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The following is a transcript of the fourteenth Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture by Dr Christopher Fitz-Simon, at Dublin City Library and Archive on 24 January 2011. AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, 'Mr J. Kennedy Miller's very capable company of Irish players', Christopher Fitz-Simon details Miller's successful Irish theatre company which toured Ireland and Britain during the period 1889 - 1906.  The fourteenth annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture, was recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 24 January 2011.My Lord Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen, in December 1891 the critic of the Irish Playgoer magazine expressed this opinion: “The play A True son of Erin by Mr J W Whitbread, at the Queen’s Royal Theatre, was presented by Mr J Kennedy Miller’s very capable company of Irish Players, who each and all seem to know the pulse of the particular audiences invariably to be found in this theatre…”During most of the 19th century and well into the 20th the big Dublin theatres relied exclusively on what were known as ‘cross-channel attractions’, whether it was for opera, musical comedy, the latest west end plays, major productions of Shakespeare with starry names, music-hall variety and even the Christmas pantomime. Indigenous productions were a rarity though Irish ‘acts’ were to be seen in some variety programmes and Irish comedians and chorus were usually engaged for the London-produced pantos, to give a bit of local colour. The big Dublin theatres – the Royal, the Gaiety, the Queen’s Royal Theatre, the Empire Palace (later known as the Olympia) the Tivoli and the Lyric – were what was known in the trade as ‘receiving houses’, mostly owned and managed by Dublin business people such as the Gunn family at the Gaiety or the Figgis’s (of bookshop fame) at the Empire Palace: but they did not produce their own shows.Dublin was simply another city on the ‘British’ provincial touring circuit: what we saw this week in our theatres, Glasgow, Leeds, and Stockton-upon-Tees had seen last week in theirs. Yet a trawl through period copies of ‘The Era’, the weekly paper that gave details of all productions on the road, shows an interesting difference between Dublin and other cities: touring managements tended to allocate longer runs to Dublin than, for instance, Manchester. This strengthens the view, strongly promoted by the Hibernian press, that Dublin was more ‘appreciative’ of the theatre than other ‘British’ cities. The French actor-producer Constant-Benoit Coquelin gave seven performances at the Gaiety in 1899 of (on alternate nights) Molière’s ‘Les Précieuses Ridicules’ and ‘Le Tartuffe’ and Rostand’s ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ – in French! – when he only gave three nights in other ‘British’ cities outside London.We all know about the fringe theatres that developed towards the end of the 19th century in Dublin, out of which in 1904 emerged the Abbey; several thousand books and learned magazine articles have been devoted to this phenomenon: its playwrights, its actors, its associated personalities and its impact abroad, which was considerable in literary and artistic circles before becoming an international industry. My subject this evening is not the Abbey or the grubby ateliers of Camden Street and Capel Street, but the Dublin metropolitan or boulevard houses with their dress-circles, parterres and boxes, and especially of one of these, the Queen’s Royal Theatre in Brunswick Street just a quarter-mile from where you are now sitting. More particularly, I’m looking at one Company that was based there for seventeen years and produced, exclusively, major productions of Irish plays with Irish players. This company was known as Mr J. Kennedy Miller’s Combination and it flourished here and on tour throughout the British Isles from 1889 until Mr Miller’s untimely death in 1906.The Queen’s, as it was popularly known, was a receiving house like all the others. At the time of which I’m speaking its lessee was Mr J.W. Whitbread, an English entrepreneur who had settled here and rescued the Queen’s from its apparently deplorable condition. ‘The Graphic’, a London weekly of arts and fashion, said of the Queen’s “the plays were low, the actors vile, the authors rough exceedingly. Mr Whitbread… by main energy, patience, wisdom and expenditure, dragged all out of the mire.” (laughter) The Queen’s visiting attractions were no different from those at the Gaiety or the Royal, though on a smaller scale: it was a ‘No.2 house’ on the circuit and did not have the space to stage the most crowded dramatic and operatic productions. Typical were plays with titles like ‘A Woman’s Revenge’ or ‘Lost in New York’; F.B. Gilbert’s Grand Opera Company was a regular visitor in ‘Maritana’, ‘Satanella’ and ‘The Daughter of the Regiment’. Medium sized rather than grand I would have thought. Whitbread was an unusual manager, for he was more than a businessman: he fancied himself as a playwright, and indeed in 1886 he wrote a play called ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ which he produced with a touring management, first in Limerick, before allowing the same company to grace his own stage in Dublin. Clearly the out-of-town opening was a precaution; had it failed in distant Limerick it certainly would not have proceeded to the bright lights of Brunswick Street, and Mr Whitbread may have been prudently questioning his own dramatic talent.Whitbread gave his next play, ‘The Irishman’, to the touring management of Kennedy Miller who brought it out in 1889 in London at the Elephant and Castle Theatre. Why there? The answer is quite simple: Kennedy Miller’s company was rehearsing the play while performing other works on the road in England and it was apparently deemed to be ready by the time they reached the splendid new suburban house seating 2,203 patrons, and designed by the leading theatre architect of the time, Frank Matcham. A largish number of seats to be filled for a week, you will be thinking, especially for an Irish play by an unknown author. It would appear from the reviews that Kennedy Miller’s staging was particularly impressive, especially the multiple setting of castle interior, exterior and adjacent lakeside in the final act, and a spectacular visual occurrence earlier in the play when a battering ram is used to demolish a cottage from which the inhabitants are seen to be cruelly evicted.Who was this Kennedy Miller who was to have such a fruitful 17-year career as a director of Irish plays? Well, he was a Scot who claimed Irish ancestry. His first name was actually Andrew though he never used that professionally. His initial employment was as bit-part actor and assistant-stage-manager – there was nothing like Drama School at that time. His apprenticeship was at the Grand Theatre, Glasgow. In an interview with the ‘Irish Playgoer’ after his own company was well established Kennedy Miller modestly declared that his early experience had been ‘very varied’, travelling with “operas, comedies, dramas, pantomimes …and the band belonging to His Majesty the King of Siam.” It was typical training-on-the-job. He found himself engaged more and more frequently as ‘acting manager’ – we would now use the term ‘director’: the person who directs the actors in rehearsal and is responsible for the interpretation and co-ordination of the piece. He came to Whitbread’s notice when productions he’d directed visited various theatres in Dublin.It would appear that the two men, now in their enterprising thirties, saw the potential for writing and producing specifically Irish plays. The Irish melodramas of Dion Boucicault were still very popular through Boucicault was no longer active on the circuit – he died in New York in 1890. As well as this there appeared to be a distinct vogue for Irish topics on the London stage – and also, indeed in the rest of Britain. Why was this? Certainly for English theatregoers Ireland was near enough to be the scene of patently credible, if bizarre, incidents, but yet removed enough for these not to impinge too heavily on the tranquil minds of the bourgeois theatregoing public: agrarian disturbance, rebellion, prison escapes, evictions, courtroom reversals, political assassination, such things did not happen in Tunbridge Wells. (laughter) There was also, for the English theatregoer, the “engagingly humorous way our brave neighbours across the Irish Sea have of expressing themselves in the English language – if you could call it English my dear though I don’t think I would”. This ‘humorous’ Irish mode of speech was especially prevalent when stage characters were attempting to climb out of tricky situations, whether domestic, legal or military. Of the six stage productions that grossed the most money in the British Isles in 1895, no less than three were on Irish topics: revivals of Boucicault’s ‘The Shaughraun’ and ‘The Colleen Bawn’ and Buckstone’s ‘The Green Bushes’. There were 160 professional theatres and music-halls in Greater London and about 380 on the provincial circuit – which included Ireland. So there was consumer partiality for Irish work and ample accommodation.Whitbread and Kennedy Miller would certainly have discussed the vexed question of English actors portraying Irish characters – this always raised the hackles of the Dublin critics, from Frank Fay who wrote acidic reviews for the ‘United Irishman’ to Joseph Holloway who wrote sweet ones for the ‘Freeman’s Journal’ and the ‘Irish Times’. A company of genuine Irish actors was the obvious solution.Kennedy Miller did not produce anything as pretentious as a manifesto – that would have been more in line with the work of the théâtre-à côté on Abbey Street. Nor was he given to expounding dramatic theories. I’m reminded of a character in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ who says disparagingly of the parish priest, “What would he be doing with a theory?” (laughter) Well, Kennedy Miller was not a theorist, he was a practitioner. It’s clear from the few hints we have from the press that he required complete authenticity from his actors, as he did from his scenic and costume designers. It is also clear that he required absolute discipline.The Whitbread-Kennedy Miller collaboration had begun tentatively when Kennedy Miller obtained the rights of the Limerick-originated ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’. After that Whitbread penned a succession of plays, mainly on patriotic themes, all of them presented by Kennedy Miller’s company and most of them opening at the Queen’s in Dublin before touring ‘across the water’. Ireland was not populous enough to sustain a production on tour for more than a couple of months. Furthermore, only Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick and Waterford – and Wexford and Derry at a squeeze – could provide theatres with adequate stage facilities. These Kennedy Miller productions were patently not ‘fit up’ shows, though one American scholar has recently and ignorantly described them as such – the fit-up companies played in their own booths or in parish halls and latterly in provincial cinemas. Companies like Kennedy Miller’s required an orchestra pit, a spacious stage and most of all flying facilities for the elaborate scenic effects.Some theatre historians have been confused by the arrangement between J. Kennedy Miller and J.W. Whitbread. Because most of Whitbread’s plays were seen in Dublin in his own theatre, it has been erroneously assumed that he directed them himself: but there is in fact a clear distinction between the House and the Performing Company. The Queen’s ‘received’ Kennedy Miller’s company; it just so happened that his company contained in its repertoire an increasing number of plays by Whitbread, the manager of the Queen’s. Later, certainly, there was a fusion of talents when in 1899 Kennedy Miller became Whitbread’s deputy and took up residence in Dublin, but there was no alteration in his company touring independently in Ireland and Britain for the greater part of the year.Now the notion of touring exclusively Irish plays in England, Scotland and Wales worked very well. Kennedy Miller mounted new productions of Boucicault’s ‘The Colleen Bawn’, ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘The Shaughraun’, Buckstone’s ‘The Green Bushes’, Travers’s ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, Falconer’s ‘Peep O’Day’ and Tyrone Power’s ‘Born to Good Luck’. By 1904 the list of Whitbread’s plays which Kennedy Miller produced with the same leading and supporting actors amounted to twelve: the original two, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ and ‘The Irishman’; then ‘The Nationalist’ – also known as ‘A True Son of Erin’ (you get the picture); then ‘Lord Edward’, initially presented in 1894 in anticipation of popular ferment leading up to the commemoration of the ’98 (1798) Rising. Next, Whitbread’s only historical play that does not have an Irish setting (but there is a leading comic part for a leading Irish actor, in this case Frank Breen), it’s called ‘The Victoria Cross’, a tale of derring-do in India’s sunny clime was brought out in Dublin and toured successfully; then ‘Theobald Wolfe Tone’ hard on the enormous commercial success of ‘Lord Edward’. Next came ‘Rory O’More’, a weak adaptation of Lever’s novel which did not do good business; then ‘The Insurgent Chief’, a clumsy melodrama with the Scarlet Pimpernel figure of Michael Dwyer at its centre. Very much in the same mode is another 1798 play without a famous figure in the title role and not Whitbread’s best (‘The Sham Squire’); and then ‘The Ulster Hero’ who is of course Henry Joy McCracken; and finally, in 1904, ‘Sarsfield’, which probably is Whitbread’s best. ‘Sarsfield’ opened at the Queen’s in Kennedy Miller’s production on the night that Yeats' ‘On Baile’s Strand’ and Lady Gregory’s ‘Spreading the News’ were dress-rehearsing across the river at the Abbey prior to the formal opening of that house on 27th of December 1904.It would be convenient to be able to say that the recherché literary theatre put an end to the popular Irish melodrama, but such was not the case. Melodrama – the Irish version of which J M Synge generously referred to as “the traditional drama of the Irish stage”, it continued until it was superseded throughout the Western world by the motion picture which could present its high-flown sentiments and exotic scenic effects so much more effectively.Isn’t it remarkable that not only did a commercial touring company manage to play forty eight weeks of the year in large metropolitan houses throughout the United Kingdom in Irish plays, but that it also gave permanent employment to upwards of two dozen actors and technicians. (The stagehands, flymen and orchestra were provided by the receiving house, as were the crowd extras who were recruited locally and rehearsed on the afternoon of the particular show in Aberdeen or Watford or wherever it happened to be.) In an almost entirely free-lance profession there is nothing like the confidence occasioned by a regular pay-packet to give a feeling of company solidarity; this, with a regular director in rehearsal, one might argue, would create a company style. Clearly the actors came to know one another very well indeed: how would they not, sharing cramped dressing-rooms and equally cramped digs in the lanes between Brunswick Street and the river; sitting up all night on the Princess Maud out of Kingstown and waiting for LMS train connections on Sunday afternoons at Crewe or GSR trains at Limerick Junction. Some were married couples and some entered into that state when employed with the company (laughter). Some, indeed, died while in service. Certainly one gathers from the reviews that there was an ‘ensemble’ rather than an ‘ad hoc’ feeling, more like what you’d expect to find in the D’Oyley Carte Opera Company, or in Henry Irving’s Celebrated Troupe of Shakespearian Players. After all, like the D’Oyley Carte and Irving productions, Kennedy Miller had a particular product packaged in a particular way.What was this ‘Irish melodrama’ and was it any different from any other? Well at the time I’m speaking of, ‘melodramatic’ was not used as a term of disparagement for cheap sensational effects. Later, in the theatre and cinema, it did come to be synonymous with plays – or films – of excessively dramatic content containing exaggerated episodes of horror, violence or domestic strife. I suppose the tern originally meant just what it suggests: Music Drama, with music as background to the spoken passages, or separating incidents, or emphasising mood: the violins – the brass – the timps – depending on the emotional pitch of the scene. In true melodrama everything is larger than life and in these productions assisted by the musical background.Kennedy Miller was adept at contriving, for example, the action-packed and sentimental finale, as we read from reviews of his productions, rendering them credible to the theatre audience in the heightened atmosphere created. At the close of Whitbread’s patriotic play ‘Theobald Wolfe Tone’ our hero is about to embark from Brest for Bantry Bay in charge of a vast French fleet and army. The final words in the script take place in the camp where Tone has caught up with two spies, Rafferty and Turner, who are in the pay of the English government and are intent on betraying him and his expedition. (‘Betraying’, because they are Irish.) Both spies die dishonourably in the final scene, though Tone generously pleads for their lives for “are they not my countrymen!’ Turner blames Rafferty for their capture and shoots him, while a French firing squad swiftly disposes of Turner. Tone remarks, ‘So perish all traitors!’ and that is the end of the play as we read it in manuscript – but not the end as Kennedy Miller directed it. According to the review in the Dublin ‘Evening Telegraph’ there was an additional scene on the quayside. There was no dialogue, but the Brass Band of the Dublin Workingmen’s Club, Wellington Quay Branch (by kind permission) was on the stage playing for all it was worth dressed in habiliments of the French army, its strains joined from below by the pit orchestra. Mr Alfred Adams as Wolfe Tone mounted the gangway of his vessel, amid the waving of nautical banners and the firing off of muskets, shortly to be joined by none other than the Emperor Napoleon and his charming wife Josephine. (laughter) ‘Vive la France! Vive l’Irlande! Vive La Liberte!’ cried the crowd. – So the painted ship cast off to cheers without even the slightest hint of what might be in store at Bantry. Bantry is not in the play. The ship sails, as the curtain falls. This is not the ship of history, but the ship of theatrical illusion; and that is what Kennedy Miller, with his company of Irish actors, musicians and scenic artists, evidently supplied, for none of it is in the script.What distinguished Irish melodrama from English and American was the covert – you may well think overt – nationalistic feeling. The lovely Irish heroine was something other than a young girl wronged like Maria Marten in ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ or Elizabeth in ‘East Lynne’; she, the Irish heroine was the very embodiment of Ireland, a kind of aisling gheal except that in these plays she was usually quite witty. The hero of Irish melodrama, if not taking the purple path to the gallows in order to assuage his country’s wrongs, was at least striving by direct or subversive means to achieve a measure of reform. The Irish villain was far more than a stereotypical mustachio-twirling toff intent on securing the hapless beauty for his own social or sexual gratification – he was the conniving agent of an absentee landlord or worse, an informer against those of his countrymen who were seeking justice. The servants who support their masters in Irish melodrama are, as a matter of course, aiding the national cause by clever stratagems and by means of their sharp tongues: their use of language is far more allusive and colourful than that of any rustics I’ve yet come across in English or American melodrama.The actors who appear to have been most popular with audiences happen also to have been those who stayed with the Kennedy Miller Combination the longest. There may have been a way in which theatregoers came along to see what their favourite player was appearing in tonight. I certainly remember a vestige of this in the 1950s at the Queen’s, when the Abbey Company was in residence there, people going to see what Harry Brogan was as this week, or Eileen Crowe or Ray McAnally. The actors went in for wonderful make-up disguises so they looked different even if they didn’t sound very different to what they had been portraying last week – and certainly the parts doled out to individual actors were inclined to be stereotyped – there was the Dashing Hero, the Pretty Heroine, the Comic Servant, the Infamous Villain etc. etc. – but often audiences were pleasantly surprised when one of their favourites came up with something quite unexpected and accounted for him- or her-self very well in a different kind of part.We’ll now have a sos beag for a short slide show. Most of these pictures appear in my book ‘Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment’ which I learn was delivered from the printers today to my highly regarded publishers, the Carysfort Press, and, I’m told, will be available in the foyer in just a few minutes! (laughter) I’ve seen it but I haven’t opened it. Very few images of the actors in Kennedy Miller’s company have survived and most of those that have are of poor quality. Generally only the very famous and well-to-do – like Irving and Coquelin – had production pictures taken of themselves, and there was no theatrical repository in this country to house such material. Fortunately we now have the Dublin City Library and Archive, gradually building up an impressive collection of theatrical memorabilia. All the following pictures (except the photograph of Kennedy Miller which is from the ‘Irish Playgoer’ magazine) are from the archive here in Pearse Street, or Brunswick Street if you like:The first is not a photograph but a caricature of Frank Breen drawn by his colleague Ion Ireland. He’s seen here as Feeney in Boucicault’s melodrama ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’, a revival of which is now, as it happens, running at the Abbey Theatre: (The strange noise you may have heard was Yeats and Lady Gregory turning in their graves (laughter) at this class of buffoonery taking place in their theatre.). Frank Breen was from Co Down. He played in many stock companies all over the British Isles before joining Kennedy Miller where he was in revivals of Tyrone Power’s comedy ‘Born to Good Luck’, and he created the parts of Flynn in ‘The Nationalist’, Rafferty the spy in Wolfe Tone, Brander Byrne in ‘The Insurgent Chief ‘and Niblock in ‘The Ulster Hero’. The Evening Herald said Breen was “the most interesting villain on the Irish stage”. Another reporter drew attention to the fact that Breen seemed to enjoy the hisses and catcalls as “tributes to his talent.” Comments of this kind emphasise how much these melodramas were considered to be entertainments: the villain’s presence was relished. This is something recent scholars – particularly those from the New World – fail to understand.Here is Kennedy Miller’s leading comic actor, James O’Brien. Were it not for J M Synge’s visit to the Queen’s in 1904 O’Brien’s name would be unknown to students of theatre history. Synge wrote in a magazine article that “Some recent performances of The ‘Shaughraun’ … as they were played the other day by Mr Kennedy Miller’s company, had a breath of native humour that is now rare on the stage. Mr James O’Brien especially…put a genuine richness into his voice… and in listening to him one felt how much the modern stage has lost in substituting impersonal wit for personal humour…” Synge used the term ‘comedians’ in the French manner, meaning ‘actors’ – ‘les comédiens’. One senses that Synge would have liked O’Brien to be cast in The Well of the Saints over the river but of course that was an impossibility. James O’Brien created Danny O’Hea in ‘A True Son of Erin’, Hogan the Raparee in ‘Sarsfield’, Patsy Dooligan in ‘The Old Land’, Thady McGrath in ‘Lord Edward’ and many others.This is Ion Ireland. He was known among his colleagues as Harry so Ion must have been a stage name. For Kennedy Miller he created the parts of Squire O’Hanlon in ‘The Old Land’, Captain McMurrough in ‘The Sham Squire’, Captain Ellis in ‘The Ulster Hero’, General Talmash in ‘Sarsfield’ and he also appeared in strong supporting roles in revivals of other plays, generally as officers or members of the landed gentry. After Kennedy Miller’s death in 1906 he and James O’Brien formed their own company called the O’Brien-Ireland Combination. Among the very young members of their company were Anew McMaster and Cyril Cusack.H Somerfield Arnold was an English actor recruited by Kennedy Miller to play smart young gentlemen and romantic heroes. Here he is as Phil Hennessy, in ‘The Nationalist’, the landlord who sympathises with the leaders of agrarian reform. He played the lead in ‘The Victoria Cross’. He was Hardress Cregan in ‘The Colleen Bawn’, Beamish MacCoul in ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Captain Molyneux as you might expect in ‘The Shaughraun’. He died shortly after this picture was taken. The obituarist in the ‘Playgoer’ stated that his “greatest triumph was as Lord Edward Fitzgerald”, and that he “had been in constant ill health which he had managed to overcome several times, always returning to the stage. Thus ended the life of one of the most promising actors we have ever met.” Terribly sad.Next we have Annie Hylton. She tended to be cast in the straight roles. She created Eileen O’Moore in ‘A True Son of Erin’, Kate Kearney in ‘The Irishman’, Mary Doyle in ‘The Insurgent Chief’ and Lady Rose de Burgh in ‘Sarsfield’. Frank Fay, when theatre critic for the ‘United Irishman’, said that he preferred her Anne Chute in ‘The Colleen Bawn’ to her Fanny Power in ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’, but he didn’t bother to tell us why which was rather remiss of him I think.Here is Monica Kelly. She usually excelled as spirited peasants and outspoken ladies’ maids. She created Kitty Malone in ‘Lord Edward’, Peggy Ryan in ‘Wolfe Tone’ and Eilly Blake in ‘Sarsfield’ – and several other vivacious servant parts so similar one wonders how she managed not to confuse the lines. According to an anonymous columnist in the ‘Playgoer’ “her style is very natural, and she can be pathetic or humorous as occasion demands; while her love-making is always racially droll and mirth provoking” (laughter) – whatever racially droll love-making may be. Monica Kelly was Moya in ‘The Shaughraun’ of which Synge wrote so appreciatively; as you might expect, she also played Eily O’Connor in ‘The Colleen Bawn’ and the title role in ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’.Mrs Glenville was the third in the trio of Irish actors, tantalisingly briefly noticed by Synge, in ‘The Shaughraun’ in which she played the mammy, Mrs O’Kelly. She seems to have been with Kennedy Miller for his entire period as a director of Irish plays on tour, that is, 17 years. She created The Widow Moloney in ‘The Old Land’ which Joseph Holloway described as “a real gem of a performance… she is a genuine Irish humourist and her sayings and doings seem to be nature itself…” She had already played the very similar part of Molshee in Kennedy Miller’s revival of Edmund Falconer’s extravaganza ‘Peep o’ Day’ which had been a continuing hit in London since it first came out in 1863 at Covent Garden.I’ve included this photograph even though it’s unnamed because it’s such a striking image. My guess is that it is either Maude Tremayne as Lady Rose in ‘Sarsfield’, or, Clara Russell as Kate Maynard in ‘The Victoria Cross’. I don’t know which lady I’m insulting. The carved chair in the photographic studio keeps reappearing.This is the only picture I was able to find of the man himself – Kennedy Miller. It’s from the ‘Irish Playgoer’ magazine. You’ll agree that his is an unprepossessing face – someone you might pass in the street without remarking. (The same might be said of many directors.) (laughter) You would hardly imagine that this was the man who selected and directed the large and ‘capable company of Irish players’ and not only that but also organised the complex touring schedule, making sure that this year’s visits to thirty cities did not repeat plays seen there last year or even the year before, and seeing that the actors were well rehearsed before their opening in unfamiliar houses.Here is a Queen’s Theatre poster for a revival of ‘Theobald Wolfe Tone’ in 1901, with Frank Breen billed as the villainous Rafferty, a spy, and Tyrone Power as Tone’s garrulous manservant, McMahon. It’s significant that billing is given to the comic characters and not to the actor who played Wolfe Tone (laughter). Incidentally, the Tyrone Power here was the nephew of the actor-playwright of the same name who was so popular on the London and New York stage. Confusingly, a third Tyrone Power was a Hollywood actor in the mid-20th century. The director Tyrone Guthrie was a great grandson of the first Tyrone Power.This is an advertisement for a performance of ‘Lord Edward’ by ‘Kennedy Miller’s Powerful Irish Combination’ at the Metropole Theatre, Glasgow, in 1898, “Depicting the Vivid Scenes, Episodes and Vicissitudes in the Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald” – an entirely adequate description. The orchestra, as well as supplying the incidental music to the play, entertained the audience in the intervals with selections from Donizetti, Suppé and ‘E. Strauss’. E Strauss -who was E Strauss I wonder? Do you think it’s a misprint for J? This was a week-long run – but in some cities of smaller population the programme was changed nightly, so that you might see ‘Lord Edward’ on the Monday, Saturday and Saturday matinee, ‘The Green Bushes’ on Tuesday and Thursday, ‘The Colleen Bawn’ on Wednesday and Friday. You can imagine the amount of effort needed to alternate the stage settings, and also to travel them.Leading players were allowed an annual benefit performance in a favourite role, from which the profits went entirely to that performer. Kennedy Miller was not an actor, so he did not appear in his benefit which was made up of a play supplied by members of its own company, and as his name became more and more celebrated in the profession, actors, singers and musicians from other companies in town that week gave of their services in a kind of enormous variety show. In this one, on February 23rd 1903, his own players gave the main item, Tyrone Power I’s Sheridanesque ‘Born to Good Luck’. It was a very long evening, as the ‘Telegraph’ reported next day, with sixteen supporting items. The ones I would like to have seen were ‘Curtis, Leo and Noblesse, mystifying illusionists’ and the ‘Gibson-Henry Celebrated Comedy Cyclists’ (laughter) – not to speak of ‘The Misses Kinsella and Gorm, Irish Jig Dancers’, no doubt precursors of Miss Lily Comerford. The Edison pictures is an announcement for next week.Of the contributions of so many participating artistes, the ‘Evening Telegraph’ continued: “It shows the high appreciation in which Mr Kennedy Miller is held in the profession… Mr Miller has been willing, at all times, to give the benefit of his time, labour and experience gratuitously to those anxious to serve laudable, charitable and popular objects in the city…”To revert for a moment to J M Synge, I think it’s significant that he picked out for praise three comic actors from the company when writing of Kennedy Miller’s ‘Shaughraun’: Judging from other reviews, the preponderance of actors in the company who possessed a highly developed sense of comedy is very striking. I think it’s not at all farfetched to suggest than in melodrama, where the actors constantly addressed the audience, even, where necessary, surreptitiously gesturing their feelings about other characters, or about the situation itself, a sense of comic irony about the very nature of the play is manifest; and an actor’s ability to convey their subliminal thoughts without upsetting the balance of credibility, would have been a godsend. Nor, I think is it farfetched to add, incidentally, that all the truly great Irish actors of the 20th century possessed this inner sense of the comic: Barry Fitzgerald, FJ McCormick, Maureen Delaney, Maire Kean, Cyril Cusack, Donal McCann; yes, they certainly excelled in many grave and unsmiling roles, but an underlying sense of fun – wicked fun, at times – often lent a touching dimension.Frank Fay wrote in the ‘United Irishman’ that Mr Kennedy Miller’s company is “too good for Mr Whitbread’s pieces.” This all-too-brief evaluation is fascinating. From it we gather that Miller was responsible for achieving exactly what one of the chief jobs of a director is: making the audience suppose that the weak play they are observing is something else – through judicious casting, attractive design, striking choreography, variation of mood and pace, and sheer comprehension of stagecraft; but when the director has the advantage of a first class script, as in the Irish melodramas of Boucicault, or in Power’s farce ‘Born to Good Luck’, clearly Kennedy Miller’s work moved into a higher dimension.In 1905 Kennedy Miller was stated to be ‘in failing health’ and so he took a three-month sea voyage on his doctor’s recommendation. He died at his home, 1 Belvedere Avenue, North Circular Road, on March 4th, 1906, only a week after his annual benefit presentation. He was buried in St George’s cemetery, Drumcondra, when the chief mourners were Mrs Kennedy Miller, his daughter Miss Kathleen Miller and his friend the actor Mr Dane Clarke. There were representatives from the Queen’s and Gaiety Theatres. The impression is of a small attendance and one wonders why. Certainly he was a man who did not court publicity for himself; this can be seen from the posters – with the exception of those advertising his annual benefit – where the actors and author are generally given much greater prominence.Certainly J – or Andrew – Kennedy Miller soon joined the legions of the forgotten. This happens to theatre directors, unless they’ve also worked in film or have published influential books. Who, among today’s jeunesse dorée of the theatre, knows anything of Hilton Edwards? And were it not for the great theatre in Minneapolis that is named after him, Tyrone Guthrie would hardly be remembered outside the profession. Once the curtain falls, what has been created on the stage vanishes forever. That is why it is a real honour for me to be given this opportunity by the Dublin City Library & Archive, in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, of recalling to mind the forgotten director and some of the forgotten actors who entertained my grandparents – and your great-grandparents (laughter). My Dublin grandmother used to refer to the Queen’s Theatre as the place where you saw ‘the real Irish plays’. Thank you for your attention to the story of ‘Mr J Kennedy Miller and his very capable company of Irish players’.Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin's talk Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin talks about his career publishing high quality translated books for the Irish market, while working in co-operation with international publishers.  Recorded at the Central Library on 24 November 2010, as part of the series series 'In Other Words . . .Irish Literature in Translation in Your Library'.Go raibh míle maith agaibh.  Tá sé go hálainn stóir mór a fheiceáil. This is what I consider a big crowd so I’m delighted that so many of you came out when the country is falling on our heads to talk about publishing.  I know that this series of talks has been about Irish writers kind of reaching out into the world and in a way I kind of think that’s what we do as well but in a different way.  But just to explain where Futa Fata came from as Sinead mentioned I was involved in television for many years and before that I worked as a primary school teacher.  I worked in a Gaelscoil in an Irish medium school and my first book was published during those years which was a re-telling of a story about Cuchulain called 'Flea Bhricriu' and then I moved gradually into the world of television.  I began on a part-time basis presenting a children’s preschool television called Dilín ó Deamhas and then I went and worked in RTE for 13 years full-time as a presenter on a programme it was kind of a catch-all magazine programme called Cúrsaí and I was always dealing with kind of the cultural end of it and then it became its own sort of Arts show.  It was in the Irish language but kind of de facto bilingual Arts show called Cúrsaí Ealaíona and that ran for 5 years and that was a great education really, it was a great chance to kind of meet all sorts of interesting artists and so forth. But parallel to this I also had this kind of moonlighting career as a Gaelic rock star. I was writing songs in the Irish language and I was recording music and then when my children started to arrive I started writing songs for them and I had kind of come up with a bunch of songs in a kind of an organic way making them up with my kids as we went around in the car and that sort of thing and I decided to record them.  So I did the first children’s record in 1997 and that’s where the Futa Fata label as it were were born.Then in the year 2000 I left RTE and I went to live in Spiddal in County Galway, Connemara, where I still live, and I began to kind of freelance and I began to kind of explore various ways to keep my children fed and I was doing some television work which I still do but I began developing more the children’s music and one of the most successful ones that I’ve done is this collection of traditional rhymes from Connemara called Gugalaí Gug and it’s a CD and book illustrated by Cartoon Saloon who were nominated for an Oscar this year for their film The Secret of Kells and the book has been also successful, it’s sold 8,000 copies which isn’t Harry Potter but in an Irish language context is Harry Potter. (Laughter) It’s a significant success. So I realised then that I had access to funding to do this kind of work and it was the work I loved and it was kind of work which was related to all sorts of things I’d done in my life up to that – teaching and working kind of with the visual and working with children and all that sort of stuff. So I decided that this was something I could pursue. I could probably dip in and out of the television world now and again but this is something I could pursue and that it would be kind of a regular income. So I realised very quickly that I couldn’t really live on making one kind of quite complex production like Gugalaí Gug which would almost be a year’s work so I would have to find titles to kind of build a catalogue fairly quickly. So I began going to the Bologna Book Fair in 2006 and I began meeting publishers from other parts of the world and the first kind of fruits of that kind of adventure was two books we did that were originally published by a small publisher in Los Angeles called Kidwick Books and this was called in English ‘Frog Thing’ and we called it in Irish Frog sa Spéir and you would kind of know to read the book that it’s about a Californian frog because it’s the story of Frank Frog and when he was little his parents said Frank when you grow up you’ll be able to do anything.  So then Frank kind of became older and he decided what he really wanted to do in the world was to fly and he went back to his parents and they said well, you know, when we said, you know, you could do anything we really meant you could do anything as good as any other frog but that wasn’t good enough for Frank.So it was kind of a halfway house for me I suppose in terms of the way I’d worked up until that point was that there was a CD with the book and the thing that I liked about it was that there were children actually on the CD there were various children, different voices playing the roles of the characters in the book and I thought that it was a lovely natural kind of production and I felt that I could kind of re-create that in Irish because I already worked with a whole cast of young talent in Connemara and I could find children who could do that sort of acting and indeed I did. So we published Frog sa Spéir and we published another title from Kidwick at the same time called Eileanór an Eilifint Éagsúil, and they went down very well.So I began kind of looking further afield to find other books and I found other books.  This one, for example, was on the short list for the book of the year this year, this was originally published in French in Belgian ‘Le Loup Magicien’ and in Irish it’s ‘Mac Tíre na Draíochta’, the Magic Wolf and it’s the story of a wolf who in Irish his name is Maidhceo which is a nice Connemara name and he kind of discovers his kind of more vulnerable side.  He comes home from a walk in the woods one day and he smells a strange smell and this isn’t the first time it’s happened so he decides the next day that he will go and he will hide and see what intruder is coming into his house and when he does that he finds that the interloper is a rabbit and a very tasty looking rabbit at that and he decides to jump out and eat the rabbit for dinner.  But the rabbit persuades him not to that and persuades him to check out the magic tricks he can do and he does card tricks and so forth and they become very friendly and he really shortens the winter for Maidhceo because he’s able to do all sorts of very entertaining tricks and then when the spring comes his new friend the rabbit Coinín becomes quite lonely because as you know rabbits are a very amorous species and he feels that it’s time to settle down and get married which indeed he does with quick results (laughter), they have loads of babies, and Maidhceo becomes very involved in this new family because he’s feeding them and he tells them stories and they change his life and he becomes, you know, ...Person1 That’s very Californian too... (laughter) it is Californian in a certain way but then the other wolves find out and they’re not too impressed with Maidhceo’s new direction and so they approach him and Maidhceo of course is devastated that all the wolves will find out what’s going on.  So the ending is really good.  (laughter)  So that’s Mac Tíre na Draíochta. We’ve also worked with the same company Mijade in France, I think this was actually the first one we did with them is ‘Nina et le Chat’ which became ‘Neilín agus an Cat’.  The lovely thing about doing these versions is that you can make up whatever, any name you want, in the translation.  That’s a chance to make a kind of an important point about story book or picture book translation is that it’s generally and I think this happens in every language really is that it’s generally kind of an adaptation that you’re trying to achieve because just the way the whole thing works is that when you go to an international fair like Bologna or Frankfurt you will be presented with an English version of the book because English is the international language of trade. It doesn’t matter where the publisher comes from if the publisher is from Germany and they’re discussing a book with a publisher from Korea they will be showing them an English version of them book and the meeting will be in English and that’s generally how it works.  So then you’re really free to kind of adapt the book to your own kind of country and your own culture so it’s quite a creative business actually because when I tell translators who work with kind of adult literature they’re absolutely horrified that, you know, we’ve had such freedom but that generally is the way it is with picture books.But anyway this one I think is one of my favourite books of all the ones we’ve translated in from other languages. This is the story of an elephant family and they have a little baby Nellie who is the absolute apple of their eye and she is so cute and she can do so many really clever things but then the day comes when the maternity leave is over and mother elephant and father elephant have to go back and work in the woods and there is nobody to look after Nellie and they’re obviously very worried. But a kindly cat comes along and says well I’ll do the job, I’ll look after Nellie, so they decide to give it a go. So the cat actually turns out to be a great success and Nellie completely bonds with this new childminder and is very happy and she also learns lots of interesting new skills from the cat.  She learns how to creep up on birds and she learns how to do all sorts of stuff. So when the parents come home they think things are actually going really well but then at the weekend they are going to a birthday party and mom is brushing Nellie’s hair there, you see, but when they get to the party Nellie completely lets them down by not taking part in the fun and by doing all sorts of strange things that elephants shouldn’t do like washing herself with her tongue (laughter) and climbing up in a tree and doing all sorts of stuff and the elephant community as you would expect are absolutely horrified that this has happened and mom and dad decide that the cat has to go and Nellie is absolutely bereft and mom says I’m going to take a day off and I’m going to re-bond with you and she brings her down to the waterhole but Nellie won’t go in because she’s afraid of the water (laughter). And then she won’t walk in line as she used to do and then she won’t eat with her trunk like she used to do and the parents are reaching for Dr. Spock at this stage they are so horrified and they don’t know how they’re going to get this poor child back on track.  But then that night when they’re all asleep they hear a strange noise and mom elephant is terrified and dad elephant is terrified by this little visitor, it was a mouse, but Nellie isn’t terrified, she’s well on top of the situation (laughter).  She takes the mouse outside and then she comes in and she gives those irresistible elephant eyes and says the cat taught me how to do that, can he stay? And of course he can and they make friends. So I finished that story myself.Anyway that’s Neilín agus an Cat, and the lovely thing about this work is that well I believe that, you know, in time to come I think there will be children who will look back on those books and will have a real kind of a, you know, special memory of those books and I think that’s really important work and I know I have four children myself and sadly they’re all beyond the picture book stage at this point but the other thing I really feel strongly about picture books is that there’s much more to a picture book than reading the book it’s actually this wonderful opportunity to bond with your child over a book and it’s a whole kind of a ritual at bed time.  I mean my eldest son Marcus is now 19, I remember there was one book that he was kind of fixated on for about 2 months, every night for about 2 months we had to read this book and he still remembers it (laughter).  This is another one we did with Mijade ‘Béiríní ag Troid’ about Anna.  For her birthday she gets a present of two little bears, two little teddies, but then they begin to fight over her so she has to figure that out.  And we also did one with another Belgian publisher but from the Dutch speaking area of Belgium and that was the Dutch version ‘Mauw En Mol Mol Is Jarig’ and it’s about this little character called Méig agus Cóilín, an lá breithe who was trying to figure out what sort of a birthday present she would get for her best friend.The other thing we do in terms of translation in words is ... yeah, before I move on to that I’ll just show you these new ones and we have noticed as well that even though we were doing quite well in terms of picture books which would be generally 3 to 6 that there was a bit of a kind of a lull in terms of the amount of just the range of material that was available for children from 0 to 3 so this year we have kind of tackled that and we found a series in Quebec in French Canada which was called in French Caillou and in Irish Cathal.  And these are different because generally picture books and it’s the reason why a picture book would work internationally is that they’re generally about animal characters and they are written deliberately in that way.  The reason for that is that when you write something about animal characters you are immediately taking out all the kind of cultural references or references to a race or all those kind of things that would make a book possibly less attractive to be bought, for example, by a Chinese publisher or by a South African publisher.  But these are slightly different because they are definitely about human characters and they are just kind of very well done because even though they look very simple it’s very difficult to write a book that is as well targeted as these books.  This is one about Cathal, and this is little Cathal here, and it’s about his friend Liam coming to play with him and it’s about Cathal struggling with dealing with Liam playing with his toys and just kind of having to get it around his head that, you know, he has to share and I think it’s done very well.  I think the artwork is simple but I think it’s really stylishly done. This book has been hugely successful, this series.  There are ... I don’t know how many titles there are in this series but there are a lot and it is has sold in 40 countries worldwide so it’s a big success for a publisher from a relatively small base, I mean there are about 5 million French speakers in French Canada so it has a worldwide reach and I think it’s going to work very well for us.  We’re just launching them now this winter in Ireland and they have this sort of thing as well which is a kind of like a dictionary picture book, you know, first words book and also a nice features is that as well as seeing the pictures individually you can kind of relate them to the picture and so there’s a slight interaction.There have been books that I initially thought would work or initially was kind of attracted to but when I looked at them in more detail I felt that they wouldn’t work in an Irish market and they are ... well that happens for a number of reasons but this book when I saw the cover and I’ll you’ll agree that that is quite a stunning cover and I saw that in Bologna and it’s a Korean book and I was just so curious like who is this girl, what has happened to her because it’s just I think that cover is just so full of character. So I was sent a copy of the book and I was sent a translation and when I went through the translation I felt that it was probably a book that would work very well in its kind of traditional context in the same way as the Children Of Lir, for example, is part of our culture. It’s a very dark story when you look at it objectively and there is very little kind of redemption or kind of hope in it but it’s kind of part of our culture and it’s a story that is kind of passed on but no more than this book I’m not sure that the Children Of Lir would travel very well when it’s taken out of it’s kind of original context. But anyway when I went through it I just found that it was a very dark story about this princess who was ... it’s a bit like Moses she was thrown out into the weeds and she had to kind of fend for herself and like a lot of kind of traditional stories that have evolved over hundreds of years it’s quite a kind of a rambling affair.  So I decided not to go for it.I found this book as well, this is by an Italian publisher, and again the artwork I think the artwork is really important in terms of when you’re looking for a book because it’s the first thing that would draw your attention and it’s quite a kind of a poetic ... when you look at it it’s quite beautiful, aesthetically it’s a beautiful book, it’s quite a poetic kind of a story but I think it would be difficult, I think it would be hard to sell in Ireland to be honest and it’s pitched at a kind of an older age group and we don’t have much of that here in Ireland.  I mean that’s not a good reason not to do it but it has to work commercially at some sort of level and I think it would be difficult.  It’s kind of a love story and I think it would be difficult to sell it even though I would love maybe to work with the illustrator at some point but that’s a book I didn’t go ahead with.The other thing we do which again is sort of just to kind of a reach a critical mass because I mean you see I just gave out those catalogues you go through the catalogue and you see we have built up since 2006 quite a few titles and that has been done mainly if not nearly all through translation but as well as doing this kind of fiction stuff which is supported by Clár na Gaeilge / Foras na Gaeilge we also do stuff which is a bit more educational but at the same time we’re trying to find stuff which we feel would work for families and would work in book shops and would work for the general community as well as being ... we don’t want to go kind of too schooly as it were.This book was very successful for us this year and again it was shortlisted for the book of the year and it sold very well and this is a book about a garden and it’s about things that children can do in the garden and it’s kind of like a ... it’s nearly like a cookbook in a way, it kind of presents you with all sorts of projects, gives you information about food chain and about the interconnectedness of all living things in a very practical way and then it suggests things that you can do.  To make a little pond, for example, and all the various steps you can take.  It talks about the seasons in the garden and how to plant a tree, how to plant a natural hedge, how to make compost and so forth, and sunflowers.  So it’s a very practical interactive book and myself and my youngest daughter Róise have done a few of these projects in the garden and again it’s just a lovely thing to do and I know they’re using it at school because she had me pestered to finish a carton of milk because she had to bring it into school to make teach ui féileacáin. So it’s a very useful book but it has sold very well for us. So there’s that sort of thing.These are kind of for younger children and they are about the circle of life and about various animals grow and the photography is beautiful, it’s beautifully illustrated, and it’s a lovely insight into the cycle of life and so forth.  So we have the panda and we have one about apes, ápaí, féileacán, butterfly and frog, frog.  And we have four more of those in the pipeline for next year.  This is a book ... I mean this is kind of in a way it’s very ... I really like this book because I think in a way that there is this kind of image of the Irish language that it’s very insular and very inward looking and very kind of nationalist Catholic, you know, play Irish music, play Hurley, that sort of thing and there’s actually a lot more than that and this book is about religions of the world.  It’s about introducing children to the religions of the world and through the eyes of children and this is like the last few books I’ve shown you was originated by Dorling Kindersley which is one of the biggest publishers in the world of non-fiction books and it goes through various religions and faiths from traditional beliefs and gives you maps of where the religions are, how many of them are there, for example.  I mean I was surprised to find out that whereas there are 1 billion Catholics in the world, not Christians Catholics, that there are only 5 million Jews.  I was quite surprised to find that out.  There’s Hinduism and again it introduces the material from the point of view of a child who explains, you know, what’s going on in her life and so forth.  I remember I showed it to my son who is 11, well he’s just 12 now, and it’s an area he’s very interested in himself but I remember he said “tá rudaí ag eiteann liom chomh haisteach agus tá meas acu faoi na rudaí ... a bhfuil tá sé sin chomh haisteach céanna” which means the things they believe in are so strange and if they heard about the things that we believe in they’d think they were strange which I thought was a great comment.  It’s about Buddhism and so forth.  It was very interesting to work on this book because in a way we were kind of really at the coalface of kind of stretching the kind of borders, the outer borders of the Irish language, we had to work with the Coiste Tearmaíochta the Terminology Committee of the Department of Education because there were certain words that there was no Irish for but there’s a lovely glossary at the end so you can ... Martin Luther did the same thing with the German language didn’t he?  He invented words.  So there’s Sikhs and so forth and I translated this book myself and I just learned so much from it, I really did.  So that’s that one.We did another big one this year as well, it’s a history of visual arts from the cave paintings of Lascaux in France, that’s where it starts right through the whole story of art right through to Damien Hirst and it’s actually a very inclusive book because it includes things like aboriginal art and all sorts so it’s not just Western art it’s quite wide and again we have a nice big glossary.  So those are the more ... they are kind of slightly more even kind of slightly  more educational books.  This book in English when it was originated by Dorling Kindersley was called the Children’s Book of Art but I took out the world children in the title because I really felt that there was loads of adult Irish speakers would be interested in this book.  That it did definitely have a crossover theme and that’s the kind of feedback we’re getting, people are very taken with it. So the final thing I want to say is what Sinead mentioned at the beginning of the talk is that what we are trying to do now with Futa Fata is to kind of go to the next level and that is to see if we could begin to originate books and we’re starting in the area of picture book and if we could originate books here in Ireland, work with Irish writers, Irish language writers and Irish illustrators, and originate those and develop them here in Ireland and then bring them to the international market.  And that’s what we’ve done this year for the first time and we have more in the pipeline for next year and we did this in an unusual way because I felt that getting the story right is key in a picture book.  If the story is strong and if it works well, the story is kind of like a little engine, if it works well and everything is kind of, all the pistons are kind of working in the right order it’s going to really work as a piece.  So what I did was I had worked in the past in children’s animation and television animation and I had worked quite extensively with a woman called Barbara Slade who is from Los Angeles and writes mainly in animation and she’s written like feature films based on the Winnie the Pooh character for Disney, for example, she created the television series of books called Angelina Ballerina so she’s very experienced and she does a lot of teaching and I met her actually through a course that was run about writing for animation and we’ve become very friendly.  So I got her to come and we advertised that we were going to have this workshop and we were looking for six writers and well I’d say nearly twenty people applied and they had to apply with story ideas and we went through the story ideas and we picked six people and from those six people then we developed the stories in the workshop, jointly – myself and Barbara, it was a bilingual workshop which we did in Connemara.  So between the two of us we developed the stories and then we published three this year and we brought them to Frankfurt and so far I have to say the results are very encouraging.  We will soon be signing a contract with a publisher in Beijing to publish this book which is a new original Futa Fata picture book in Chinese it is written by Bridget Bhreathnach from Rosmuc and maybe the first time a Rosmuc writer has been published in Chinese.  We’re proud of that.  And also this morning I got a very strong email of interest in another one of our titles from a publisher who publishes in Afrikaans in South Africa and we are also going to be publishing three of the new feature books that we’ve done this year in Scots Gaelic so that’s an interesting geographical spread if nothing else.  (Laughter)  So we hope to work and we hope to kind of build on that for the next few years I think that we’re going to be originating our own picture books.  We’ve identified some fiction for older children that we will be translating and we have identified a series originally published in French by Bayard who are a very well respected publishing house in France and we are going to kind of work on that basis and I think it’s a very good way for us to work because when you translate a book and when you put it out there and when you kind of get feedback from it you really get a really good picture of the genre and of the age group and so forth, you get a really kind of good feel for it and we’re going to do that with various different age groups in different segments.  We’ll publish, we’ll translate, we’ll publish the translations and we’ll work with children because the important thing about this and one of the nicest parts of it is actually getting out there and reading the stories for children and working with children in that kind of group basis and just getting their reaction.  So it started with music and sort of that’s the journey it has taken since 2006 and that’s all I have to say.So we want to thank you very much Tadhg.  (Clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Hugo Hamilton's talk and readingWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, author Hugo Hamilton talks about his 'Strange life in translation' and reads from his novels ‘The Speckled People’, ‘The Sailor in the Wardrobe’ and 'Hand in the Fire', before answering questions from the audience.  Recorded at the Central Library on 17 November 2010, as part of the series 'In Other Words . . .Irish Literature in Translation in Your Library'.I think Sinead said it perfectly; I live in translation because as a child it was very complicated, you know, because we spoke German at home and Irish and then we migrated out onto the street but it was a different language altogether and then back again, you know, and we were not ... my father refused to allow any of this language from outside, the English language was barred from our house, so effectively we couldn’t go back and bring that country back in with us into the house so that caused a lot of trouble for us as children. And you know, what age am I now, I mean I’m an adult finally and I still have this feeling that, you know, there are certain words that I just think of in a particular language.  For instance, lobster, I always think of it in Irish, gliomach and then it goes through the other languages and gets translated back into whatever language I’m speaking so there’s a bit of a time delay constantly and you probably don’t notice it now but in my twenties there was a very, very obvious kind of delay and sort of a hesitancy with language and I describe myself as, you know, in this constant state of atranslation where I always have to look over my shoulder to see what country I was in before I could speak.  You know you can imagine like we were not allowed English in the house and often you’d have uncles coming up from Cork, West Cork, and I describe it in my book as, you know, suddenly like the house was full of smoke and English and there was nothing my father could do about it because these were his people. But then like they’d ask me a question and I’d have to look at my father and look at my mother and then see like, you know, which language do I even speak now so there was almost this kind of a prevarication, you know, in anybody who has three languages there’s some kind of hesitancy and prevarication in that before like you finally get to talk.And then you could notice that with my family even still, you see us kind of, you know, starting a sentence in one language, you know it sounds right, but then it ends with sort of a German syntax, you know.  So there is a sort of constant translation going on and, you know, it’s funny my brother Franz, you know, he should be here tonight, he’s a living example of somebody who has kind of learned the language second hand, it’s a foreign language, English is a foreign language to all of us in our family.  And so my brother ... like I concentrated when I was growing up I kind of rehearsed English to myself and, you know, like speak to the wardrobe in English, you know, I’ll batter you and all those kind of terms that I heard on the street, I would rehearse them to myself because I wanted to get the colloquial version of English and I wanted to fit in with the people on the street.  But my brother has a different version, his English is very formal and when he’s talking to me in English he will say things like yes I could commence that next week, you know, it’s terribly formal language like that he has, it’s almost like sort of letters from the bank or you know business letters and so his language was always kind of, you know, he wanted it to be perfect in that way like with sort of very formal expressions, you know.  With regard to, like he’s always saying that, you know, with regard to next Sunday (laughter), you know, yeah and, you know, complete – all those kind of words, you know, words that I don’t use, I just say start and finish but he uses commence and complete, you know.  It’s bizarre, you know, but he sounds great.  But it’s a demonstration that like we are actually speaking a foreign language, you know, it’s still ... okay, we’ve been speaking it for 50 years but, you know, we’re still catching up, you know.I wanted to read you a small passage that illustrates that in The Speckled People.  It’s a description of a coal delivery.  We were actually quite a privileged household.  I mean my father was an engineer and we had central heating but it was never on, you know, (laughter) like there was just like a, you know, he would put on three or four, he would count the coals going in, you know, and that would heat one radiator.  Alright.A truck stopped on the street outside and because they couldn’t go round the back the men with black faces and black hands had to come through the house.  My mother was afraid the wind would slam the doors shut in anger so we had to hold them open, Franz at the front door, me at the in between door and Maria at the back door.  She told us to count the bags as they came in.  In Ireland people count in their heads she said but in Germany people count out loud.  So out loud we counted, eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf – all the way up to fifteen.  The men walked in stooped over with heavy sacks leaving long black marks with the sacks scraped along the wall on their way through and where they went down the three steps towards the kitchen and out the back door they put a black hand up every time to hold onto the door frame.  One of the men winked and made me forget what number I was on.  (laughter) I didn’t know if I should be counting the sack that was coming or the sack gone by but then I heard Franz counting the next number at the front door and I was able to catch up.  When the shed outside was full and the coal was spilling out across path the men got back onto the truck.  One of them counted the empty sacks as if he couldn’t trust us to count right.  He came back inside with a pink piece of paper covered with black fingerprints and asked my mother to sign her name, that was to make sure she agreed there was no mistake in the counting and that nobody ran away with one of the empty sacks.  But there could be no mistake because we counted out loud in German and the man counted the empty sacks in English and it was the same number no matter what language.It’s a funny thing as well like my mother spoke in this German accent always, you know, and I think she misunderstood Ireland, you know.  She learned English and her English was fairly good but she didn’t understand nuances and the way Irish people spoke, you know.  I think, you know, it’s not just about language but it’s a matter of expression and it’s what people say and what people leave out, it’s the silences between their sentences that matter as well so even if you understand a language it’s still ... you have to translate an entire culture and I think my mother had difficulty doing that.  I think the best way of describing it is the fact that, you know, she would always tells us, you know, to be honest, if somebody ask you a question you just answer it you don’t invent something you just tell them the way things are and like I kind of realised after a while that’s completely the wrong thing to do in Ireland (laughter) because the Irish have a completely different sense of truth and all those kind of little spaces in between the truth and my mother never could get to grips with that, she was constantly, you know like she just couldn’t get to grips with it, you know, and just the kind of whole dance thing, the detours around language here in Ireland and I actually happen to think that that’s the great source of the power of invention in language, I mean it’s what brought Joyce and Synge and Beckett and all those writers, I mean that’s the source of the great lrish literary tradition.  Even today I think, you know, that whole sort of ambiguity of language is what sort of marks Irish literature out.But my mother had sort of difficulty translating those kind of ambiguities into concrete German understanding, you know, and I think I have the same problem in German even though I kind of grew up speaking German in the house I still have ... but I never went to school in Germany, I mean I’ve read a lot, but I’m still missing a sort of a freedom in the language that, you know, the people who went to school in Germany would have, you know.  And it’s also because of the prohibition of the English language in our house I speak a very, very clean pure German and it doesn’t have any words in it like super or in Germany a mobile phone is called a handy, you know, there’s a million words, English words, come into the German language but I never used them because just I think, oh yeah, my father is still behind me, you know, I’ll get a clout on the back of my head even though my father is long gone now, you know, you have that sort of instinctive hesitancy.  So people who listen to me speaking in German, you know, and I do tours in Germany and I talk about my books in German and then think I come from another century sort of pre-war (laughter), just hasn’t got old yet, you know.And I mean I remember when we were children we would always be asked on the street by old woman God you have three languages that’s brilliant isn’t it, you know say something in Irish or say something in German and we’d be standing there like thinking what will we say, you know.  The same thing happens in Germany, the old woman will all ask us say something in English, say something in Irish and they had a feeling that our German was very much pre-war, you know, and they called it German without chewing so chewing for them only came in with the Americans, you know, and also the American language came in.  So I mean all those kind of lovely influences that sort of, you know, change language all over Europe we missed out on completely.I’d love to read you another passage from ‘The Sailor in the Wardrobe’, it’s the second memoir and it’s not directly to do with language but it’s interesting maybe for Ireland now because we have all these different languages on the streets, you know, that’s the one thing I notice now that, you know, the whole phobia about the Irish language I don’t know if we have that anymore because we have all these people speaking other languages on the streets so like what’s so odd about speaking Irish then?  I don’t think we have that quite healthy kind of self hatred that we had when I was growing up, you know, and the kind of, you know, I grew up in, as I call it, this language war and where my father was trying to get rid of everything British, you know.  So anyway this:My father is not the kind of man who keeps a stem of grass between his lips, even with his shirt open he looks like he’s thinking about something that still has to be done to improve Ireland to keep this landscape from disappearing.  We climb halfway up a mountain and look back at the small grey Opel Kadett parked like a toy car along the road, we see the houses and the small people of Ireland working in the fields below us, my father holds his arm stretched out in front of him and tells Stefan to look across the landscape with his eyes open because there are certain things that can only be seen in the Irish language.  In English my father says you can only see as far as the eye can see.  On the way home he’s looking for a place called Echo Gate, driving up and down the country roads for a long time saying it can’t possibly be gone away.  My mother points at lots of gates and tells him to stop so we can shout over them to see if we can hear anything coming back but he drives on with a determined look on his face until he finally comes to the right place and we all stand shouting across the gate towards the ruins of a monastery.  The echo is very clear.  We count how many seconds it takes for the word to come back.  We shout in German with the sun going down and the cows looking up wondering what we’re saying.  It’s a perfect echo each time as if the fields know our language, a whole family shouting back at us with great excitement as if they’ve been waiting for centuries and this is the first time somebody has come to the gate who understands them.  Our voices come out from under the mossy stones and start calling back hoping we don’t leave again.  How are you all over there and how did you know we were coming, my father shouts in Irish, when the echo comes back my mother says you must be Irish because who else would answer a question with another question (laughter).  The sky changes in layers of yellow and purple and deep grey.  We can see the dark outline of the ruins fading against the land.  Stefan is barking like a dog, Ciaran climbs the gate and Maria stands behind him singing a ‘do, re, me’ ladder of notes that stands up against the sky and we’re like the family laughing at ourselves in the mirror even when we get back into the car and drive away my mother’s voice is still laughing around the ruins after it gets dark.So that’s a real place, Echo Gate, I’m sure some of you might have seen it or have been there, so if you go there and shout over in Chinese it will come back in Chinese, you know.  Any language you like and you don’t need a translator.Yeah I’d love to answer any questions you have about strange life in translation. I think the other thing that’s possibly interesting to say about my writing is just the fact that, you know, I suppose I have to admit in some ways like that Irish writing can be very lyrical and I’ve always kind of rejected lyricism, I don’t know why, you know, none of my books have any kind of strong lyricism in it, you know, and it’s probably exactly that rule that my mother had set, you know, she said look, you know, don’t tell any lies, don’t embroider anything just tell the truth the way it is and I think that’s still a rule I have as a writer even, that any excessive colouration well she would sort of think like that’s fake, you know, that doesn’t stand up to her scrutiny, you know, and it’s part of this Irish way that she kind of resisted in some ways, you know. That’s always ... I’ve been talking to German people a lot about their experiences here in Ireland and it’s often mentioned by them that whole way of talking is different. So I think my writing in a way has this very deliberately plain direct way of presenting facts and I think writers have also commented on that, you know, that my writing is also terribly careful because I’m handling and this is a foreign language to me and I have to be correct in it, I don’t know.  I was talking to a writer recently and he said to me just quite in passing he said, you know, Hugo I love my mistakes, you know, it’s a great admission to make isn’t it?  I wish I could say that, you know, but that’s part of the development of the literary culture in Ireland, it’s actually based on beautiful mistakes, you know, this transition between the Irish language and the English language, you know, once the Irish transferred everything across into the English language they produced this extraordinary ... yeah, it’s a very colourful language that we invented here in Ireland, you know, and I think it’s interesting what John Banville says about it he refers to language and the literary traditions here as something that’s more like a stain glass window, we don’t really want to see what’s out there we just want to see the colours, you know.  Okay, that’s probably boxing Irish writing in too neatly but, you know, that’s interesting to me in terms of language and where I stand as well as a writer, I’m still translating my mind onto paper as I write, you know.  I try to recreate some of those thoughts in the mind of a migrant who is just now coming into Ireland and at the beginning of the book I kind of describe his linguistic problems, you know he’s just not a ... he’s just trying to pick up the local language:What does it matter where you come from?  (This man’s name is Vid Cosic.)  What does it matter where you come from?  You could say it’s irrelevant.  I wanted to forget about my own country and start again.  I wanted to get a foothold here, get to know the place and the people.  I already knew some of the most famous names like James Joyce and George Best and Bono and Bobby Sands.  I knew the most important landmarks like the GPO where the Easter revolution took place and Burgh Quay where the bus to Galway leaves from right next to the immigration offices.  I was beginning to understand the way things are done here, the way you have of saying how’s the man and what’s the craic.  I was starting to pick up the jokes trying not to take everything so seriously.  I was working on the accent learning all the clichés – at the end of the day, 9 times out of 10, only time will tell.  I was eager not to be misunderstood or misled so I stuck to the expressions that would give me least trouble.  I was reluctant to abbreviate, I never allowed myself to use puns or play with people’s names, I tried to limit the amount of times I used the words without meaning such as like or you know, I was cautious with terms like mega and sketchy and legging it and literally glued to the television. But, you know, I’ll just read you another extract, which actually describes my brother in how he speaks.  His first job was working in a nursing home so:The nursing home was administered by nuns in brown habits but they didn’t take part in the caring anymore, those duties were carried out by the lay nursing staff.  The few nuns that were left over came out from their residence early in the morning to walk the grounds with their headgear blowing vertically in the wind.  I got to know one of the nurses on night duty, her name was Bridie, she had red hair, she was much older than me, in her 50s, but she kept winking and calling me the love of her life.  She would laugh out loud and repeat a few things I said, not just the accent but the vocabulary.  She said I sometimes sounded like a letter from a bank using words like complete and commence and with regard to, words I picked up from newspapers and which were not suited to everyday use.  I’m going to commence laughing she would say.  It took me a while to get the hang of the ordinary words.  At first I could see no difference between start and commence.  My sentences must have sounded like translations asking people if there was any room of work going for a carpenter.So I’ll just read at the end of that chapter about his observation of this woman Bridie:When I stopped working there she said she was not surprised that I would break her heart and walk away it was the story of her life.  She invited me for a farewell drink.  We met in a pub close by and she seemed older out of uniform or younger, it was hard to say, more motherly perhaps and also more fragile and more like a girl.  Sitting with her coat on and her handbag beside her she stirred her vodka and tonic with a plastic stick and did all the talking because I had nothing to say and didn’t know what questions to ask.  She placed her mobile phone on the table beside her drink and watched it for a while to see if it would ring.  She started crying.  Now I could not work out what to do in a situation like that where she was not my mother or my sister.  She ended up putting her hand on my arm to comfort me instead.  She opened her handbag searching for a tissue to wipe her tears but then she produced a letter and asked me to read it.  Dear Bridie, it said, it is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter.  It was written by her fiancé around 30 years earlier.  I read it slowly all the way through moving my lips across every word.  He was breaking it off with her so I gathered.  They intended to get married; the date had been set for the wedding and the families notified.  At the last minute he changed his mind and explained that he was not ready for it because he was still drinking too much.  He was not fit to be married to her, he didn’t deserve her love and the only thing left for him to do was to leave the country and emigrate to America.  I suppose each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty, different ways of disappearing and walking away from the past, different measurements of loneliness and happiness.  I wanted to track down the man who wrote that letter and tell him that he made the biggest mistake of his life but it was no longer possible to intervene because time had turned us all into distant observers.  She told me she had a baby shortly after that, after he left, that she had been persuaded to give it up for adoption.  She had tried to make contact with her son in recent years but he had not wished to meet her.  She asked me if I thought he would be good looking and intelligent so I said yes of course.  She wanted to know if he might have red hair like her and then she answered all her own questions assuring herself that her boy was happy in his new family and better off not looking back.  Even though he was grown up by now living his life she still spoke of him as a baby.  Staring right into my eyes she said she hoped he turned out a bit like me in fact which made me think of myself as her son promising to do my best.  She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route wherever.  Go for it she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag.  I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé just to be big hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings.  She pushed me with her elbow unable to sit beside me any longer.  Then she stood up to embrace me.  Come back and see me some time, she smiled through red eyes then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message.  She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself so I walked out the door away across the street not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road as though it was impossible for me to get killed.So there you are that’s Vid Cosic trying to get a foothold, and trying to understand the country, and trying to understand the history of the country as well and what the people are like, what their backgrounds were like.  I don’t know if you have any questions?QuestionsParticipant 1: Can I just ask you something please?  I’m reading ‘The Hand In The Fire’ at the moment, I’m about halfway through, and so I was very anxious to meet you to see if you spoke the way you write (laughter) and I’m struck by the way the sentences in your book are very short sentences, simple sentences, and at first I felt ah, you know, it’s not doing anything for me but gradually as I went through the book I realised it created its own atmosphere, these short sentences, and also something you said this evening about your mother I felt ... I realised there wasn’t the lyricism in the story as you said but yet the observations of small things and very true things about the city and about the country and about the people I really said yeah you’ve got a handle on it alright, you know, it’s very true.  But I was wondering about the short sentences did you write them in that book for a particular reason or was it unconscious?Hugo: No just very much because just saying all that ... no I mean I like the structure of sentences and I like the writers who do that. Participant 1: So do I, yeah.Hugo: I mean I think I kind of possibly liked Ernest Hemingway too much, you know, but I mean I like some writers with long sentences.  You know, one of my favourite writers is an Austrian Writer, Thomas Bernhard, who just can do a page with one sentence, you know.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: And they all, you know like they’re all kind of often the same sentence just turned around in different ways.Participant 1: Yes.Hugo: So he repeats the sentence in kind of a musical way.Participant 1: Yes.Hugo: But I think all writing also has kind of a musical form at the back of it, you know.  Like lots of writers will tell you that, you know, Colum McCann in particular who will talk at length about sort of how important the musical cadence of the language is for him, you know, and that’s very much the same for me, you know.  I mean probably, you know, I just have three chords and doing everything with just the three chords on a guitar but, you know, for me that’s sort of rhythm in the language, is that’s what is important for me to create and I do that with short sentences, you know.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: The other answer would be, you know, it’s just that’s part of my upbringing my German/Irish/English upbringing.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: And that’s the way I thrust myself.  I suppose, yeah, I mean there are lots of other answers to it as well.  I mean I think short sentences sometimes allows you more room for ambiguity actually, you know, I think the Irish writers are good at short sentences, you know, I’m not the only one.  I think McGahern as well I mean there’s lots of writers with ... I think it allows more space between what’s being said, you know.Participant 1: Right yeah.  Thank you.Participant 2: I just want to ask did you learn to write in German or just ...?  No?Hugo: No I never ...Participant 2: Yeah.Hugo: ... I mean I’ve written in German, I’ve tried to do that, but it’s not easy, you know.  I mean I would have to live there. Participant 2: Yeah.Hugo: Maybe I’ll start now.Participant 3: Do you see the character in Hand In The Fire as a big departure following on from the books that have been largely autobiographical you’re suddenly stepping outside?Hugo: In some ways yes I mean it’s very much a fictional character but, you know, I’m not sure I completely get away with it, I think too much of myself is on view in this book, you know.  In fact, you know, I mean some of the reviews remarked on that, you know, that I show my hand with this fiction, with this story.  And then in some ways they are. My experience as first generation immigrant in Ireland is actually very similar to that of a migrant coming into the country except that a migrant can always walk away, you know.  I speak to migrants about this and they say, you know, I don’t have that problem that you have, you know, of trying to fit in and trying to kind of be like the Irish, be truly Irish, because they come from somewhere else and they just say well, you know, to hell with it.Participant 3: I’m different, yeah.Hugo: Yeah, I’m different, you know, and if it doesn’t suit me if people don’t respect me in this country I’ll just walk away, you know.  And I don’t have that luxury.  I grew up here in Ireland and I felt the inadequacy of growing up as a German-Irish child, you know.  I’ve always felt I’m not quite Irish enough, that I’m not getting away with it and that’s what I’m trying to describe with this book that it’s, you know, the story of a migrant trying to kind of fit in and not ever catching up, that sort of disadvantage.  For instance like I think it’s very interesting like the landscape and the way that Irish people have of sort of mapping the landscape, basically the Irish map for Ireland is not just a piece of paper with sort of roads and train connections and towns, the Irish map of the country is a very, very intricate and sensitive and, you know, elusive thing where it’s a grid of connections between families and friends and sort of memories of the country, you know, and for a foreign person to understand that I mean I watched my mother trying to understand that map and she failed, you know.  My mother never made the transition to Ireland quite fully, you know, even though she had six children.  So she is the story of a migrant who hasn’t made it in Ireland, who hasn’t quite understood the Irish map because the Irish map is quite a fluid thing in a way, you know.  It’s made up of all these kind of conversations rather than anything specifically on paper and we all know that about Irish people like as soon as you get into a conversation you start talking about families, you know, people that you know, connections, towns, you know, street names – all kinds of things, it’s actually a sort of conversation full of social fact checking and I’ve heard people say this.  A film maker in Cork recently said that to me he comes from a small town in West Cork and he said to me – a lot of English people living in the town, you know, but he said you often get the impression that there’s no point in talking to them because there’s no electricity, you know.  They talk to you about very sort of specific things but they’ll never get into that sort of fluid electric conversation that Irish people have that goes back three centuries in time and that sort of connects up all our people, you know.  So that’s one of the things I try to describe in Hand In The Fire and that’s one of the things that I sort of feel even as a sort of grown person living here most of my life, you know, I still feel I’m not quite connected into that Irish map, that Irish social map and, you know, it could be my fault but still I feel it’s a formative thing, you know, in my childhood somewhere I kind of understood that I’ll never get to grips with this map, you know, but I’m still trying.Participant 4: Can I ask, you know, in Hand In The Fire Vid has this I suppose quite dark history so that he’s been in an accident and he’s lost a lot of his memories and he wants to escape that history, did you do that so that he wouldn’t have that option of wanting to go back or knowing that he can easily go back and ...?Hugo: Yes I mean it’s very deliberate.  I think really I’m showing my hand here again because with a German mother I lived most of my life trying to kind of pretend I wasn’t German.  In fact there are episodes in my memoirs where I describe seeing my mother coming down the street and I run the opposite direction.  Okay like a lot of teenagers may do that (laughter), you know, you don’t want to see your mother because like she kind of, you know, let’s the cat out of the bag, you know, but I mean I think it’s exaggerated in my story because, you know, who wants to have a German mother in the 19 ... you know, she was a lovely mother, you know.  That sort of burden of history was very, very difficult for me to understand, possibly more difficult than it was for a lot of German people because, you know, they weren’t being called Nazis on the street every day, we were, we were put on trial.  And I have the feeling now ... and that’s why I chose a Serbian character because he has the same history behind him which he is trying to forget, trying to walk away from, and with which he has nothing to do so I am echoing that sort of very personal experience through his story.  And I suppose it also allows me to examine this immigrant without going back to his country, without constantly referencing his own country, you know.Participant 5: Do you think that ... you talk about like an Irish identity, about mapping and so on do you think that sort of the American influences and English TV has changed since you were ... if you were a child now in the same situation?  Do you think it’s more international now?Hugo: I think so I mean that’s an interesting question, you know, I mean I’d love to talk to sociologists about it and linguists about it and, you know, we’re constantly translating ourselves into an American way of saying things and I mean the way people talk in Dublin now is very, very different to the way people talked, you know, in the 70s even, you know.  In fact if you want to hear somebody talking real Dublin language the way it was spoken in the 70s and even further back you should listen to Paula Meehan, I mean she is like the real Dublin, the way it was, you know, and she even says, you know, she’s afraid that it will completely disappear, the Dublin dialect.  So we are constantly imitating the American way and, you know, those faces, like the inflections of people, we talk now ... the tail of the sentence is almost up now, you know.  But then again like I mean I talk to some young people and they say yeah my parents do all that social mapping, they kind of do all the rounds, you know, like they say oh yeah his father was a butcher oh no, no he was a chemist, you know, and all those kind of things like that’s really important even still and young people say like I mean we don’t do that anymore, you know, but will they?  I think they will when they get to thirty or when they have babies themselves, they’ll start doing it because it then becomes important, you know, and they have the skill for it, they’ve inherited the skill, you know.  So I think a lot of the Irish ways of doing things are still there even though we kind of speak with accents that we picked up from friends and whatever, you know, I think we still do things with a very kind of distinct way.Participant 6: Hugo can I ask you about your mode of working, say that you speak carefully and I think you probably write carefully as well, but do you work carefully?  Do you work slowly?  Do you do several drafts of a book or ...?Hugo: Oh I do lots of drafts of a book, you know.  Yeah and I kind of re-write things constantly, you know, that’s ...Participant 6: And do you wait a long time before you put pen to paper?  Do you think about the idea a long time?Hugo: No I don’t because like you can’t think about what you’re going to write, you can only find out what you’re going to write when you’re writing it, it actually kind of just comes out and it’s because you have this terror of not finding anything to say, you know, it produces this something, you know, particularly when you’re kind of constantly writing and you’re writing every day and that’s the great freedom you have, you know, just writing uncarefully, you know.  But then I go back and re-write and, you know, change things a lot but the basic burst I mean I like things to be written in a burst because they’re honest and then they kind of have a bit of magic to them when they’re written in a burst because like, you know, you have to think on your feet, you know.  And then you can go back and sort of pare it down.Participant 7: This is a question about your translations, your novels into German, I’m guessing from what you said that because you don’t write German you don’t translate them yourself.Hugo: No I don’t no.Participant 7: Well are you involved in the choice of translator or not?  Like does the translator need to have a background in that kind of knowledge of Ireland, coming from a kind of dual knowledge, from a knowledge that kind of dual.Hugo: Yeah well that’s very interesting because, you know, my German translator has never been to Ireland, you know, and he did a fantastic translation of ... well I started with The Speckled People and he’s been working on all my books since then and he rarely ... I mean I show him the manuscript each time and he has about five questions each time and then I look over the manuscript and I have about five changes that I ask him to make, you know.  But he’s a poet himself, you know, and a writer so he just has a feeling for language and I’m often sort of worried that the German version is better than the English. (laughter)  So there is only one thing that I had to kind of change at one stage, in The Speckled People I had this phrase, you know, this man at some stage stands up and tells my mother, you know, Hitler was a great guy, you know, like he fought against the British and his phrase in it is he said, Fair play to the Germans, and he didn’t understand what fair play was so he looked it up and fair play in the dictionary sounds like justice so he just translated it like that, justice to the Germans, and it was a completely different meaning so things like that I was able to kind of catch but, you know, I can’t spot those things in French or in Spanish or Italian so there’s probably some wonderful mistakes in those translations, you know.  (laughter)So listen thanks very much for coming and thanks for all your questions.  (Clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to John Boyne's talk and readingWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, author John Boyne reads from his novels ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and ‘Noah Barleywater Runs Away’, and takes questions from the audience.  Recorded at the Central Library on 10 November 2010, as part of the series 'In Other Words . . .Irish Literature in Translation in Your Library'.Good morning everybody and it’s very nice to be here today.  So yeah what I thought I would do is read to you two things: one from my first children’s book which is ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and then read you something from the new one ‘Noah Barleywater Runs Away’ to get a sense of the difference really I suppose between the two books.  And ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ wasn’t actually my first novel it was my fifth and before I wrote this book I had only written for adults before that and I had only written books which were set in the past and I had never really thought about writing for young readers before, it wasn’t really part of my plan, but then sometimes one thing that happens to you as a writer is an idea comes to you and it seems so powerful, so interesting, that you can’t walk away from it and that’s the way it was with ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’. When the idea for that book first came to me, a very simple image at the start of just the two boys sitting on a fence talking to each other, I felt I couldn’t walk away from that story and I felt that because I was going to be writing it from the point of view of a 9 year old boy then it would seem natural that it was going to be written as a book for children, for young readers.  And after it was published of course there are people, there were people, who felt that a subject matter like this such a serious story, such a sad story, tragic story, is not an appropriate one to give to young people to read which of course I didn’t agree with, I mean I do feel that young readers can approach serious subjects like this if the stories are told in the right way and I tried to tell it in the right way. So what I’m going to do is read you – at the end of this as well of course I’ll take any of your questions – what I’m going to do is read you a section from the book which is from the centre of the book.  I like reading from this section because it does go back to the very start for me for how this book started.  As I said the first idea was these two boys meeting at the fence even though that idea actually only happens halfway through the book.  So at this point in the story Bruno the son of a German Commandant at the concentration camp has been in this house far away from his old home, far away from his friends, for a long time and he’s very bored, he’s very lonely, he’s got nobody to talk to, he’s got nobody to play with and he wants to be an explorer when he grows up so one day he decides that he’s going to break the rules, he’s not allowed go exploring the camp, he’s not allowed go walking along this fence that runs alongside the house but he’s so bored, he’s so lonely, he’s going to do it anyway and this is what he finds when he does it.The walk along the fence took Bruno a lot longer than he expected.  It seemed to stretch on and on for several miles.  He walked and walked and when he looked back the house that he was living in became smaller and smaller until it vanished from sight altogether.  During all this time he never saw anyone anywhere close to the fence nor did he find any doors to let him inside and he started to despair that his exploration was going to be entirely unsuccessful.  In fact although the fence continued as far as the eye could see the huts and buildings and smoke stacks were disappearing in the distance behind him and the fence seemed to be separating him from nothing but open space.  After walking for the best part of an hour and starting to feel a little hungry he thought maybe that was enough exploration for one day and it would be a good idea to turn back, however, just at that moment a small dot appeared in the distance and he narrowed his eyes to try to see what it was.  And while he was looking his feet were talking him step by step closer and closer to the dot in the distance which in the meantime had become a spec and then began to show every sign of turning into a blob.  And shortly after that the blob became a figure.  And then as Bruno got even closer he saw that the thing was neither a dot nor a spec nor a blob nor a figure but a person, in fact it was a little boy.  “Hello” said Bruno.  “Hello” said the little boy.  The boy was smaller than Bruno and sitting on the ground with a forlorn expression.  He wore the same striped pyjamas that all the other people on that side of the fence wore and a striped cloth cap on his head.  He wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks and his feet were rather dirty.  On his arm he wore an armband with a star on it.  When Bruno first approached the boy he was sitting cross-legged on the ground staring at the dust beneath him, however, after a moment he looked up and Bruno saw his face, it was quite a strange face too, his skin was almost the colour of grey but not quite like any grey Bruno had ever seen before.  He had very large eyes and they were the colour of caramel sweets, the whites were very white, and when the boy looked at him all Bruno could see was an enormous pair of sad eyes staring back.  Bruno was sure he had never seen a skinnier or a sadder boy in his life but decided he had better talk to him.  “I’ve been exploring,” he said.  “Have you?” said the little boy.  “Yes, for almost 2 hours now.” “Have you found anything?” asked the boy.  “Very little.”  “Nothing at all?”  “Well I found you” said Bruno after a moment.  He stared at the boy and considered asking him why he looked so sad but hesitated because he thought it might sound rude.  He had discovered something during his exploration and now that he was finally talking to one of the people on the other side of the fence it seemed like a good idea to make the most of the opportunity.  He sat down on the ground on his side of the fence and crossed his legs like the little boy and wished he had brought some chocolate with him or maybe a pastry they could share.  “I live in the house on this side of the fence” said Bruno.  “Do you?  I saw the house once from a distance but I didn’t see you.”  “My room is on the first floor,” said Bruno  “I can see right over the fence from there.  I’m Bruno by the way.” “I’m Shmuel”, said the little boy.  Bruno scrunched up his face not sure he’d heard the boy right.  “What did you say your name was?” he asked.  “Shmuel” said the little boy as if it was the natural thing in the world.  “What did you say your name was?”  “Bruno,” said Bruno.  “I’ve never heard of that name,” said Shmuel.  “And I’ve never heard of your name” said Bruno.  “Shmuel, I like the way it sounds when I say it, it sounds like the wind blowing” Bruno said “Shmuel,” nodding his head happily, “ yes I think I like your name too, it sounds like someone who is rubbing their arms to keep warm.”  “I’ve never met anyone called Shmuel before,” said Bruno.  “There are dozens of Shmuels on this side of the fence,” said the little boy, “hundreds probably.  I wish I had a name all of my own.”  “I’ve never met anyone called Bruno,” said Bruno “other than me of course, I think I might be the only one.”  “ Then you’re lucky,” said Shmuel.  “Hmm, I suppose I am.  How old are you?” he asked.  Shmuel thought about it and looked down at his fingers and they wiggled in the air as he tried to calculate. “ I’m 9” he said.  “My birthday is April 15th 1934.”  Bruno’s eyes opened wide and his mouth made a shape of an O, “I don’t believe it,” he said.  “Why not?” asked Shmuel.  “No,” said Bruno shaking his head quickly.  “I don’t mean I don’t believe you I mean I’m surprised that’s all because my birthday is April 15th too and I was born in 1934.  We were born on the same day.”  Shmuel thought about this.  “So you’re 9 too?” he asked.  “Yes, isn’t that strange?  Very strange” said Shmuel “because there may be dozens of Shmuels on this side of the fence but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with the same birthday as me before.”  “We’re like twins,” said Bruno.  “Hmm a little bit,” agreed Shmuel.  “Do you have many friends?” asked Bruno cocking his head a little to the side as he waited for an answer.  “Oh yes,” said Shmuel, “well sort of.”  Bruno frowned.  He had hoped that Shmuel would say no as it would give them something else in common. “Close friends?” he asked.  “Well not very close,” said Shmuel “but there are a lot of us, boys our age I mean, you know, this side of the fence.  We fight a lot of the time thought that’s why I come out here, to be on my own.”  “It’s so unfair,” said Bruno “I don’t see why I have to be stuck over here on this side of the fence where there’s no-one to talk to and no-one to play with and you get to have dozens of friends and are probably playing for hours every day.”  “Where did you come from?” asked Shmuel.  “Berlin.”  “I’ve never been to Berlin,” said Shmuel.  “Well it’s certainly not as nice here as it is there,” said Bruno, “although it was much nicer before things changed.”  “How do you mean?” asked Shmuel.  “Well it used to be very quiet there,” explained Bruno who didn’t like to talk about how things had changed, “and I was able to read in bed at night but now it’s quite noisy sometimes and scary we have to turn all the lights off when it gets dark.  Do you like exploring?” he added after a moment.  “I’ve never really done any,” admitted Shmuel.  “I’m going to be an explorer when I grow up,” said Bruno “at the moment I can’t do very much more than read about explorers but at least that means that when I’m one myself I won’t make the same mistakes they made.”  Shmuel frowned.  “What kind of mistakes,” he asked.  “Oh countless ones,” explained Bruno “the thing about exploring is you have to know whether the thing you found is worth finding, some things are just sitting there minding their own business waiting to be discovered like America, and other things are probably best left alone like a dead mouse at the back of a cupboard.”  “I think I belong to the first category,” said Shmuel.  “Yes,” replied Bruno “I think you do.  Can I ask you something?” he added after a moment.  “Yes,” said Shmuel.  Bruno thought about it, he wanted to phrase this question just right.  “Why are there so many people on that side of the fence he asked and what are you all doing there?” So that’s a scene from the centre of the story it’s the moment where Bruno and Shmuel first meet and the rest of the novel really is taken up with the two boys trying to answer that question, why are there so many people on that side of the fence? and what are they doing there? and, you know, the thing that Bruno and Shmuel have in common is that they’ve both been taken away from their homes, from their places of safety, they both miss where they come from and they both don’t know what they’re doing in this place.  Now of course Shmuel is going through a much more difficult experience on his side of the fence than Bruno is but the one thing that they do have is they have each other, you know, their friendship, the way that they can go to the fence every day and talk to each other and pretend for a little while that they’re not in this terrible place, is what keeps them both, you know, cheerful at moments when they would otherwise be quite unhappy.  And it was quite important to me when I wrote this book that the two boys at the centre of this book would be the real heroes of the story, they wouldn’t have the same hatreds and prejudices that the adults in the book have, it is a book where the kids are all the good guys and the adults are the bad guys.  And even though it’s a sad story, even though it’s a novel with a very sad ending, I did always feel that it was a novel that young people would be able to come to and hopefully if you have read it and if you were moved by the story of Bruno and Shmuel and what happens to them then you would know that there are a wealth of other books out there by people who actually went through these experiences which you can then go and read because my book, of course, is just a made up story and a lot of the events in the book and the way the story is described aren’t exactly the way they would have been during the Holocaust or at those camps but it’s more of a ... I subtitled the book a fable, a work of fiction with a moral at the centre, so it’s supposed to be an introduction to a study of the subject and hopefully that the story of these two boys would move you enough that you would want to learn more about it. Now after writing this book I went back to writing a couple of more adult books and I wondered would I come back to writing for young people again and I really wanted to but as you can imagine this was kind of a tough act to follow in terms of writing for young people.  And I knew one thing; I knew I didn’t want to write a historical novel for children again.  I didn’t want to write a book which would explore such a serious global tragedy as the Holocaust because I thought if I did that it would be ... I thought it would be kind of a cynical thing to do because I’d be trying to replicate the success of ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and I had written this book in a very uncynical way, I’ve written this book because of the story, so I didn’t want to go searching for another worldwide tragedy to write about but I did know that if I wrote for children again I wanted to write about something serious at the same time.  So when I came to write this new book, ‘Noah Barleywater Runs Away’, it’s very different.  It’s not a fable it’s a fairytale, it goes back to the idea of traditional fairytales.  I read a lot of Grimm Brothers stories and Hans Christian Andersen and found these running themes through them of most of those stories begin with the child being abandoned in the centre of a forest.  If you think of Hansel and Gretel, Hansel and Gretel were abandoned by their parents in a forest because there’s a famine going on in the land and they can’t afford to feed them.  Snow White is abandoned in the forest.  Pinocchio runs away into a forest.  There’s this running theme of children being abandoned and the more I read these fairytales the more this idea intrigued me but I knew that I didn’t want to write about that, what I thought I would start with was a boy who was running away from home into a forest but not being abandoned, he’s running away from home himself, but we very quickly learn that his family life ... he has a very happy family, he loves his parents, his parents love him, so why is he running away?  And this is what the reader has to discover as the story develops and even though there’s a lot more jokes in this book and even though it’s a lot lighter in tone and funnier there is still quite a serious story going on at the centre of it and the deeper you get into the forest the deeper you get into the book the more you realise that there’s actually something quite sad and quite unhappy, quite tragic taking place here but it’s one person’s sad story rather than the world’s sad story.  So I’m going to read you a section from the opening of the book, from chapter one, because this doesn’t really need any introduction it tells you exactly who Noah is and how his adventure on this one day in his life is going to take place.  So this is chapter one and it’s called ‘The First Village.’Noah Barleywater left home in the early morning before the sun rose, before the dogs woke, before the dew stopped falling on the fields.  He climbed out of bed and shuffled into the clothes he’d laid out the night before before holding his breath as he kept quietly downstairs.  In the hallway he took his coat off the hook but didn’t put his shoes on until he’d already left the house.  He walked down the laneway, opened the gate, went through it, closed it again treading as lightly as he could in case his parents heard the sound of the gravel crunching beneath his feet and came downstairs to investigate.  It was still dark at this hour and Noah had to squint to make out the road that twisted and turned up ahead.  When he got to the end of the first quarter mile at just that point where he could turn around one last time and still make out his home in the distance he stared at the smoke rising from the chimney that stretched upwards from the kitchen fireplace and thought of his family inside all safely tucked up in their beds unaware that he was leaving them forever, and despite himself he felt a little sad.  Am I doing the right thing he wondered, a great blanket of happy memories trying to breakthrough and smother the fresher sadder ones but he had no choice, he couldn’t bear to stay any longer.  Anyway it was probably best that he went out to make his own way in the world after all he was already 8 years old and the truth was he hadn’t really done anything with his life so far.  Why only a few days before he tried to make a list of all his achievements and this is what he’d come up with:  1) I have read 14 books from cover to cover.  2) I won the bronze medal in the 500 metres at Sports Day last year and would have won silver if Breffni O’Neill hadn’t jumped the gun and got a head start.  3) I know the capital of Portugal, it’s Lisbon.  4) I may be small for my age but I’m the 7th cleverest boy in my class.  5)  I am an excellent speller.  Five achievements at 8 years of age he thought, not very impressive at all. And so here he was out on his own a young soldier on his way to battle.  It wasn’t long before he reached the first village and by the time he got there he was starting to feel a little hungry as he hadn’t had anything to eat since the night before.  The smell of eggs and bacon spilled out from the open windows of the houses that ran up and down the streets.  He licked his lips and looked up at the window sills.  In the books he had read grown-ups often left pies and cakes there with steam rising out of their peak pastry hats just so ravenous boys like him could come along and steal them away but no-one seemed to be that stupid in the first village or maybe they just hadn’t read the same books as he had.  But then a stroke of good luck, an apple tree appeared before him, it hadn’t been there a moment before or at least he hadn’t noticed it, but here it was now standing tall and proud in the early morning breeze its branches weighed down with shiny green apples.  “Breakfast,” he thought running forward but as he did so one of the branches of the tree, the one that had been leaning most towards him, seemed to rise up a little and press itself closer to the trunk as if somehow it knew that he’d been planning on stealing away one of its treasures.  “How extraordinary,” said Noah, hesitating for a moment before stepping forward again, this time the tree made a great grunting sound and if he hadn’t known any better he would have sworn that it was edging its way to the left moving away from him, its apples trembling a little in fright.  But it can’t be he decided shaking his head, trees don’t move and apples certainly don’t tremble.  And yet it was moving.  It was most certainly moving.   Well that’s enough nonsense for this time of the morning Noah decided throwing himself against the tree which immediately froze as wrapped his arms around it and plucked three apples, one, two, three, off the branches before jumping away again popping one in his left hand pocket, one in his right and taking a great bite out of the third in triumph.  The tree wasn’t moving at all now.  If anything it seemed to be drooping a little.  “Well I was hungry,” he cried aloud as if he had to explain himself to a tree.  “What was I to do?”  The tree didn’t respond and Noah shrugged his shoulders and walked away but just at that moment a voice called out from behind him, “hey you,” and he turned to see a man marching his direction.  “I saw you,” the man cried, stabbing his finger in the air,  “What do you think you’re doing eh?”  Noah froze then turned on his heel and started running, he couldn’t be caught this quickly, he couldn’t allow himself to be sent back.  In fact it wasn’t until he was sure he was no longer being chased that he slowed down and this was when he realised that the apple in his left hand pocket had fallen out while he was running.  Never mind, he thought, I still have the one in my right, but no that was gone too and he hadn’t even heard it fall.  Ahh, annoying, he thought, but at least I have the one in my hand but no somewhere along the way that had vanished too and he hadn’t even noticed.  How extraordinary, he thought continuing on his way a little more disheartened here and trying not to think about how hungry he still was.  One bite of an apple after all is hardly a satisfying breakfast for an 8 year old boy especially one who is on his way to see the world and have a great adventure.So that’s how that story begins with Noah running into the forest and very shortly after this he comes across a toy shop in the centre of the forest and an old man living in the centre of this, living in this toy shop, carving puppets all day and over the course of the day Noah starts to tell the old man stories about the months leading up to his decision to run away and the old man tells stories about when he was a boy and how he ran away from home.  And as we hear these two stories we start to realise how much these two characters have in common and why Noah shouldn’t be running away from home at all, what he really needs is to run straight back home before it’s too late.  So maybe at this point what I’ll do is open it up to you and you can ask me questions about writing or about these books or the movie or the books or anything you want really.  Before you do let me ask you a question, how many people here think they would like to be writers when they’re older?  Lots.  A good few.  Great, okay well that’s good.  Okay, so you may want to ask questions about writing along the way. QuestionsJohn: So who’d like to start?  Yes.Participant 1: Like how old were you when you decided that you wanted to become a writer when you were old?John: I think I was about 10 or 11 years old.Participant 1: And did you start writing books there like when you were that age?John: I did because I mean I loved reading when I was a kid and my parents used to bring me to the library all the time, we had a library like this down the road from my house, and I loved books, I loved getting lost in books and remember when I was a kid, when I was your age, you know, we didn’t have computers or DVDs or PlayStations or anything like that, we had nothing.  So we just had books and I loved books and I knew that the stories that I was reading I wanted to be able to write stories too, I wanted to ... the books that made me laugh or made me sad or made me scared I wanted to write stories that would do the same thing.  So I started writing when I was about 10 or 11 and I would take characters from the books that I liked and I would write new stories for them and then when I got a bit older, you know, I stopped stealing other people’s characters and started making up my own characters and to be honest I think from the time I was about 10 or 11 ‘til, you know, this morning I haven’t really stopped writing because I love it so much.  And I mean one of the tricks to writing is being very disciplined about it, it’s writing every day, it’s never walking away from it.  So I just felt inside me always from the time I was very, very young that this is what I wanted to do.Participant 2: Did anyone persuade you to write books?John: No, not persuade me but encourage me, you know, because even when I was younger I would give stories to my parents, to my brother and sisters to read and they seemed to enjoy them, you know.  I wrote a lot of funny stories I suppose like you do when you’re young and they seemed to think they were funny and interesting so they gave me a lot of encouragement.  And in school as well I was writing a lot and I always seemed to get a good response to what I was writing, you know, people seemed to think they were good and that was encouraging.  You always need a bit of a clap on the back sometimes, you know.  Yeah.Participant 3: How long did it take you to write ‘The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas’?John: Well that was a very strange writing experience because most of the books I’ve written have taken about a year and a half to write but ‘The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas’ came about in a very different way.  Usually I have an idea for a book and I think about it for a long time before starting to write it but when I had that idea I started writing it the next day and I didn’t know if it was going to be a short story, a novel, what it was going to be.  I just started writing and the story seemed to take me over and I couldn’t walk away from it and I wrote all the way through one day and I felt at the end of the day if I walk away from this now I’m going to lose this story, I have to keep writing, so I wrote through the night and the next day I wrote all day, I wrote all night, and on the third day at lunch time I finished the first draft and I hadn’t slept.  I wrote for 60 solid hours but only taking a break between chapters for a cup of tea or a sandwich or whatever and the one thing I remember about that experience was when I would stop, when I would, you know, be sitting having a cup of tea thinking to myself don’t think about this too much, don’t analyse it, just keep writing it because if you think about it, if you intellectualise it in some way this story which seems really interesting is going to run away from you.  So I didn’t.  So after two and a half days I had a draft of the book, 50,000 words, now it’s not the same book that you see here today, it then took maybe about 8 months to re-write it, to get it into the shape it is.  Because again for all the people who want to be writers one of the tricks of writing is knowing how to re-write.  The first draft is only the first draft and you have to write it again and again and again until it’s right.  Yeah at the back there?Participant 4: What was the first book you wrote?John: The first book was a novel called the ‘Thief of Time’ which was published just over 10 years ago and it was a story of a man who lives for 256 years because his body stops ageing when he’s in his 40s and he’s born in 1743 and he tells his story from on the night when 1999 becomes 2000.  And he tells all these stories, he’s been through all these different historical periods and, you know, met lots of famous people along the way and it’s a big sort of adventure story.  Yes?Participant 5: If you weren’t a writer what would you have wanted to be?John: I think I probably would have liked to have been an actor.Participant 5: Would you say you would have made it?  (Laughter)John: (Laughs) I don’t know but what I would say is that knowing I wanted to be a writer and again for all of you who want to be writers I pursued it absolutely, you know, I was focused on it.  I didn’t just think in my head I want to be a writer I wrote and that’s what matters, you know.  There’s no point just wanting to be something you have to actually work to get it and I think if I had wanted something different I would have probably worked to the same extent and hopefully, who knows, but I’m happy with where I am.  Yeah?Participant 6: Would you ever want to write an autobiography?John: An autobiography?  I don’t know, you know, nobody has ever asked me that before.  Do you know what’s strange is, you know, I’ve been talking about books for ... I’ve published books for about 10 years and I’ve certainly talked about ‘The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas’ for about 5 and very occasionally somebody asks you something like that that no-one has asked you before.  I don’t ... I’m too young, you know, I’m still in my 30s.  Maybe when I’m in my 80s.  I don’t know how interesting my life is, you know, I mean I just write the books.  I don’t really lead that interesting a life, people might think it’s very interesting to be a writer; it’s not all that interesting.  You know, I mean it’s enjoyable, you know, I write my books, I go out and I talk about my books and then I go home and like, you know, walk the dog (laughter) and think about, you know.  You want to know about a writer’s day?  This morning, first thing, walked the dog.  Second thing put the laundry on.  You know, third thing answer some emails.  Fourth thing come here.  So it’s chapter four, you know, separating the whites from the coloureds in the wash, you know, maybe when I’m 80 I’ll write an autobiography.Participant 6: Yeah.John: Yeah?Participant 7: Can it be a bit lonely at times?  I’m thinking of your hours writing on your own and do you have to write every day?  Like it could be a bit lonely couldn’t it?John: It’s actually not lonely.Participant: 7 No?  Oh right.John: And I think people think that working on your own and working from home, you know, can be lonely ...Participant 7: Yeah, to write from there.John: ... but it’s not because I get so enthusiastic about what I’m writing and if I’m working on a new novel I get so lost in it and I enjoy it so much that it’s company like, you know, during the work day.Participant 7: Right yeah.John: And I couldn’t work with other people around me anymore, you know, I need the silence, you know, the only person during the day time who is bothering me is the dog, you know, running around my feet.Participant 7: A way of life now, yeah.John: Yeah, but actually I don’t find it lonely and there is this strange split in a writer’s life because you do spend half your time at home writing quietly on your home and then you spend the other half maybe in different countries talking about the books as they come out and talking to audiences so it’s either very quiet or it’s very busy and it’s always enjoyable going out touring and stuff and then at the end of a tour it’s always enjoyable going home.  Yeah at the back?Participant 8: What type of dog do you have?John: (Laughs) I have a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, it’s a little King Charles, he’s only a little fella, he’s only a year old.  Yeah?Participant 9: See when you wrote ‘The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas’ did you go over to Germany and like see all the concentration camps and did it give you the idea about it?John Well that’s a good question.  When I wrote the book, right, firstly if I go back in time, when I was about 15 my English teacher in school one day came in on the last day before our summer holidays and he gave us a list of about 40 books and he said if he get a chance over the summer read some of these books, you won’t be tested on them but just read some.  And the first book I read was a book called ‘Periodic Table’ by a man called Primo Levi who had been in a concentration camp and survived the camp and wrote about his experiences but he hadn’t really survived because the experiences were so difficult for him to cope with that he was never able to really get over them.  His life was very tragic.  And it sparked an interest in me in the subject and over the years that followed I read an awful lot of books about the Holocaust and about the concentration camps because I was always interested to know, like I said there, what are all those people doing there, you know, why are they there.  So I had studied a lot about the camps and when I came to write the book all of that knowledge came into it but I hadn’t yet been to visit a camp when I wrote the book and because, as I said, I wrote the first draft in such a short space of time the book was written before I could do that.  So subsequently, afterwards, I then went and visited Auschwitz and saw that for myself which was a very, you know, interesting experience, it’s a sad experience.  I’m sure a lot of you when you’re older will be travelling around Europe, it’s a very worthwhile place to visit because it’s now set up as a museum and you can learn a lot more about it and there’s lots of photographs and lots of information.  So I hadn’t gone before I wrote it but I went afterwards.  Yeah?Participant 10: Have you ever got like an idea in your head and like when you go to write the book you forget it?John: No because again for all of you who put your hands up and said you want to be ... do you want to put your hands down between questions it’s probably easier ... for all of those of you who said you’d like to be writers another thing you have to do is always carry a notebook with you and you never know when you’re going to get some great idea and just write it down or put it into your phone or something, you know, and keep them somewhere and 99 out of 100 of those ideas might go nowhere, they might not be any good, but 1 out of 100 is going to be really good and it could be a great story.  So once you think of something scribble it down somewhere, find some place and keep all those ideas together, because at some point maybe you’ll be thinking what will I write, I can’t think of anything, and you’ll read through these and something will jump out at you and say write me.  Yeah, the corner?Participant 11: Where you there when they were like making the film?John: I was indeed.  We shot the film in Budapest.  Does anybody know where Budapest.All: (Shout out) In Hungary.John: Wow!  Brilliant.  Yes indeed, Hungary.  Yeah and so we shot the thing, it took about 9 weeks to shoot and I was there on set during it and watching it all take place before me which was very interesting.  Yeah?Participant 12 Did you get to write the script and all?John I didn’t write the script.  The Director, Mark Herman, wrote the script but what he did was every draft of the script he would email to me and I would read it and give back my notes, you know, say you know this is working well, this one I’m not so sure about and we became very good friends and so we worked quite closely on it and talked about it a lot about my ideas of the characters and his.  At some point you have to kind of let it go as the writer because the film maker is the guy who is making the film and you have to let him do that without too much interference but if you have a good relationship with the person who is making it, if you get on well, then at least you can have a say in what’s going on.  Yeah?Participant 13: Were you there when they hired the actors for the film?John: Was I there when they hired the actors?  No I wasn’t there.  We talked a lot about the adult actors and we went through lots of different names of people that we wanted to ask to do it and some people that like I would suggest the Director would say no I can’t stand him or (laughter) somebody that the Director would say and I’d say nah I can’t stand her she’s hopeless.  So, you know, I had a say on the actors, well not really a say but I had an involvement in the adults not for the kids though.  The kids ... there was like a special casting agent who went through all these different videos of kids that were auditioning with the Director and actually Asa who played Bruno in the movie believe it or not was the second person who she saw out of I don’t know hundreds and he got the part so.  Oh okay?Participant 14: Were you happy that you were there?  Why is the two boys 8 in the film and 9 in the book?John: That’s another good question.  I think the Director felt that ... I know it’s a small gap between 8 and 9 but he felt that a little bit younger would explain the naivety of the characters a little bit better, you know, I mean I wouldn’t change it in the book I still think 9 is fine but he just felt a little bit younger was better to tell the story so.  At the back?Participant 15: Yeah when we do like a story in school, right, we do a brainstorm.  Would you do a brainstorm or would you just like think of something and then write it down?John: I would just think of things myself and I don’t tend to ... it’s a very good way of starting out and getting into writing, it’s very helpful, but when you get older and when you get more experienced at it I guess I prefer to just keep it all in my head I don’t even tell people what I’m working on.  I’ll say yeah I’m working on a new book but I prefer to just keep it all inside until I can give it to somebody to read.  Yeah?Participant 16: Do you make your title before your story or do you have to do the story first?John: Excellent question.  It differs, you know, it depends.  Some books you get it, you have a title very early on.  My most recent novel for adults was a book called ‘The House Of Special Purpose’ and it was set around the Russian Revolution and when I was researching the book I found that the characters ... I knew that the characters in it, because they’re real life figures, the last Russian Royal family were assassinated, and the house that they were assassinated in was called by the Bolsheviks the House Of Special Purpose and when I read this ... do you want to put your hands down between ... when I read this phrase immediately I knew that was what the novel was going to be called.  ‘The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas’ about five chapters in or something Bruno looks out the window he sees these people in the distance walking around and he asks his sister Gretel why are they wearing striped pyjamas and I knew Bruno was going to end up putting on a pair of these striped pyjamas and I can remember scribbling on a piece of paper ‘The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas’, it seemed like a good title.  And others you get to the end of the book and you still don’t have a title and you’re struggling and you show it to you publisher and you’re kind of brainstorming like you asked about, you know, what will we call it, I can’t think of something.  So it changes from one to one.Participant 17: Is there any of your other books that were made into films?John: Not yet but a short film has just been made in Australia from a short story that I wrote and it’s a 15 minute long film which is going to be in film festivals and it’s about a man, also set during the second world war but on a farm in New South Wales and it’s about a man who is the man in town who delivers telegrams to people to tell that their sons have been killed in the war and it’s how the reaction of people in the town every time they see him coming on his bike about how frightened of him they are.  Yeah?Participant 18: Is it easier to write children’s books or adult’s booksJohn: It’s not easier to make either, writing is hard work.  It can be easier when you’re really loving it and involved in it.  It’s about the story itself.  You don’t write a children’s book thinking this is going to be much easier.  And I’ll tell you something, you know, like pop stars and movie stars tend to write children’s books because they think that it’s easier to write children’s books and it’s not and it’s very insulting to both young readers and to writers who write for young readers.  It’s not easier at all it’s just as difficult.Participant 19: Do you know like when you’re writing a story ...John: I do.Participant 20: ... do you write it on a page and it takes ages or do you write it on the computer?John: What I do is the first draft I write it on a computer because, you know, I can type as quickly as I think so I write the story without really editing myself in my head, you know, I just let it all flow out I don’t worry about does this make a lot of sense of this, you know, because it’s just a first draft.  I type it all out and then what I do is I print it out with big gaps like this between all the lines, print it all out, get my pen and I cross loads of things out, I re-write lots of the things so it’s full marks and then I feed all that stuff back into my computer and I print it all out again, the same way with big gaps, keep doing that over and over and over again, it could be fifteen/sixteen times you’ll end up doing it, keep doing it until one time you print it out and you have nothing left to make any changes on and that’s when I give it to someone to read.  We’ll take two or three more.  Yeah, the man at the back there?Participant 21: Yeah I enjoyed your readings very much and I also enjoyed the questions from the floor. I just have sort of a specific question.  You said there at the start about you had the image of the two boys at the fence was the setting actually in a concentration camp?John: Yeah when I had that image I knew where the fence was.Participant 21: Right.John:  And I mean I could see them in a ... I could see Shmuel in his striped pyjamas as such and Bruno in like a little pair of shorts and a shirt, you know, so I knew that immediately.Participant 21: And then when you said you actually went right into the book and you wrote for 3 days or whatever ...John: Yeah.Participant 21: ... did you on reflection at another time say, you know, where did all that come from?John: Yeah I’ve asked myself that many times actually and I think it’s partly from all that reading I had done over the years and my fascination, my interest in the subject.  You know, one thing I sort of believe about the book and this is not something I normally believe about anything but I believe it about this is that sometimes I think you’re supposed to write something, you’re supposed to write a story, you know, and my mind, my whole person, was just in the right place at the right time that when I had this idea it was just supposed to happen for me to do that and to write a story that could reach so many people, you know.  Like I didn’t ... when I finished it on that Friday, that first draft, you know, I did look at it and think, you know, what is this and how did I write this and this is very different to what I’ve done before.  So I don’t really have any answers on it other than I just sort of feel it was in my life that I was going to do this, you know.  Maybe somebody who hasn’t asked a question, yeah?Participant 22: I first heard your interview and you talk about your book on the Tubridy Show and then I went and got the book and I saw the film when it came out. John: Okay.Participant 22: Could you tell me what page you read that excerpt from please?John: Yeah it’s from the centre, it’s chapter ten, it’s from the beginning of chapter ten, which in my book which is the hard back is page 104 but easy to stop at.Participant 22: I really enjoyed your talk, thank you.John: Thank you.Participant 23: Have you ever wrote anything like in a story that happened to you?John: Yeah when I was much younger I did.  I mean when you’re starting writing first it’s not unusual that you write a lot about your own life and things that have happened to you and you turn those into stories and I got to a point though in my sort of mid to late 20s where I felt that wasn’t really working for me, you know, that works very well for some writers it wasn’t working for me and I wanted to just make it all up, you know, I wanted to use my imagination much more and so I focused on that really and in the books I’ve written I haven’t really written anything too personal.  One thing I have done is in Striped Pyjamas, I mentioned in that section I read the two boys say they were born on the 15th of April 1934 and I chose that date and that month and that year because that’s the day, month and year on which my own father was born and my father happily is alive but I use that date because I wanted to be able to look at my dad and think alright this is the life that these boys and boys like them could have lead, their children, their grandchildren, the jobs, the whole thing that makes up your experience of life, this is where they would have been now had their story ended differently so I tried to personalise a story which, you know, I don’t have a personal relationship to in a way.  I tried to do it like that.  So I don’t bring an awful lot of personal stuff in but maybe subconsciously things go in but I try to just really kind of make it all up.And on that note I think maybe we’ll have to ... sorry I’m going to have to call it a halt there I think.Thank you very much. Well thank you all.  (Clapping) Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

German bombings of Ireland 1940-41 by Eoin Criostóir Bairéad. 

The air defence of Dublin and the North Strand Bombing by Michael Kennedy at North Strand Bombing and the Emergency in Ireland seminar held at Dublin City Library & Archive on Saturday, 29th May 2010.

Transcript of 'The Effects of War-Time Censorship on Historical Sources regarding the North Strand Bombing 1941' by Kevin O’Connor, at North Strand Bombing and the Emergency in Ireland seminar held at Dublin City Library & Archive on Saturday, 29th May 2010.