Sydney 2020
Mangan's Ann Tiquity to Joyce's Anna Livia by Clara Mason


“The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.”
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce did learn Irish briefly with his friend at UCD George Clancy but it was the poet James Clarence Mangan’s who would provide the profound indigenous touchstone in Joyce’s journey as a writer. Mangan’s personification of Ireland began with ‘Ann Tiquity’and his version of "Róisín Dubh" highlighted his ability to crack the poetic code through time back to ancient Ireland.
Mangan took on the name Clarence from Sean Clárach Mac Domhnaill a member of Filí na Máighe from his father’s country in West Limerick.

Douglas Hyde tells how it was Mangan's
"custom to stretch his body halfway across the counter, while John O'Daly would translate the Irish song to him and [he] would versify it . . ."

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy remembers him, “Some of the pleasantest evenings of my life were spent with Mangan in a room in the office of The Morning Register, I being then sub-editor. Mangan recited verse with singular power: not with the skill of an elocutionist, but with the elan of a man of genius; and his memory was inexhaustible…"

“LONG they pine in weary woe - the nobles of our land –
Long they wander to and fro, proscribed, alas! and banned;
Feastless, houseless, altarless, they bear the exie's brand,
But their hope is in the coming-to of Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.


“The old national soul that spoke during the centuries through the mouths of fabulous seers, wandering minstrels, and Jacobite poets disappeared from the world with the death of James Clarence Mangan.”
- James Joyce, Trieste 1907

Click to Page: 'A journey from Mangan's Ann Tiquity to Joyce's Anna Livia'