‘Put “Molotoff bread-basket” into Irish, please’: Cruiskeen Lawn, Dada and the Blitz

Abstract

This chapter investigates Myles na gCopaleen’s long-running satirical column in the Irish Times, Cruiskeen Lawn, which began in 1940 during ‘The Emergency’. Written in both Irish and English and often juxtaposing these languages in a single instalment or transliterating one into the orthography of the other, Cruiskeen Lawn makes fun of nationalist piety about the Irish language, debunking the idea of a purely Irish voice. The column’s polyglot, polyvocal play mocks the idea of national or linguistic isolation, thereby challenging Eamon de Valera’s isolationist policy of neutrality in World War II. Heretical to nativism in its use of modernist polyglossia and fragmentation, Cruiskeen Lawn is also heretical to modernism insofar as it ‘moves outside of literary genres, and outside of the available genres of the newspaper, excerpting the discourse of its day and amplifying, distorting, and subverting it through linguistic play’.