Irish Lingo & Million Dollar Baby

Mon Feb 28 12:44:54 UTC 2005

The song with the clanging symbols is "Macnamara's Band" (1917), by Shamus O'Connor & John J. Stamford.  Your computer will play the tune right here:

http://www.rienzihills.com/SING/macnamarasband.htm

Bing Crosby recorded it during WWII.

JL

Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: Irish Lingo & Million Dollar Baby
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I remember "Macushla" as one of several Irish-themed popular songs of
my childhood. I had no idea that it was so old. Some others are:

Casey Lowered The Boom
Christmas In Killarney
Mother Macree, i.e. Mathair Mo Chroi "Mother, My Heart"
Derry Air (= Danny Boy)
Harrington

and a couple of others that I remember only a few words of, e.g.
"....The drums go banging / The cymbals clanging / The horns they blaze
away...."

-Wilson Gray

On Feb 27, 2005, at 5:47 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> Subject: Re: Irish Lingo & Million Dollar Baby
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> You can start diggin' the rockin' sheet music to "Macushla," by
> Jospehine V. Rowe & Dermot MacMurrough (1910) right here :
>
> http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/display.pl?
> record=153.109a.000&pages=5
>
> Or if lyrics alone are your bag, check it :
>
> Macushla! Macushla! your sweet voice is calling,
> Calling me softly again and again;
> Macushla! Macushla! I hear its dear pleading,
> My blue eyed Macushla, I hear it in vain!
>
> Macushla! Macushla! your white arms are reaching,
> I feel them enfolding, caressing me still!
> Fling them out from the darkness, my lost love Macushla!
> Let them find me, and bind me again if they will!
>
> Macushla! Macushla! your red lips are saying,
> That death is a dream and love is for aye;
> Then awaken Macushla! Awake from your dreaming!
> My blue eyed Macushla! awaken to
> stay!
>
> (Unlikely to have been on Yeats's hit parade.)
>
>
> JL
>
> Educational CyberPlayGround wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Educational CyberPlayGround
> Subject: Irish Lingo & Million Dollar Baby
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> 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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