Essay

Never speak ill of the dead

By Mike Dwane

In Ireland we have an expression: "You should never speak ill of the dead." This means that after somebody passes away, there should be a period of grace in which you can only say nice things about them.

The big news in Ireland has been the death on Aug. 30 of the poet Seamus Heaney. I didn't care for his poetry while he was alive and still don't, but when I mentioned this to relatives over the weekend, you could — as the expression goes — have heard a pin drop. We don't speak ill of the dead!

Heaney was from Northern Ireland, where political and sectarian violence killed 3,500 people between 1969 and 1998. As a young man, he chose to pick up a pen rather than a gun, and used his writings to work for peace. In that regard, he was a "national treasure," an expression we have for somebody who is almost universally loved by their fellow countrymen and women. Think Nelson Mandela in South Africa or, I suppose, Ichiro Suzuki in Japan.

Heaney was a Harvard professor and one of four Irishmen to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Poetry, drama and fiction are among the few things the Irish excel at. Our country has almost always been broke, so we have never won a Nobel for economics. We have had one scientist win a Nobel compared to 17 from Japan.

And I guess the only reason Irish men and women have won the Nobel Peace Prize four times is because we have been at war with ourselves for so many years. If there was a Nobel Prize for fighting or terrorism, I suspect Ireland would be right up there.

But it is a source of pride in such a small country that Ireland has more Nobel literature laureates than Russia, China or all of South America. To be fair, this probably reflects the Eurocentric nature of the Nobel Prize committees, with Asian and African writers often overlooked.

Our other literature winners were the poet W.B. Yeats and the playwrights George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett.

My Japanese friends are more likely to recognise Irish writers who didn't win the Nobel Prize. Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) were both dead before the Nobel Foundation started giving out awards in 1902. And my favourite Irish writer, James Joyce (Ulysses), was simply overlooked.

The Irish writer Japanese people are most likely to recognise is Lafcadio Hearn, or Koizumi Yakumo, as he became known after he moved to Japan.

In Dublin recently, I was with a group of friends as we passed a townhouse that had been his childhood home. A plaque over the door included some kanji, which I pretended to read, telling them: "It was here that Lafcadio Hearn, famous for his writings on the Meiji Era and Japanese ghost stories, lived from 1852 to 1854."

None of my friends, including two literature graduates, had ever heard of him. "Big deal. Some nerd who wrote ghost stories," said one. "How dare you," I replied. "Don't you know you should never speak ill of the dead?"

死者の悪口は決して言ってはいけない

ノーベル文学賞詩人シェイマス・ヒーニー氏死去のニュースは地元アイルランドで大きく報道された。筆者は彼の詩について特に何とも思っていなかったが、それを正直に口にしようものなら・・・。

The Japan Times ST: September 27, 2013