Tim Robinson

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Commentary
Jack Hanna, review of Stones of Aran: Labyrinths, in Books Ireland (Nov. 1995), pp.282-83: Stones of Aran, Labyrinth (?1995); comments, ‘modes of thought in the great European tradition of Goethe and Ruskin reveal the stones of this bare rock in the N. Atlantic margins to be as worthy of consideration as those of Venice’.

Luke Dodd, Director of Strokestown Famine Museum, reports on a paper on landscape and the Famine presented by Tim Robinson at at a Conference on Hunger (New York 1995), in Irish Reporter (3rd Quarter 1995), p.15: ‘although ostensibly dealing with the Martin estate auction of 1849, his paper combined official sources, folklore, cartography, and a deep feeling for the west of Ireland to produce one of the most moving papers of the conference. He was the only voice throughout the entire conference to mention, by name, some of those who perished during the Famine. he told delegates that he had eventually “stopped recording famine graves ... there is a limit to what one can carry of the past”.’

Colm Tóibín, in the Guardian, ‘Books’ (8 Dec. 1995), identifies Aran: Pilgrimage as his favourite book; speaks of how ‘the point where nature and culture meet in the island is observed with great beauty and precision’. (p.23.) See also his reference to Robinson in a review of Sean Scully, Walls of Aran, in The Guardian (12 May 2007): ‘Breandán Ó hEithir [...] made everything on the big island seem complex, not dreamy at all or romantic, funny at times yet worthy of detailed attention, he grew silent at the mention of the middle island, saying it was different and always had been. He spoke to me that day about Tim Robinson, a writer and mapmaker, who had come to live on the island and who had learned the language not only of the people, but of every stone and system, and written a number of superb books on islands.’

Mary O’Malley, review of Tim Robinson, My Space in Time (2001), in The Irish Times (12 May, 2001); 11 essays; b. Yorkshire; serviced Bombers in Malaya; pursued an art career in London in the 1960s; moved to Aran in the 1970s; friendship with artist Peter Joseph.

Sylvia Thompson, review of Tales and Imaginings (Lilliput), in The Irish Times (19 Oct. 2002), Weekend: Robinson is winner of Irish Book Award Medal and a Rooney Prize Special Award for Literature, 1987 ( Stones); the present work inspired by dreams, travels and encounters from 1950 to 1960, incl. Malaya and Thailand in 1956; Norway in 1971; childhood in Yorkshire and at his adopted home in Roundstone, Co. Galway. Thompson writes: ’At times, the writing is self-conscious and laboured (he even scolds himself in one peace: “I’m always bidding you take your art easy, as leaves grow on the tree”). Yet, at other times, the reader is drawn into Robinson’s dreamy world and left with an appreciation of his absolute affinity with nature and human vagaries.’ [End.]

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Quotations
‘The Seanchaí and the Database’ (2003): ‘Seanchas [old sayings], being the creation of an oral community, is rarely confronted with written records, whereas the database meshes technologically with library catalogues, book indices, web sites - and if this mesh is not perfect its failings are immediately apparent; discrepancies are like squeaky bearings in a machine. A database that draws on both traditional lore and written records will also show up inconsistencies, and in a clash between the official and the vernacular it is well to remember that error can be ingrained on either side or both. Thus for generations the well-read visitor to Roundstone has trotted out the received idea that “Dog’s Bay” is an ignorant corruption of the Irish Port na Feadóige, the bay of the plover - but this assertion is in fact incorrect. It arose from an ambiguously placed name on a map drawn by John O’Donovan for the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s, and was made generally known by Robert Lloyd Praeger in his book The Way that I Went. But in reality Dog’s Bay and Port na Feadóige are different places, as those locals who were not overawed by the prestige of the printed word could always have told us, had anyone asked them. Nobody did, and the mistake was copied from map to map and from book to book for a century and a half. / Unlike the database, traditional lore is very tolerant of internal contradictions and does not suffer from what Keats called the “irritable searching [for reaching] after fact and reason” - but this “negative capability”, while conducive to romantic poetry, is frustrating for the researcher. I remember getting unreasonably cross with a man I depended on for placename lore in An Cheathrú Rua who could tell me that a nearby stream was called Sruthán an Mhuillinn because there used to be a mill on it, and had wondered all his life exactly where that mill had stood, but had never to go a few hundred yards out of his way to walk along the stream and and look for its ruins. A small gap in his knowledge was no problem to him; but for me, the compiler of a databse, it was an annoyance, a scandal. In such respects the database is quite intolerant; its searchability and powers of cross-correlation depend on [48] consistent and methodical compilation, and in the face of ambiguous and doubtful data it simply sits down and refuses to cooperare. The database’s very format, in which each record consists of a number of “fields” or spaces each to be filled with information of a particular sort, prompts a drive towards full coverage and uniformity of treatment. Thus in the forthcoming Placelore of Roundstone Parish, there is a record for each place, and in each record are a number of spaces to be filled in with the history of the place, its archaeology, the meaning of the placename, the location, the associated oral lore, etc. And if I lack the information to fill in all of these “fields” there is an obvious blank. The database is, visibly, a mosaic in which the holes where bits are missing are objectionably apparent. The computer is insatiable, it hungers and thirsts for data. 1 know this as the master of a computer, or the slave of a computer. sometimes I feel as driven by it as a blackbird feeding a nestful of chicks. / This demanding nature of the database also gives it the intriguing and even addictive qualities of a game, a crossword puzzle, that one cannot relinquish until it is completed. And having covered one area, one parish, there is no reason not to go on to the neighbouring one. So the task will never be completed; it stretches to the horizon and beyond. As a game of patience, it will not come out this side of eternity. [...]’ (pp.48-49.)

Connemara: Listening to the Wind (2006): The selling-off of Connemara is immensely profitable to landowners and developers, and as a result planning regulations are flagrantly subverted, with the connivance of clientele-dependent politicians. It corrupts our eyes; we see every field as a potential house site, flaunting a price tag instead of its ragged hawthorn tree ... yellow irises and buttercups are bulldozed and turned into level lawns ... loosestrife and meadowsweet go under tarmac as boreens are widened to accomodate SUVs. A suburb without an urb is coming into existence, a centreless anywhereville.’ (Quoted in Joe Horgan, review of Connemara: Listening to the Wind, in Books Ireland, March 2007, p.52.)

Stones of Aran (Vol. 2, 1995), speaks of the ‘omnipresence of traces of foreignness, of other languages and cultures, in a place that through the work of John Millington Synge and others was closely identified with Irish language and culture and Irish cultural nationalism.’ (q.p.; quoted in Michael Cronin, Translation and Identity, London: Routledge 2006, p.16; quoted in Eamon Maher, review of latter, in The Irish Book Review, Summer 2006, p.6.)

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