MAGAN'S WORLD:Manchán Magan's tales of a travel addict
SWEETER THAN twice- leapt trout saved thrice from skittish otters are the treasures of noble Temple Bar. Its Liffey waters more lustrous than the dilated pupil of a spear-gored boar, more nimble than bracken-fed plover. Its traffic louder than the dawn cry of the lonely bittern across the berry-black bog
.As a description of Dublin's cultural quarter this may be a bit floral, but it beats Lonely Planet'sassessment: "crappy tourist shops and dreadful restaurants serving bland, overpriced food . . . huge characterless bars . . . pools of vomit and urine that give the whole area the aroma of a sewer".
The travel industry has always depended on flowery language to sell itself, to differentiate one particular thatched cottage, infinity pool or palm beach from all the others. Ireland, in particular, relies on purple prose to lure people to places such as the Cooley peninsula, the Nore valley or the Offaly bogs that only reveal their treasures once one is there. But, in these newly humbled and hair-shirted times, we’ve all lost patience with hyperbole. We are no longer willing to be hoodwinked by vacuous terms like secluded, unspoiled or old-world getaway.
It’s in this spirit that I suggest reviving our indigenous form of grandiloquence, the vernacular tongue conceived by druids, scribes and filí to describe our country and passed down to us through the centuries in folklore and manuscripts. The beauty about folklorese is that it can mean anything one wants it to, as was deftly shown by Myles na gCopaleen in the pages of this very newspaper half a century ago. He showed how the process of translating from Irish to English provides such elasticity that black can literally be made to mean pink, purple or even speckled. For example, the verb cur in Irish means to put, but if necessary it can also mean to send, to rain, to sow, to bury, or, if Myles is to be believed, the “act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of sewage farm windmill, a corncrake’s clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman’s dumpling, a beetle’s faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man’s curse . . . a fairy godmother’s father”.
Like Orwell's Newspeak, folklorese either obliterates or transforms the meaning of any sentence so that truth becomes the least important element conveyed. Watch how Lonely Planet'slacklustre description of Temple Bar can be transformed from a place of crappy tourist shops into a place: redolent of a she-otter's intestine sliced open at noon, with tourist shops more numerous than seven warrior-clans of double-hooved stags, filled with tat less useful than three-score teats on a white bull, with food no more palatable than twice-retched frogspawn served on bright-thorned gorse.
What tourist wouldn’t be so charmed by this lyricism that they’d forget to even take heed of the meaning? And it’s not really cheating, it’s just giving tourists what they want. They come to Ireland seeking the real experience after all; and they’d rather not know in advance about the crappy tourist shops and pools of vomit.
While we're at it, Lonely Planet'sdescription of Waterford could also do with a makeover. The guidebook downgrades the city to a town and says the, "seedy port-town feel is still evident in places". With a bit of poetic manipulation this can be spun into: Harder to find than the grub-feedings of lice on a rutting stag are the treasures of oyster-innards grim Waterford, a place as bough-worn and battle-weary as Cú Chulainn without the company of bright-shielded chessmen. It means next to nothing, but doesn't it sound sweet? Sweeter than twice-leapt trout?