LITERARY spirits kept watch over the opening day of the ninth Baileys James Joyce Summer School in the old physics theatre in Dublin's historic Newman House yesterday.

The school's new director, Professor Terence Dolan, invoked the "distinguished ghosts" of Joyce, who had both studied and lectured in the theatre, and the poet Patrick Kavanagh, who had also been there.

But it was the spirit of the school's late founding director, Prof Augustine Martin, which infused the opening morning. Prof Dolan delivered the inaugural Augustine Martin Memorial Lecture in memory of the professor who died last October.

Following the paper, Prof Martin's widow, Claire, rose from her seat at the back of the room to speak about the man who gave birth to the school "in our kitchen" and to whose memory it is dedicated this year.

While Prof Dolan had been speaking about the room's "distinguished ghosts", she thought she had noticed a slight movement near the windows where there had been a row of terraced seats when the room was a lecture theatre.

"I was aware that there was a rustle up there and I thought I saw two students," she said. "I swear I saw James Joyce and Gus. And then I thought, Oh, there's a coincidence. James Augustine Joyce and Thomas Augustine Martin, and now that they have gone to the Gods, they will be students again Ms Martin said the school's soul "is up there with those two students". Its heart, she said, was with her son, Aengus, who helps run its lively social programme. "The spirit of it is with Baileys," she continued. "It's in the hands of Terence Dolan. And to you, the school militant, I hope you have a great time socially and intellectually."

Around 45 students from countries such as America, Canada, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Taiwan, Korea, Great Britain and The Netherlands are hoping to do just that at this year's two week event. They were welcomed yesterday by the deputy lord mayor, Ms Carmencita Hederman, in three languages Irish, French and Italian. "I'm afraid I can't do anything for the Germans or the Japanese," Ms Hederman said.

Prof Dolan said he chose to speak about the "Irish bonding landscape" that exists between Joyce and the poets James Clarence Mangan and Patrick Kavanagh who "formed part of Gus Martin's literary and intellectual landscape it is an Irish Catholic landscape. I will use the words from these writers to commemorate Gus's own love for the words of literature."

Prof Dolan, the school's associate director for the past eight years, succeeded the late Prof Martin as director this year. He is a professor at UCD's department of old and middle English and the author of works on Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey and other writers of Hiberno English. His dictionary of Hiberno English will be published next year by Gill and MacMillan.

In a lecture which touched on the use of the English language, religion and the famine, Prof Dolan illustrated how the landscape of Mangan, Joyce and Kavanagh showed many cross connections "direct influences, borrowings, distortions, commendations, references and thematic connections".

He drew parallels between Joyce's preoccupation with the Catholic sense of sin and a similar perception in Kavanagh as identified by Prof Martin in his paper "The Apocalypse Of Clay Technique and Vision in The Great Hunger".

PROF Dolan also explored the intellectual and emotional links between Mangan and Joyce. In one essay, Joyce described Mangan as "the man that I consider the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world".

Joyce's work paid tribute to Mangan in a variety of ways. He included him in the short story Araby in Dubliners, made subtle references to his well known poems in Finnegan's Wake and, on a more personal level, adopted Mangan's metaphorical description of his father as "a human boa constrictor" to his own.

Mangan and Joyce, Prof Dolan said, also shared a passion for foreign languages "and the themes and sentiments locked up in them". Mangan admitted to knowing eight languages and was responsible for many translations into English. All three writers wrote in English. Mangan's language was straightforward and contemporary in its syntax and vocabulary, with very little trace of the Hiberno English dialect which was spoken and developing in Dublin in his lifetime. Kavanagh, too, kept to standard norms, except for his occasional use of the Monaghan dialect. He was also much more cautious than Joyce in creating new words, or neologisms which are a major feature of Hiberno English in general.

Joyce, however, took Standard written English, such as he was taught at school and translated it, exchanging it into another language Hiberno English.

This was most intensive in Finnegans Wake, and Prof Dolan used several examples from the book's Anna Livia chapter to illustrate how Joyce used Hiberno English "as a subversive dialect based on incorrect assimilation of the English language". Examples included phrases such as "Look at the shirt of him," and "she'd hate the hen that crowed on the turrace of Babbel".

Responding to a question later on whether Joyce's subversion of the English language was deliberate, Prof Dolan explained that rather than subverting English by military means, the Irish "subverted the English language by injecting it with Irish syntax and changing it around to make it almost a different language".

He left the participants with the following example and invited them to work it out for themselves. "The dinner is on the table and my wife is in it".