Irish Lingo & Million Dollar Baby

[Educational CyberPlayGround]

Hey Y'all

Irish lingo has been nominated for an Oscar in Million Dollar Baby along
with the phrase mo chuisle (macushla).

best,
karen ellis


February 26, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Fighting Words
By WES DAVIS

BEFORE the bell has sounded at the start of her first title fight in Clint
Eastwood's Oscar-nominated film "Million Dollar Baby," the scrappy,
big-hearted boxer Maggie Fitzgerald, played by Hilary Swank, finds herself
cheered into the ring by shouts of "Mo Cuishle," the Irish Gaelic moniker
she's been given by her manager, Frankie Dunn, played by Mr. Eastwood.

The name is a shortened form of the phrase "A chuisle mo chroí," "O, pulse
of my heart," or as Frankie will put it more concisely, "My darling." But
Ms. Swank's character doesn't know that yet and neither do we. All we know
is that the words emblazoned - and some argue misspelled - on the back of
her robe are important to a lot of people.

Apparently they still are. After seeing the movie, I overheard whispered
conversations about "Mo Cuishle." A few of the movie goers confessed that
they hadn't even known there was an Irish language apart from English, but
they were captivated by the sound of it. In the last few weeks some queries
about the phrase have arisen on the Internet, and students of the language
are coming out of the woodwork. Around Valentine's Day, in particular, many
Web surfers were frantic to learn how to address their darlings in Irish.

That sort of popular reaction makes sense. In the shorthand of the film, the
Irish, scattered by hardship in their home country but strangely united by
the trials that threw them apart, stand for a culture of underdogs, and the
language that was once the common idiom in Ireland becomes the watchword of
the movie's romantic idea of the hero.

As Maggie's boxing career builds to its climax, Mr. Eastwood hinges the
movie's emotional peaks on the longing held in the Irish language. The most
moving of these moments occurs when Mr. Eastwood's character finally reveals
the meaning of "Mo Cuishle," and when he translates W. B. Yeats's "Lake Isle
of Innisfree" from the little Irish-language book he carries like a talisman
throughout the movie.

An achingly beautiful poem, "Lake Isle" expresses a yearning for escape that
fits perfectly with the movie's hope that it may be possible to build a new
life. For Yeats, the fantasy retreat is a rustic cabin in a "bee-loud
glade." In the movie, it's the "little place in the cedars, somewhere
between nowhere and goodbye," imagined by the character played by Morgan
Freeman.

Yeats's poem also reflects on the more rugged emotional landscape the film
exposes. In "Lake Isle," as in "Million Dollar Baby," the dream of escape
finally slams against the hard facts of real life. The dream can survive, as
Yeats puts it, only "in the deep heart's core." In the movie, the dream is
mined by Mr. Eastwood's character when he labors to translate the poem from
the Gaelic for Maggie. It feels as if he's extracting a gift of hope for her
out of the bedrock of Ireland's nearly forgotten language.

There's just one hitch: Yeats didn't write his poems in Irish. He didn't
even know the language well enough to read it.

On the whole, Yeats was less than rigorous in the way he represented his own
linguistic abilities. He was never fluent in French, for example, but he
talked breezily about the latest French book once his friends had read it to
him. Having once made a stab at memorizing the Hebrew alphabet, he would
later lament having forgotten his Hebrew. But about Irish he was completely
clear. He tried to learn it, and he failed.

The language issue was a vexed one for Yeats. Like many of his countrymen,
he was at times drawn to the image of Ireland as a nation speaking its own
language. He actively promoted dramatic performances in Irish.

But he knew that much of Ireland's literary life, and even more of its
practical business, had been carried on in English for over a century. When
Yeats was serving in the Senate of the newly independent Irish Free State in
1923, he spoke against a proposal that the prayer at the start of every
session be delivered in Irish as well as English. He protested that the
Irish prayer was "a childish performance," since, like him, most of the
senators didn't know the language and were unlikely to learn it.

Later, when the Senate was considering a proposal to add Irish to the
country's traffic signs and railway notices, he argued against it on similar
grounds, fearing that forcing the language on people at a moment when they
just wanted information would hurt the efforts of groups like the Gaelic
League to preserve Irish and spread its use. In the same session, though, he
called for government support of scholarship on Irish language and literature.

Strange as the idea would have seemed to him, Yeats almost certainly would
have supported the translation of his own poems into Irish. Such
translations do now exist, so it's not impossible to imagine Mr. Eastwood's
character wrestling an Irish translation back into the original English.

But all of this is ultimately less important to the film than the effect
"Million Dollar Baby" achieves with its use of Irish. From a cinematic point
of view, Mr. Eastwood couldn't have done better than to adopt the endangered
language of a culture whose history has been as dramatic as that of his
characters. And the wonderful twist of the film's pretense of translating
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" from the Irish is that it seems to have done
just what the Gaelic League and all those Senate proposals, and even the
contrary Yeats, ultimately wanted. It has stirred up interest in the
language itself.

Wes Davis, an assistant professor of English at Yale, is editing "The Yale
Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry."




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