Tonn Tuile Comes Ashore in English – Flood Tide Launched at Hodges Figgis
On Wednesday 8 July, Mercier Press celebrated the launch of Flood Tide, the first English-language translation of Séamus Ó Néill’s landmark 1947 novel Tonn Tuile, at Hodges Figgis in Dublin. It was a full house, with family and friends travelling from Westport, Donegal and as far as Washington DC for the occasion – fitting for a book that is itself a family affair, translated by the author’s daughter, Eithne O’Neill, and arriving with readers eighty years after it was first written.
‘One of the most readable, best-written and most interesting Irish novels ever written’
The book was launched by the novelist Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, a long-time champion of Séamus Ó Néill’s fiction. Her love of his work, she told the audience, began in her schooldays at Scoil Chaitríona on Eccles Street, where she came across his crossover novel Máire Nic Artáin – the story of a Catholic girl in Belfast in love with a Protestant boy – and was astonished to find a novel in Irish that engaged her the way it did. Years later she discovered Tonn Tuile on her husband’s bookshelves and was equally gripped.
The novel, first published in December 1947, is the story of a marriage. Liam – the first-person narrator, named only once in the whole book – and Eileen are honeymooning in the Rhineland in August 1939, deeply in love, when truckloads of soldiers in the streets cut the trip short. Home in Dublin, first in a flat in Rathmines and then a fine house in Rathgar, Liam has high hopes: a book bought every month, nights at the theatre, a writing life beyond the office, and a marriage of intellectual equals. Nothing works out quite as he had planned. ‘In other words,’ as Éilís put it, ‘it’s a very normal marriage’ – with plot twists she was careful not to reveal.
What makes it special, she argued, is the voice: a quirky, occasionally cranky, disarmingly frank narrator whose short, curt sentences Eithne’s translation catches perfectly. Ó Néill wrote in a clean, pared-back style – closer to Hemingway or Beckett than to the rich, proverb-laden Irish of many of his contemporaries – with Chekhov as his hero. His portrait of middle-class, Irish-speaking Dublin in the 1940s is ruthless, deadpan and utterly convincing, whether he is skewering the pieties of the language revival or observing his wife’s long eyelashes descending slowly when a conversation bores her. The novel’s uniqueness was recognised on publication – Niall Ó Dónaill reviewed it in Comhar in 1948 – and Éilís closed by calling it one of the most readable, best-written and most interesting Irish novels ever written.
A queue at Cannes and a question over coffee
Eithne O’Neill then told the story of how the translation came to be. A film critic and translator based in Paris, she brought the novel with her to the Cannes Film Festival some fifteen years ago, to read while standing in the long queues for screenings – and found herself reading it chapter by chapter over the six days of the festival, deliberately saving the ending for home.
Back in Dublin, over coffee at the National Gallery, she showed the book to her cousin Paddy, telling him its conversations were exactly the ones they had grown up hearing decades later. His reply set everything in motion: ‘Is there a translation?’ There wasn’t – and so, in time, she brought the idea to Mercier Press. ‘From then on,’ she said, ‘this is a love story.’
She paid warm tribute to the book itself as an object. The original 1947 edition carried a dust jacket by Richard Kennedy – once Virginia Woolf’s office boy at the Hogarth Press, later a wartime friend of the Ó Néill family in Dublin – showing a vortex of figures whirled by a storm. For the new edition, Cork-based artist Craig Carry has painted a red-brick suburban villa remarkably like the house on Glenart Avenue where Eithne grew up, a writer visible at one small window, with a great wave rising over it that put her – author, most recently, of a book on Japanese cinema – happily in mind of Hokusai.
The novel
Guests on the night had a rare opportunity to have the hardback first edition signed by Eithne O’Neill – Séamus Ó Néill’s daughter and the translator of the novel from the Irish – and the signing queue spoke for itself.
‘Flood Tide is a masterly study of the corrosive creep of disappointment – political, marital and creative. Subtle and nuanced in its emotional handling, yet it has gasp-out-loud moments worthy of a contemporary thriller. The novel may be eighty years old, but it’s as arresting and resonant as if it were written yesterday.’ – Mary Morrissy
Where to find it
Our thanks to Éilís Ní Dhuibhne for launching the book so generously, to Eithne O’Neill, to the team at Hodges Figgis, and to everyone who travelled – some a very long way indeed – to celebrate a novel worth the eighty-year wait – written in 1946, published in 1947, and now, at last, in English.
Flood Tide (Tonn Tuile)
Dublin, 1939. Journalist Liam returns from his Rhine honeymoon just as Europe tips into war. As the Emergency tightens its grip, his marriage begins to fracture. A landmark of mid-century Irish fiction, now in English for the first time – translated by the author’s daughter, Eithne O’Neill.
ISBN: 9781917453028
Buy Now
Flood Tide is available now in hardback from Hodges Figgis, good bookshops nationwide and mercierpress.ie.