The Midnight Court / Cúirt an Mheán Oíche: A Critical Edition

Approaching Cúirt an Mheán Oíche/The Midnight Court

78 Approaching Cúirt an Mheán Oíche/The Midnight Court B R Í O N A N I C D H I A R M A D A ne of the most challenging aspects of a text like Brian Merriman ’s ribald eighteenth-century masterpiece Cúirt an Mheán Oíche/The Midnight Court is determining how to read it as twentyfirst -century readers. This issue is particularly pertinent for those who approach the poem in translation. It is commonplace now in literary studies to acknowledge that no reading is neutral; we, as readers and critics, bring to each text our own particular expectations , experiences, and prejudices. This is not to say that these may not be confounded by our engagement with the text, forcing us to look anew not only at the text but at our whole understanding of the condition humaine. And it is for this very experience that many of us turn to literature. Indeed, it is often a text’s ability to achieve this feat that allows us to define it as a piece of world literature. Cúirt an Mheán Oíche is, I believe, such a text. Since its composition in County Clare at the end of the eighteenth century, Merriman ’s poem continues to delight, amuse, and confound its many readers in equal measure. Why is this so? The poem, written in what was to become a minority language and outside the metropolitan centers that so often dictated taste, would grip the imagination of Approaching Cúirt an Mheán Oíche 79 the local audience of the time and also manage to traverse the worlds of oral and literary transmission (Buttimer 2006, 320). In the early 1900s, more than one hundred years after its composition , Cúirt an Mheán Oíche was on the lips of local farmers in Feakle, County Clare, memorized and recited word for word in the original Irish, even though the area, long associated with Merriman and his poem, was well along the road of language change from Irish to English. The esteem in which Merriman’s verses were held is evidenced by their tenacity and their grip on the imagination of the local populace. It was not an uncommon occurrence for the work of poets to be remembered and preserved in their own locality, particularly later poets such as Máire Bhuí Ní Laoghaire in West Cork or the songs of Anthony Raftery or Colm de Bhailís in Connaught, whose work was preserved mainly as part of the song tradition. Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, however, also belonged to the literary manuscript tradition. Merriman himself was, of course, a literate poet, part of a literary coterie of Irish-language poets in County Clare and the surrounding areas. Even though Cúirt an Mheán Oíche was publically recited at public gatherings such as the cúirteanna filíochta (courts of poetry) or in local taverns or at fair-day assemblies, during Merriman ’s lifetime numerous manuscript versions of his poem were in circulation, as they later were throughout the nineteenth century. The poem also spawned numerous translations in English that continue to bring it to the attention of a wider audience. Merriman’s poem survived not only a change in the dominant language, but changes in taste and political upheaval. It survived to become a set text in the Irish-language curriculum in the schools of the newly independent Irish state founded in 1922. Cúirt an Mheán Oíche remained a fixture on the school curriculum from the 1920s until at least the 1970s, when the Irish-language school syllabus underwent radical change and simplification. It seems a little Bríona Nic Dhiarmada 80 ironic to note that it was during what were the more liberal years— in terms of sexual morality—of the 1970s that the poem ceased to be a fixed text for examination. This sense of irony is increased when we consider that it was taught throughout the highly conservative years of the Free State and of what is often referred to as De Valera’s Ireland, although its removal from the school curriculum (though not from the canon) had more to do with students’ growing linguistic inability to deal with what Ciarán Carson has called Merriman’s “intricate Irish” than any objection to theme and content (2005). It is also...