinchey's book really covers, autobiographically, in terms of folklore, is the shift from a completely integral Gaelic-speaking culture in Inishowen to an English-speaking one - a lot of McGlinchey's memories are about people in between two worlds".

But it is the unsentimental pitch of the voice that particularly impresses Heaney. "McGlinchey's discourse, quite a lot of it, is rehearsing the tales and the possessions of the tribe - the old stories," he says. "But there's an absence of sentimentality . . . there's no attempt to effect an audience with a sentiment. There's a record. The posture isn't one of nostalgia."

After the success of the 1986 English-language publication of the text, The Last of the Name found its way into French, as Le Dernier Du Nom. A French historian picked up a copy of the book, in Kenny's bookshop, in Galway, and received permission to make a translation. The result was the Éditions Ouest-France edition, translated by Maurice Polard, which appeared in 1999.

But it is only now, with the publication of An Fear Deireanach den tSloinneadh, that the work has come, in a sense, home.

As Desmond Kavanagh explains, although the work was originally written down in English, on completion of that original manuscript, both Charles McGlinchey and Patrick Kavanagh set about rendering it into Irish. By the time that occurred, McGlinchey was quite advanced in years and his memory needed jogging by Kavanagh.

Indeed, at times, Kavanagh had the greater hand in the translation. So much so that the editor of the Irish language version, Nollaig Mac Congáil of the Irish department at NUI Galway, can distinguish in the text both the classic Inishowen dialect of McGlinchey and Kavanagh's more bookish Irish.

The tragedy is that McGlinchey died before the translation was complete. What was left was an unfinished manuscript, but, fortunately, it formed the bulk of an original text in Irish, translated back into the old language, much as Beckett created a new literary text by translating his own French back into English. Mac Congáil toyed with the idea of completing the work, but settled in the end on preserving the purity of the text - there was no point, he felt, in adding another voice.

So the incomplete translation of those two Inishowen men has, finally, after half a century, completed its journey. What has been brought into being is a book to stand alongside any of those texts from the Blaskets. It is a work full of cures and spells, tales of illicit stills and details of the habitual joys of life as it was once lived.

It is an event of some significance when an Irish language text, which was almost unknown for so long, becomes available for the public to discover for the first time. It looks like The Last of the Name will not be forgotten - this one will last.

An Fear Deireanach den tSloinneadh is published by Arlen House and is available at Easons nationwide and other booksellers. Further information on the McGlinchey Summer School is available at www.clonmany.com