A cartographer in addition to a mathematician, painter, and writer, Robinson produced intricate maps of the Aran Islands, as well as the Burren in County Clare, and the Connemara. In 1972 he moved to the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland, where he began to intimately study its landscape. “Robinson called what he did, not ‘geography’ but ‘geophany, the showing forth of the earth.’ His concern was the planet-our luck was that he chose to concentrate his great powers of observations and expression on some small rainy western Irish corners of it.”īorn in Yorkshire in 1935, Robinson studied mathematics at Cambridge and then worked for many years as a teacher and visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna, and London. In a eulogy published today in the Irish Times, columnist and critic Fintan O’Toole writes: Listening to the Wind, in particular, traverses the famed region’s history, myth, ecology, and landscape with Robinson’s signature punctilious grace. Robinson’s work reflects the multiple worlds he occupied and explored-literature, art, map-making, and math. Robinson is the author of numerous books, most notably his two-volume study of the Aran Islands, and his Connemara trilogy, which acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane has called “one of the most remarkable nonfiction projects undertaken in English.” The first volume in the trilogy, Listening to the Wind, was originally published in Ireland in 2006, and we are incredibly honored to have released the book to an American audience last year in September. “A rush of talk like the whirl of starlings coming to roost” – a lot of it talk in Irish – lies beneath his writings, in the stories he gathered, the old (and sometimes not so old) place-names he recorded.Milkweed Editions is deeply saddened to report that Tim Robinson has died from coronavirus this morning in London. He paid attention to the people who lived in and worked the land as much as to the landscape itself. His personality – gentle, generous, inquisitive, quietly humorous – was important too. He walked the land, he was present in its contours and its weathers, he stopped to talk and to listen. He practiced a quiet revolt against the dualism of mind and body: his legs and his ears were every bit as important as his eyes and his mind. He was “drunk on flowers, on the nectar of their names” and he practiced “the priestcraft of water”. Robinson was in many ways a late flourish of the great English Romantic tradition, an heir to William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Tim Robinson (seated), shows the Ford European Conservation trophy won by himself and his wife, Mairead, in Madrid in March 1988, to Senator Eamon de Buitlear (left), one of the Irish judging panel, and Eddie Nolan, chairman and managing director of Henry Ford and Son Ltd. What made Robinson so special, and so irreplaceable, was his ability to see what he was looking at with many eyes simultaneously, to take in at once science (geology and botany), art (the fall of land and light on the perceiving eye) and narrative (the history and folklore of the people who inhabit it). To undo a little of this damage has been for me, an Englishman, a work of reparation.” “Among the historical roots of Ireland’s carelessness of place,” he wrote, “is the retreat of its language and the accompanying anglicization of its placenames, which have been defaced, rendered dumb and sometimes reduced to the ridiculous. Perhaps only an English outsider could have given this project such care. That gloriously unreasonable project produced the two-volume Stones of Aran and the three Connemara books that collectively constitute one of the great literary achievements of our time on these islands. His concern was the planet – our luck was that he chose to concentrate his great powers of observation and expression on some small rainy western Irish corners of it. In fact, though, Robinson called what he did, not “geography” but “geophany, the showing forth of the earth”. But it is his astonishing books, the two-volume Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy, that will stand as timeless monuments to a genius who combined the linguistic brilliance of a poet with the precision of the mathematician he once was. Generations of tourists have been guided and enthralled by his marvellous maps of these radiant places. Tim Robinson, who has died a fortnight after he lost his beloved wife, Máiréad (the M evoked in so many of his works) was a Yorkshire man who came to know, as they have never been known before or since, three Irish landscapes: the Burren, the Aran Islands and Connemara.Īuthor Tim Robinson pictured near Roundstone, Connemara, Co Galway. Ireland was blessed to have had, for almost 50 years, the loving attention of one of the greatest writers of lands. The word “geography” means in its origins “the writing of lands”.
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