REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE PRESENTATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD, DUBLIN CASTLE
A Dhaoine Uaisle, tá lúcháir mhór orm bheith anseo libh tráthnóna ar ócaid speisialta seo. Míle buíochas libh as an chaoin-chuireadh.
Thank you for the kind words of welcome and the invitation to present this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Now in its 7th year, this valuable and prestigious award sits well with the literary credentials of our capital city - credentials few cities can even come close to.
Dublin has produced the greatest novelist of the twentieth century – James Joyce; the greatest poet of the twentieth century – William Butler Yeats; the greatest playwrights of the English stage – George Bernard Shaw and Seán O’Casey; the greatest orator in the English language – Edmund Burke; and the greatest satirist the language has ever known – Jonathan Swift. It is the only city in the world that can lay claim to three Nobel Prize Winners in Literature – Shaw, Yeats and Beckett and of course our fourth, the great Derry poet, Seamus Heaney has paid Dublin the compliment of adopting it as his home.
The huge outpouring of grief that followed the recent death of Kerry’s own literary genius, John B. Keane gives some clue to the centrality of literature in Irish life. His work in particular brought thousands of people into the theatre who would not normally have seen themselves as theatre-goers. He made them welcome and comfortable in that world though he himself, like so many prophetic writers knew the loneliness of being misunderstood and controversial. His stories, rooted in his own parish, travelled around the world and in every place they had the ring of the familiar, for John B reckoned rightly that if he could figure out Listowel he could figure out the world.
This award celebrates the gift of literary talent wherever it is found in our common global homeland, acknowledging as Thoreau says: “Books are the treasured wealth of the world, the fit inheritance of generations and nations.” Literature breaks us open, lets our stories and our imaginations flood out, allows the stories and the imaginations of others to flood in. This year nominations were submitted from the libraries of thirty-eight countries. They represent a formidable network of writers and readers and an equally formidable diversity of cultures. For all the pervasiveness of television, videos, computers, and e-publishing there is something deeply reassuring about the fact that in libraries all over the earth, men women and children still lift books from shelves and renew in every generation the great adventure that is reading a well-written book.
When I was last with you, I had the honour of presenting the award to the German writer Herta Muller for her novel “The Land of Green Plums” a translated work. This year the panel of distinguished judges has again chosen a novel originally published in a language other than English - Atomised - by French writer Michel Houellebecq. Indeed of the seven winners to date, three, including Atomised, have been works in translation and interestingly, in giving the judging panel’s citation for the winner here in Dublin Castle in May, one of the judges mentioned that she had first read Atomised in Icelandic. Frank Wynne was the translator into English of this year’s winning novel and the award gives important validation to the role of the translator in bridging the language divide and widening readers choices and writers audiences.
The staff of Dublin City Libraries worked tirelessly in co-ordinating and organising the award process and they are owed a big thank you as is the international panel of judges. It was chaired once again by Professor Allen Weinstein, who has served as the non-voting chairman since the inception of the award in 1996. The panel included British author Michael Holroyd; Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston; Icelandic novelist Steinunn Sigurdardottir; Canadian writer Audrey Thomas; and Mexican writer Jorge Volpi. With a shortlist drawn from the world’s very finest contemporary writers theirs was a job destined to provoke disappointment in some quarters, elation in others and passionate disputes wherever two or more readers are gathered. That is probably exactly as it should be.
But there is no doubt at all that it is entirely fitting on the eve of Bloomsday, a day unique in Ireland’s literary calendar, when, on the 16th June, 1904, Leopold Bloom walked out the door of number 8 Eccles Street and into the pages of world literature, that I now invite Michel Houllebecq to join me here so that I may present him with the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award for 2002.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.