La Cita Extraña Con J.M. Synge
John Millinton Synge
"The complete plays"
Ed. Methuen Drama
London 2001 pp311
2 It was in Paris that Yeats found him,
either in 1896 or 1897,
and gave him his famous advice:
I said: "guive up Paris,
you will never creat anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons
will alwyays be a better critic of French Literature.
Go to the Aran Islands.
Live there as if you were one of the people themselves;
express a life that has never found expresión"
I had just come from Aran, and my imagination was full of those grey islands
where men must reap with knives because of the stones.
6 ... a dark moustache drooping over a most beautiful mouth.
11 ... Because of its inversions, ellipses, and occasional unifamiliar constructions
it may present real difficulties of meaning to the English reader.
13 ... aspect of Synge's dramatic language invite our special consideration:
idioms, imagery and rhythm... 14
I've made all sure to have you
(I've taken all steps to possess you)
33 O'Flaherty's films, Man of Aran, gave a good picture of the setting and of the life.
39 ... for one colour belong to strength and virility, the other to the dead.
The red and grey cocks are a cliché - phrase of the Ballad;
but Yeats uses this opposition of colour in "A Full Moon in March".
For Death on the Pale Horse, see Revelation vi.
40 ... things have in them the strength of the moon.
41 ... verging...
44 ...  their habit of exchanging "wives" at certain annual gatherings...
while allowing the maximum freedom to instincts of sexual promiscuity,
fighting, drinking...
47 ... He still has the old Pagan craving for the enjoyments of the flesh...
48 ... He is big and heavily built - "a big boast of a man"...
50 ... New Testament, and Oscar Wilde's story of the young man healed by Christ,
who found no better use for his sight than to feed this lust...
54 ... the fantasies of his blind desire are the springs of his poetry.
55 ... May the Lord who has given you sight send a little sense into your heads...
57 ... "free" comedy, in which moral issues are reversed...
63 ... in Yeats' poem whose title is the fist three words:
66 ... The Playboy exists as a work of art, and in a sense all comments on it are futile or irrelevant.
67... The Playboy's real name was Synge...
120 ... If it's that gay you are,
you'd have a right to walk down and see would you get a few halfpence from the rich men do be driving early to the fair.
138 ... I've holy water here,
from the grave of the four saints of the west,
will have you cured in a short while and seeing like ourselves.
187 ... You've a power of rings...
247... *
- joining their hands -:
By the sun and moon and the whole earth,
I wed .... (person one) to .... (person two).
...
May the air bless you, and water and the wind, the sea, and all the hours of the sun and moon.