       |
Life
| 1942- ; b. 28 Nov. 1942; Cork, dg. of Eilís Dillon [q.v.] and Prof. Chuilleanáin, Prof. of Irish, UCC, who was active in the War of Independence; ed. UCC [NUI], proceeding on a scholarship to Oxford; B.Litt in Renaissance English (Oxon.); TCD English lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature from 1966, and later Assoc. Professor and Fellow; Irish Times award for poetry, 1966; her early poetry collections incl. Acts and Monuments (1972), winning Patrick Kavanagh award, 1973; Odysseus Meets the Ghosts of the Women (1973), winner of Patrick Kavanagh Award; Site of Ambush (1975), for the first time explicitly identifying the central figure as female; The Second Voyage (1977); her Selected Poems appeared in 1978; m. to Macdara Woods [q.v.], with whom a son, Niall; |
| fnd. and jointly ed. Cyphers, with Macdara Woods, Pearse Hutchinson, and Leland Bardwell, 1975 - all associates in poetry readings at Sinnott’s pub (S. King St.); issued further collections, The Rose Geranium (1981), and The Magdalene Sermons (1991); ed. Irish Women: Image and Achievement (1985), an authoritative work dealing in Irish mythology and female archetypes; her “Swineherd” (from The Second Voyage) was included in the British Arts Council Poems on the Underground series in 1986; became a forthright critic of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing’s ‘false inclusiveness’ (in Cyphers, 35); winner the O’Shaughnessy Award, 1992; |
| her poetry encompasses both contemporary and historical, physical and spiritual dimensions and is marked by a wide range of references and symbols, expressed in distinct images; appt. Dean of Faculty of Arts (Letters) at TCD, 2001; subject of a special issue of the Irish University Review, ed. Anne Fogarty (2007); issued Selected Poems (2008) - initially by Gallery and afterwards by Faber (2008); and The Sun-Fish (2009), which won the International Griffin Trust for Excellence’s International Poetry Prize (Canada, 2010) and was shortlisted for the Poetry now Award; issued The Boys of Bluehill (2015), a new collection - named after the Irish reel; appt. Ireland Professor of Poetry, May 2016; retired from TCD as Fellow as Prof. of English, 2011; her Collected Poems were published by Gallery Press in May 2021; married to Macdara Woods with whom a son Niall. DIW DIL FDA OCIL |
 |
 |
 |
| The Irish Times (photo credit) | John Hewitt Soc. (Belfast) | P. Redmond for Outra Ingles Es Imposible - Buenos Aires) |
[ top ]
Works| Poetry |
|
| Selected & Collected Poems |
|
| Prose |
|
| Reviews |
|
| Miscellaneous |
|
| See also ... |
|
| Video |
|
[ top ]
TCD Censorship Conference:| Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference, ed. Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin & David Parris [Proceedings of a Conference held in Trinity College Dublin, Oct. 2005] (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2008), 256pp., 24cm. - CONTENTS: |
| ‘Introduction’ [by eds.]. PART 1 - Theory: Maria Tymoczko, ‘Censorship and self-censorship in translation: ethics and ideology, resistance and collusion’; Piotr Kuhiwczak, ‘Censorship as a collaborative project: a systematic approach’; Elisabeth Gibbels, ‘Translators, the tacit censors.’ PART 2 - Classical and renaissance: Carol O’Sullivan, ‘Censoring these “racy morsels of the vernacular”: loss and gain in the translation of Apuleius and Catullus’; Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin & Deirdre Serjeantson, ‘The Petrarch they tried to ban’. PART 3 - Censoring regimes: Jane Dunnett, ‘Translating under pressure: censorship of foreign literature in Italy between the wars’; Aoife Gallagher, ‘Pasternak’s Hamlet: translation, censorship and indirect communication’; Cristina Gómez Castro, ‘Censorship in Francoist Spain and the importation of translations from South America: the case of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine’. PART 4 - Sensitivities: Filipe Alves Machado, ‘The case of Don Quixote: one hundred years of Portuguese translations’; Gerri Kimber, ‘Translation as hagiographical weapon: the French perception of Katherine Mansfield’; Angelika Nikolowski-Bogomoloff, ‘More than a childhood revisited?: ideological dimensions in the American and British translations of Astrid Lindgren’s Madicken’; Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, ‘... comme des nègres: whitewashed in translation’; Sarah Smyth, ‘“Razom nas begato, nas ne podolati”: remixes of the orange revolution anthem’. Bibliographical references [pp.221-36]’; and Index. |
[ top ]
Criticism
|
[ top ]
Bibliographical details
|
|
|
[ top ]
Commentary
Maurice Harmon, ‘Writing for the Gallery’, review of The Brazen Serpent, in Books Ireland (Oct. 1995), p.249, ‘the tantalising beauty of this poetm (‘Studying the Language’) and of this kind of poem is the way it both defines something and leave the full significance open. We go back over the lines to gather in the implications, to assess the weight of particular words , to take in the significance of heritage and succession, the sense of a source acknowledged, claimed and exactly meaure ... sturdy in their underpinning of image and sound and equally strong in implication ... [&c.]
Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets, Syracuse UP 1996): ‘Degendering the hero, she challenges traditional concepts of heroism and demonstrates the value of simple actions and the human scale. While her numerous images of water, travellers, and pilgrims reminds us of the deepest human fears and needs, images also catalogue the importance of the ordinary and the domestic … [as] new metaphors for human experiences and emotions.’ (p.120; quoted by Joyce C. East, review of same, in Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1996, p.12.)
Kevin Ray, ‘Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’, in Eire-Ireland, 31, 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 1999): ‘Ní Chuilleanáin herself refers over and over again to the importance of secrecy in her poems, both thematically and in the method of their composition. She writes with an intricate layering, building, in the Renaissance fashion she admires, toward what she has described as “copiousness”.’ (p.62.)
David Wheatley, ‘Closely glossed’, review of The Girl Who Married a Reindeer, in Times Literary Supplement (6 Sept. 2002), p.24: ‘Evasiveness and concealment are both themes and tropes in Ní Chuilleanáin, deliberate strategies in the “poetics of secrecy” that John Kerrigan has found in her work. If Medbh McGuckian’s poems defy the reader to piece together a bare minimum of narrative sense, Ní Chuilleanáin’s are no less mysterious in their apparent repleteness, a repleteness that on closer inspection turns out to be full of those mysterious crannies and alcoves. [...] Ní Chuilleanáin has not received the acclaim of some of her Irish contemporaries, but to the mysteries of her work can be added what is by now an open secret: that she has written some of the most skilfully crafted and rewarding poetry of the past thirty years, a verdict only confirmed by The Girl Who Married the Reindeer.’ (See full text in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index or direct.)
Sean O’Brien, review of The Sun-Fish, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, in The Guardian [Saturday] (6 February 2010): ‘Although she has long been famous in Ireland, it is perhaps only in the last 10 years or so that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has begun to receive due recognition in Britain. Ní Chuilleanáin’s work often eludes categories (and sometimes interpretation too) but it might be said that she is a storyteller before she is a moralist, and one who both invites and challenges the reader to accept the primacy of imaginative life. [...] At its most densely enigmatic – for example in “The Clouds”, “The Water” and “Where the Pale Flower Flashes and Disappears” – Ní Chuilleanáin’s work is cousin to the bejewelled, mesmeric poems of Medbh McGuckian, though its dynamic and pacing are often more urgent. Sometimes, out of its flux, there emerges a sudden arresting authority. In “The Water” Ní Chuilleanáin suddenly turns to apostrophise: “O, Hundred-pocketed Time, the big coat lined / With lazy silk pinched close as finger and thumb / Various as oceans, precious-tinted like skies, / What upset you to empty them all at once [. . .]?” Somewhere in the background here is Ulysses’s image of Time in Troilus and Cressida, seen carrying “a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for oblivion”, but where Ulysses is dealing pragmatically with the political problem of Achilles’s withdrawal from battle at Troy, Ní Chuilleanáin reads Time’s contrasting prodigality in aesthetic terms. (See full text in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index or direct.)
[ top ]
| “The Second Voyage” |
|
| FromThe Second Voyage (1977); available at Wake Forest Press - online; accessed 28.11.2022. |
[ top ]
‘Borderlands of Irish Poetry’, in Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews, (London: Macmillan 1996), pp.25-24: ‘The options open to Irish women writers, then, include the absurd, the outspoken, and the crafty use of the borderlands between the two, as also of the borderlands between two languages (Gaelic and English) and between two traditions (male and female) which overlap intriguingly. It was not by chance that a generation of women writers, of whom I am one, emerged in the 1960s, when pressures to allow women to have a profession, to control their lives, their finances and their fertility were mounting, eventually to bring the legislative changes of the 1970s. The politicisation of women’s issues coincided with their poeticising, and they became poetic subjects both in Gaelic and English. [...] The late Caitlín Maude could be at once a singer with powerful folksongs on women’s lives in rural society, and write acutely angry poetry about a woman’s life in a Dublin suburb. The poetry reading, that unquantifiable late-twentieth-century phenomenon, revealed to numbers of women poets that they had a special, female audience as well as the more general one which they had probably begun by going in serve of. Gaelic poetry too had its own audience, accessible to writers and readers - not only native speakers of the language but also the many Irish men and women who have studied it at school. [...]’
‘Borderlands of Irish Poetry’ (1996), - cont.: ‘What is it about the political and cultural condition of the Southern state which made it impossible to begin there a literary enterprise with a label like The Honest Ulsterman? What elements of irony, of compromise, of would-be metropolitan sensibility on the one side, of aggresssive localism on the other, ruled it out? How do the tensions between gender, person and place differ on opposite sides of the border, so that the very title, not to mention the promise if contains of a no-nonsense, anti-rhetorical compact between writer and reader as males inhabiting a recognisable and real place, seem suspect to Southern readers? (p.26). Quotes final issue of Kavanagh's Weekly: ‘It is the need of the audience which produces the [poet’s] voice ... although there is no ultimate audience there is [in Ireland] just enough coquetry to draw out writers who are then left with a hunger which cannot be satisfied within that society.’ (1, 2, 5 July 1952, p.i; here p.27.) Bibl., W. J. McCormack of Nightwalker: ‘That read-sea dividing collection’ (‘Politics or Community’, in Tracks, No. 7 [Kinsella Special Issue] (1987, p.63.
Translations: ‘His [the translator’s] essential expertise is as necessary for the higher virtues of civilised man - broadmindedness, enterprise, assurance - as for the man [in] luxury of civilised life - uninterrupted human communication, and the endless satisfaction of the human curiosity. Translator and plumber, though, both capitalise on basic needs of man, whether civilised or not, and thus inevitably demonstrate the unity of peoples. Languages, histories and traditions, which seem impervious to one another, are revealed as modes of communication.’ (‘Poetry in Translation’, Irish Translators’ Association Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1987, cp.5; quoted in Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures, Cork UP 1996, p.185.)
[ top ]
Anthologies: ‘Every anthology published in my lifetime has been worthless as an account of contemporary literature [...] because of the form’s spurious claim to completeness.’ (Quoted in John Kerrigan, review of Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry, in Irish Review, No. 20, Winter/Spring 1997, p.131).
| Launching Cyphers ... |
Late September 2010 saw the launch of the seventieth number of Cyphers. The Biblical figure made some of our friends assume this would be our last. The editors preferred to focus on the thirty-five year span since the magazine’s first appearance and to see ourselves in Dantean terms as still in the middle of our journey. Cyphers 71 is in preparation now. In 1975 the four editors, Leland Bardwell, Pearse Hutchinson, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Macdara Woods, produced the first number. When we started up, The Dublin Magazine had closed and The Lace Curtain’s penultimate issue had appeared. We wanted to be as regular as the first and as open to the wide world as the second. People assumed we wanted to encourage new writers – nothing was further from our thoughts, though in fact we were to assist with several emergences. We did want to keep faith with the poets we admired, who might not be, or might not stay, in fashion: we felt strong enough to back our own judgement. Our first Cyphers contained only poetry. In the second we included fiction (a piece by the late Jimmy Brennan, followed in No. 3 by one from Adrian Kenny who also has a story in No. 70), and for a long time we were the only magazine in Ireland publishing literary fiction. Our first Cyphers felt like quite an achievement, after struggles to raise funds in a recession, much wondering about the title, and long enjoyable meetings discussing the content. That was the easy bit – we wrote to our friends, and to the contacts we had made when we had run a series of poetry readings in Sinnott’s pub in South King Street, abetted by the late Justin O’Mahony. We had admitted defeat there when the price of drink rose, so that the audience came later; also, the noise of a hostile regular inhabitant of the pub and the crash of the cash register combined to make some voices inaudible; also, Pearse left for a stint as Gregory Fellow in the University of Leeds. His return was the signal for the new project. I asked the Arts Council for money. They gave us half of what we wanted for the first two issues. Some friends, John Buckley, Benedict Ryan and Katherine Kavanagh, helped out, and we decided to go ahead and try our luck. For years afterwards we depended on the patience and good humour of our printer, Pat Funge of Elo Press, as we struggled to pay off the bills for those first issues. But the Arts Council was impressed with our determination and funded us, so that in the end we got out of debt. Pat’s old letterpress machines were damaged by vandals, and he used the insurance money to shift to the newer offset litho technology, so we learned about paste-ups and light-boxes; nowadays I make pdfs using Open Office. After Pat’s death when Elo closed, Christy, Mark and Richard, who had all worked there, started a new firm, and they are our printers today. More important than the six pounds that Patrick Kavanagh’s widow could afford to donate to the founding, she taught me to keep accounts properly. It was the beginning of my long career as amateur book-keeper and administrator. For fourteen years I took care of the business end of Cyphers, haunted by bundles of invoices, dead chequebooks, and stacks of back numbers and unpublished submissions waiting to be returned. All four editors would gather for a meitheal of writing rejection letters. I had card-indexes of subscribers and battered concertina files of stamped envelopes. Then FÁS came to the rescue, with a lovely worker, and we got our first second-hand Amstrad computer (it came with a flowery oilskin dust-cover). All of the succession of nice clever people who worked for us through FÁS schemes, and the later equally nice and clever ones whom the Arts Council helped us to employ, were frightened by accounts, so I still do that part. But they were willing to log and list and copy and post the manuscripts and look after subscribers and see that the writers were eventually paid their fees. In 1975 we swore that we would always pay a fee, however miserable. Quite often the cheque has arrived so late as to surprise the recipient, but we reckon that, small as it is, a fee is never an unpleasant surprise. It is also a marker of our opinion of the pieces we publish, that we have considered and weighed them carefully and think them worth money. (But what of the writers we didn’t publish? Some of them too have made it, but not all. Our archive is rich with pompous letters of self-introduction from people who wrote a poem about their holiday in Ireland; these contrast with the admirable brevity of the man who began his letter ‘Dear Shits’ …) The early issues had a masthead with lettering by the late Ruth Brandt. It was the arrival in early 1975 of her husband, Michael Kane, to get the details for the cover, that pushed us to decide on the title. We had thought of Landrail, The Blackbird, Waterhouse Clock … Michael liked cats and asked us what our black cat’s name was. She was called (after a series of poems by Macdara) Cypher, a name derived from, among other things, the Arabic word for zero, but it also means a code. We thought that would do, though we were annoyed later when some critic thought we were being modest, taking the sense ‘nonentities’ – which it hadn’t occurred to us is one of its meanings too. When we saw that first issue it was clear we’d got some things wrong. The card for the cover was a paleish yellow, the format looked like a child’s copybook, and so we realised we must make changes, and a long evolution began. From the second issue onward we used a stronger, cleaner colour, from the fourth we put the contributors’ names on the cover (all of them – we refused to pick out the bigger names); we moved to glossy card and acquired a spine at issue 5. The black cat is in her grave in the back garden of Selskar Terrace, but her name lives on. |
| Orig. in Poetry Ireland News (Jan.- Feb. 2010); rep. on the Cyphers website - online; accessed 06.09.2011. |
[ top ]
References
James Simmons, ed., Ten Irish Poets (Manchester: Carcanet 1974), selects “Early Recollections”; “Death and Engines”; “Evidence”; “The Apparition”; “The Second Voyage”; “A Poem on Change”; “Ferryboat”; “Letter to Pearse Hutchinson”; “Swineherd”.
Chez Penguin: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has appeared in Penguin Book of Irish Verse, ed. Brendan Kennelly (Harmondsworth 1970, 1981) and also in The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, ed. Patrick Crotty (London: Penguin 2010), pp.763-77 [“Death and Engines”; “Macmoransbridge”; “Fireman’s Lift”; “The Real Thing”; “A Capitulary”; “Glos/Clós/Glas”.] (See further details on Crotty, 2010, infra.)
Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, eds., Soft Day: A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Writing (Dublin Wolfhound; Notre Dame UP 1980), selects “Swineherd”; “Death and Engines”; “The Lady’s Tower”; “Odysseus Meets the Ghosts of the Women”; “A Gentleman’s Bedroom”.
[ top ]
Seamus Deane, gen., ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects poems from Acts and Monuments; Site of Ambush; The Second Voyage; 1434 [no commentary.]
Patrick Crotty, ed., Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1995), selects “The Second Voyage” [266]; “Deaths and Engines” [267; as supra]; “The Informant” [268]; “The Real Thing” [269]; “Saint Margaret of Cortona” [270].
[ top ]
Notes
Translation Cork: Cork poets incl. Bernard O’Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Theo Dorgan, Greg Delanty, Robert Welch, participated in Cork 2005 European translation series directed by Pat Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre.
[ top ]