An Béal Bocht
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An Béal Bocht (translated from the Irish as The Poor Mouth) is a satirical novel by Flann O'Brien written in Irish. Published in 1941, it was translated into English in 1973 by Patrick Power.
The Irish expression "to put on the poor mouth," ("an béal bocht a chur ort" in Irish) is mildly pejorative and refers to the practice, often associated with peasant farmers, of exaggerating the direness of one's situation, particularly financially, in order to evoke sympathy, charity and perhaps the forbearance of creditors and landlords or generosity of customers. The title may also be a parody of that of the Irish language reader An Saol Mór (The Great Life)[1] (in Irish, béal and saol are near-rhymes).
The book is a parody of the genre of Gaeltacht autobiographies, such as Tomás Ó Criomhthain's autobiography An t-Oileánach (The Islandman), or Peig Sayers' autobiography Peig, which recounts her life, especially the latter half, as a series of misfortunes in which much of her family die by disease, drowning or other mishap. Books of this genre were part of the Irish language syllabus in the Irish school system and thus mandatory reading for generations of children from independence in 1921.
An Béal Bocht is set in Corcadoragha (Anglicè, Corkadorkey), a remote region of Ireland where it never stops raining and everyone lives in desperate poverty (and always will) while talking in "the learned smooth Gaelic". The recurrent leitmotiv is the sentence "I do not think that we shall see its like again". At one point the area is visited by hordes of Dublin Gaeilgeoirí (Irish language lovers), who explain that not only should one always speak Irish, but also every sentence one utters should be about the language question. However, they eventually abandon the area because the poverty is too poor, the authenticity too authentic and the Gaelicism too Gaelic. The narrator, after a series of bloodcurdling adventures, is eventually sent to prison on a false murder charge, and there has the chance to write this most affecting memoir of our times.
[edit] External links
- Gaelically Gaelic, essay featuring excerpts
- Declan Kiberd, "Flann O'Brien, Myles, and The Poor Mouth", from Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London 1996, 497--512.
- ^ Mac Síthigh, T., An Saol Mór: Láimhleabhar Ghnátheolais ar Shaol an Lae Inniu: M.H. Mac an Ghoill agus a Mhac Teo.
