Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

RTE Poetry Programme 18 April 2019	Photo-portrait by John Minihan

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See also The Poet’s Chair: The First Nine Years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry, with a preface by Seamus Heaney; afterword by Sir Donal Deeney (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2008), xiv, 264pp. CONTENTS: John Montague - 1. ‘The Bag Apron: or The Poet and His Community’ (memoir of a writer’s apprenticeship); 2. ‘Short Thoughts on a Long Poem: Words and Music’; 3. ‘Challenge of Translation’; Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill - 4. ‘Nil Cead Isteach ag an bPobal: Tirdhreach Liteartha Neamhaitheanta na Gaolainne / Public Access Denied: or The Unrecognized Literary Landscape of Irish’ [Parnassus in Kerry]; 5. Kismet, or the Workings of Destiny’ [A Language Odyssey - account of the Irish poet’s arrival as a bride in Turkey]; 6. ‘Chailleach agus an Apeirbhean agus an Saol Eile / Hag, the Fair Maid and the Otherworld’. Paul Durcan - 7. ‘Cronin’s Cantos’; 8. ‘Hartnett’s Farewell’; 9. ‘[The Mountain and Mahomet: The Mystery of Harry Clifton’. Trustees 1998-2007. (Johns Hopkins UL - online; note vars. in COPAC, as given in Select Bibliography for 2008 - attached.)

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Commentary
Géaroid Denvir, ‘Decolonizing the Mind: Language and Literature in Ireland’, in New Hibernia Review, 1, 1 (Spring 1997), pp.44-68, incidentally argues that ‘much of her work is a rejection of Cartesian, intellectualised Western thought, a conscious and often unconscious effort to move into a different mode of feeling, seeing, and knowing culled from the Gaelic side of her heritage.’ (p.65.)

Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 1992), review notice of Nuala ní Dhomhmnaill, Feis (Má Nuad: An Sagart 1991), calls it a poem of 4 sections that delights in the sexual connotations of the term in the title, derived from Old Irish fo-aid, ‘to spend the night with’. Uses the 9th c. story of Mór Munhan as a preface, and underscores allusions to the archaeology and mythology of Brú na Bóinne; ‘Dún’ is a love-poem; also, ‘An Traein Dubh, ‘A Bhaitráil’, Na Tri Shraoth’, and ‘Stigmata’; images of subterranean confinement in ‘Mo Shaol faoi Ghloine’ and ‘An Poll sa Staighre’. Also present is Bean an Leasa. An earth mother gone wrong terrifies the speaker’s daughter in ‘Cailleach’, reinforced by references to the Kerry Babies Case.

Robert Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge 1993): ‘For Ní Dhomhnaill and Hartnett the loss of the Irish language was a cataclysmic blow to the psyche of the Irish people in that it ripped out and tore asunder all the secret interiors that sponsor the manifold activities that go to make up a culture. […] On the other side of the coin are the linguistic or cultural behaviourists. They say: language is merely a set of counters; and those mysteries to which the cultural nationalists lay claim are romanticism, mantra-seeking, bog-digging for treasure troves of words. [..] Why trouble ourselves over traumas that may or many not have taken place a century ago? This view, in its robust common sense, has certain attractions.’ / […] It may be that the way we pose the question is part of the problem’ (Ibid., p.4.)

Gerardine Meaney, ‘Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics’, in Irish Women’s Studies: A Reader, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin: Attic Press 1993), pp.230-44: ‘[...] If the male Irish writer must speak from this Oedipal place of exile, what position as speaking and writing subject is available to the Irish woman? According to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “We’ve all internalised this patriarchal thing. It would be a lie for me to say that I’m out of the woods, because I’m not”. [Interview with Michael Cronin, Graph, 1, Oct. 1986.] / Ní Dhomhnaill here echoes the imagery of the French novelist and theorist Hélène Cixous. Cixous sees language as an agent of the internalisation of “the whole patriarchal thing” and argues that “as soon as women begin to speak they’re taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black, your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous” (1976). The image of the feminine as a colonised territory has now become almost banal, but Cixous’s association of language and colonialism is particularly resonant in an Irish context. / For both Ní Dhomhnaill and Cixous the language of patriarchy colonises women’s self-concept and world view. It presents the masculine as the norm and the feminine as an aberration. Words abound for experiences which are exclusive to or predominantly those of men. The public domain, which was for so long the domain of men, is also the domain where discourse proliferates. The private domain, women’s traditional “sphere”, is very often the realm of the oblique and unspoken. (Compare, for example, the proliferation of technical vocabularies in the twentieth century - mechanical, electronic, computer languages and jargon - with the scarcity of words relating to the experience of childbirth.) How then can women use language, particularly how can women write, without succumbing to the inherent masculine bias in the languages of patriarchal cultures? According to Ní Dhomhnaill the woman must write - and the man who would break out of the strait-jacket of patriarchal repression and “linguistic schizophrenia” must write - in “the language of the Mothers” which she calls Irish. / This latter assertion has caused considerable controversy. Ní Dhomhnaill herself admits, “There’s a level of hurt involved in the language.” This is especially so for women. The question of Irish identity and the question of feminine identity often - as we have seen - have [241] mutually exclusive answers. Moreover the political exclusion implicit in this valorisation of the Irish language is undeniable and runs the risk of a return to the same old insular Irishness. The most productive way to understand Ní Dhomhnaill’s assertion is as an attempt to revise the significance of the language she chooses and an assertion that she has a choice. The use of Irish by a woman poet to write in ways which challenge the basic assumptions and myths of patriarchy is an attempt to wrest authority, not only from patriarchy and misogynist myth, but from that formulation of national identity to which the Irish language and the silence of women were fundamental. That is an exercise which can only be beneficial to those many women. writers in Ireland who do not see Irish as their mother tongue and who instead grapple with the problem of looking back through literary mothers who are as often as not Anglo-Irish and excluded from that narrow definition of Irishness which Ni Dhomhnaill challenges.’ [For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Critical Classics”, infra.]

Bernard O’Donoghue, review of Cead Aighnuis (Sagart), in Irish Times (17 April 1999): ‘Ní Dhomhnaill at the moment looks the most likely of the brilliant constellation of Irish-language poets of her generation to be mentioned in history in the same breath as Órathaille. her forte is not as a representative, as much as a voice of extraordinary and unmissable personal force, however affectingly she enters into contemporary issues, from the political condition of women to Bosnia; quotes from “Aurora Borelais”: ‘Tá’s agam nach bhfuil sé ceart, cóir ná cothrom/rud beag chomh suarach lem’ chroise a chur i gcomparáid/le feiniméan sioraí, le rud atá chomh dosháraithe/le soilse na bhFlaitheas, le hiomrothlú na bplainéd’, and remarks: ‘The constituency represented by poetry which combines the personal and universal to this degree is the human species. And the expression of it through a language of few speakers is one of the great miracles of modern Ireland.’

Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, cites Angela Bourke’s observation that even in Irish legends, women did not speak in the first person and that Ní Dhomhnaill’s speaking women are extraordinary; Haberstroh further suggests that ‘Ni Dhomnaill and Bourke stress the importance of the oral tradition as distinct from the Fenian stories, which constitute a different kind of Irish mythology. This oral tradition, very much alive in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, works against the notion of an ideal, romanticised past articulated in a language monopolised by men.’ (Joyce C. East, Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, quoting Women Creating Women: Contemporary Irish Women Poets, Syracuse UP 1996, in review of same, in Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1996, p.12.)

Catriona O’Reilly, review of The Water Horse: Poems in Irish translated into English by Medbh McGuckian and Eilean Ni Chuilleananin (Gallery), 112pp.: ‘happy merging of styles ... a model of what translation should be.’ (Irish Times, 22 Jan. 2000, Weekend, p.8.)

David Wheatley, review of The Waterhorse, with trans. by Eiléan Ní Chuillleanáin and Medbh McGuckian (Loughcrew: Gallery 2000), 129pp., in Times Literary Supplement (2 June 2000), p.7: poems mostly taken from Cead Aignhnis (1998); cites “Devil’s Tatoo”, “Behemoth”, ‘Slaughter”, “Eithne Uathach”, “Muintir m’Athar [My Father’s People]”, “Plutonium”, “Persephone Suffering from SAD”; notes that “Mo Mhaistir Dorcha”, in Cead Aighnis, trans. by Muldoon as “My Dark Master”, is notably missing from the new collection.

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Quotations
“The Pharoah’s Daughter”: ‘Cuirim no dhóchas ar snamh / im mbáidin teangan / faoi mar a leagfá naíonán / I gcliabhán / a bheath fite fuaite / de dhuilleoga fealastraim … [I place my hope on the water / in this little boat / of the language, the way a body might put an infant / in a basket of intertwined iris leaves …] (Trans. Paul Muldoon; quoted in The Irish Times, 31 May. 2001.]

“The Marianne Faithfull Hairdo”: ‘Having washed their hands of water forever, / they can no longer even have a shower. / They scour the household vessels with a Fairy Liquid purée of ash and urine, / plus a grain of sand thrown in, / and use so much elbow-grease, / you’d have to give it to them, / they finish up like the TV ads. // They exfoliate with oils in attar of rose / and scrub their scalps with a man-made / dry shampoo supplied by Boots, / or ordinary talc. // The few-and-far between times / that they wet a hair of their heads, / it’s with lukewarm tap water. / Which must be applied before sundown / for the following very good reason: // A while back a local woman / was threshing flax with two girl-helpers, / and would only allow them to wash their hair / when the evening shift was over. / The work went on till late in the night, / and since there was no sign of a break, / one of the girls put a flake of ash in her mouth, / the other a pinch of the chaff. // Around midnight there came a knock to the door, / and a voice cried: “Away to hell / with the belly of ash! But spare / the belly of chaff - and straight out the door / with the belly that’s empty!” // The woman of the house and the ash-girl / turned into thin air, / leaving the girl of chaff / to tell the tale: // which has been handed down from that day to this, to put the heart across the breasts of the teenage mermaids.’ (Trans. Medbh McGuckian; quoted on US Navy Academy Irish Literature website at here.)

“The Mermaid in the Labour Ward”: ‘Something stirred in her not / the swishing meteor of her fin, / but in the pit of the bed, / a body-long split of ice, / languid as dulse tentacles, / flaccid as fishbait. // “Lord Bless Us, isn’t this a hoot - / some kind of Night of the Long Knives - / half a staff as pissed as a newt, / and the rest of them you couldn’t trust / as far as you could throw them. / I’ve had it up to here.” / And she upped and yanked the sea-legs / out the door. // The crunch came / when she found herself / head over heels in their wake: / were these creatures joined to her, / or was she hinged on to them? / It took the nurse / to give her the low-down / and put her in the picture: / “What you have there, dear, / is called a leg, and another one to boot. / First leg, / second leg, / left, right, / one goes in front of the other.” It’s little wonder / in the long months that followed, / as her instep flattened and her arches dropped, / if her mind went with them.’ (Trans. Medbh McGuckian; quoted on US Navy Academy Irish Literature website at here.)

‘What Foremothers?’ in Theresa O’Connor, ed., The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers (Florida UP 1996), pp.8-20: “Did you see an old woman go down the path?” “I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.” This image galvanised a whole population at the beginning of this century and is still shockingly alive in the collective psyche for all that an unholy alliance of Marxist-Freudian reductionist intellects may seek to deny it. Eavan Boland is dead right to engage polemically with this image because, as Marina Warner has shown most comprehensively in her book Monuments and Maidens, there is a psychotic splitting involved where, the more the image of woman comes to stand for abstract concepts like justice, liberty, or national sovereignty, the more real women are denigrated and consigned barefoot and pregnant to the kitchen. […] (p.16); If nothing else, the practice of poetry has taught me that there is a psycho-emotio-imagistic dimension to our being, a feeling soul, which has fallen through the interstices of the mind/body polarities of the dominant discourse so that it is become quite literally unspeakable. A whole realm of powerful images exists within us, overlooked by, and cut off from, rational consciousness. This is very dangerous because, if Freud has taught us anything, it foreshadows the inevitable return of the repressed. If these images are not engaged with in playful dialogue, if we do not take them seriously, then they will wreak a terrible revenge by manifesting somatically as illnesses or by being acted out blindly and irrationally, as we see them being acted out at this very moment in the sack of Sarajevo, as ethnic and historic tensions, long brushed under the carpet of a monolithic Marxism, explode to the surface.’ (p.17); ‘I think in the long run, though, that we are lucky that for one reason or another on this island the door between the [n]ation and this other world has never been locked tight shut. There was always someone - the bard in the hall, the seanchaí by the fireside, or the balladeer in the pub - who kept his foot in the door. Later Ong calls it our “high degree of residual orality” [...] I love this aspect of our culture. It is one of the main things that drew me back to live here, after seven years on the shughrawn. It is infinitely more exciting and much more of a human challenge to live in a country that is even just intermittently in touch with the irrational than to live in one that has set its face resolutely against it./But this gift of ours is not without its inherent dangers, one of which is that in the absence of a responsible intelligentsia, this permeability [17] of the collective ego-boundaries can be manoeuvred and choreographed for very dubious purposes. The moving statues is a case in point.’ (p.17). [… &c.; including remarks on the irony of Mairead Farrell who was killed in Gibraltar on IRA active serviee denying the hold on her psyche of the ‘mother Ireland’ topos, and remarks on the X case, and the emotional bludgeoning of Annie Murphy by Bishop Casey.] [After respectful allusion to Edward Said:] ‘But enough” This postcolonial thing is getting out of hand and anyway it seems too easy: everyone is doing it.’ (p.19.)

Irish Language: ‘Irish is a language of enormous elasticity and emotional sensitivity; of quick and hilarious banter and a welter of references both historical and mythological; it is an instrument of imaginative depth and scope, which has been tempered by the community for generations until it can pick up and sing out every hint of emotional modulation that can occur between people. Many international scholars rhapsodize that this speech of ragged peasants seems always on the point of bursting into poetry.’ (‘Why I Chose to Write in Irish: The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back’, in The New York Times, 8 Jan. 1995; See longer version infra and full version as attached; this passage quoted at US Navy Academy Irish Literature Website [available online].)

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘Why I Choose To Write in Irish: The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back’, in The New York Times (8 January 1995).

NOT so long ago I telephoned my mother about some family matter. “So what are you writing these days?” she asked, more for the sake of conversation than anything else. “Oh, an essay for The New York Times,” I said, as casually as possible. “What is it about?” she asked. “About what it is like to write in Irish,” I replied. There was a good few seconds’ pause on the other end of the line; then, “Well, I hope you’ll tell them that it is mad.” End of conversation. I had got my comeuppance. And from my mother, who was the native speaker of Irish in our family, never having encountered a single word of English until she went to school at the age of 6, and well up in her teens before she realized that the name they had at home for a most useful item was actually two words - “safety pin” - and that they were English. Typical. But really not so strange. Some time later I was at a reception at the American Embassy in Dublin for two of their writers, Toni Morrison and Richard Wilbur. We stood in line and took our buffet suppers along to the nearest available table. An Irishwoman across from me asked what I did. Before I had time to open my mouth her partner butted in: “Oh, Nuala writes poetry in Irish.” And what did I write about? she asked. Again before I had time to reply he did so for me: “She writes poems of love and loss, and I could quote you most of them by heart.” This was beginning to get up my nose, and so I attempted simultaneously to deflate him and to go him one better. “Actually,” I announced, “I think the only things worth writing about are the biggies: birth, death and the most important thing in between, which is sex.” “Oh,” his friend said to me archly, “and is there a word for sex in Irish?” I looked over at the next table, where Toni Morrison was sitting, and I wondered if a black writer in America had to put up with the likes of that, or its equivalent. Here I was in my own country, having to defend the official language of the state from a compatriot who obviously thought it was an accomplishment to be ignorant of it. Typical, and yet maybe not so strange. Let me explain. [...]

See full-text copy - as attached.

Basic myth: ‘Myth is a basic, fundamental structuring of our reality, a narrative that we place on the chaos of sensation to make sense of our lives [...]. I feel about myth what you said about poetry, Medbh, that some level of crystallisation has occurred that is timeless. This crystallisation is, at a deep level, the Muse energy, and that’s why myth and poetry feed so wonderfully into each other.’ (See ‘Comhrá: Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’, foreword and afterword by Laura O’Connor, in The Southern Review: Special Issue on Irish Poetry, V, 31, 3 1995, pp.581-614; p.604.) Further, ‘I think it is downright pernicious to underestimate myth; it’s like pretending the unconscious does not exist, and that we are just composed of rationality. Myth is a basic, fundamental structuring of our reality, a narrative that we place on the chaos of sensation to make sense of our lives. The myth of the end of myth-making is the worst myth of all; it means that the unconscious has been finally cut off and is irretrievable.’ (Idem.)

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Sexist poetry: ‘At the deepest level - you may say at the level of ontological underpinning - the Irish poetic tradition is sexist and masculinist to the core’ [on RTE 1, Dec. 1993; quoted in Poetry Ireland, 41 Spring 1994), p.109].

Language & history: ‘Because of a particular set of circumstances, Irish fell out of history just when the modern mentality was about to take off. So major intellectual changes like the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Victorian prudery have never occurred in it, as they did in the major European languages. One consequence is that the attitude to the body enshrined in Irish remains extremely open and uncoy. It is almost impossible to be “rude” or “vulgar” in Irish. The body, with its orifices and excretions, is not treated in a prudish manner but is accepted as “an nádúir” or “nature” and becomes a source of repartee and laughter rather than anything to be ashamed of. Thus little old ladies of quite impeccable and unimpeachable moral character tell risqué stories with gusto and panache. Is there a word for sex in Irish, indeed! Is there an Eskimo word for snow?’ (‘Why I Choose to Write in Irish: The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back,’ in The New York Times Book Review, 8 Jan. 1995, pp.27-8 [see full-text copy - attached; also printed at this date in The Irish Times [Weekend]; text orig. supplied for Ricorso by David Gardner, Loyola Univ.)

Source: Feile na Laoch [blog] (7 July 2011) - available online; accessed 02.04.2019; cited in part on Facebook by Neil Patrick Doherty [ (2 April 2019) [Viz., “There’s a major register problem translating from Irish to English [...] “An de bheoaibh no de mhairbh thu” (“Are you of the living or of the dead?”), and it’s partly a joke, but it puts you thinking at the same time.”]