The question of language: Postcolonial translation in the bilingual collections of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon

Abstract

The Irish-language poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill simultaneously defends Irish as a signifier of cultural authenticity and celebrates its fruitful cross-fertilization with other languages and their cultural cargo. Focusing on Paul Muldoon's translations of Ní Dhomhnaill, I treat the resulting bilingual collections as a case study for the ethical implications of translation in a postcolonial context where Irish is under threat. I consider the case of Irish-English translation in relation to models of postcolonial translation that advocate “foreignizing” Standard English by subjecting it to the structures of source languages. I suggest that Irish-English translators remain alert to the risk of “colonizing” Irish, employing “subversive literalism” to produce bilingual editions that promote a fruitful symbiosis of the colonizing and indigenous languages.

Keywords:

• poetry translation
• bilingualism
• postcolonialism
• Irish language
• Paul Muldoon
• Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Notes

1. The Innti poets take their name from a literary journal begun in the 1970s as a student broadside at University College Cork. The journal became a platform for Irish-language poets seeking to move away from the nationalist politics associated with Irish-language culture and to draw, instead, on modern themes and a cosmopolitan range of influences. Apart from Ní Dhomhnaill, the most celebrated Innti poets are Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock and Liam Ó Muirthile.

2. Lucy Cogan of University College Dublin brought the invaluable perspective of a native speaker of Irish to my analysis of the translations and their cultural context.

3. Broadly speaking, the three major dialects are those from the provinces of Munster (Cúige Mumhan), Connaught (Cúige Chonnacht) and Ulster (Cúige Uladh). Ní Dhomhnaill uses the Munster dialect.

4. The joke of this macaronic construction lies in the similarity of “cocs” to the English word “cock”. “Cocs” is not an Irish word but may allude to the coccyx or tailbone. “Um-bo” connotes “over”. “Head” is the English word.

5. © The Gallery Press, 2007. I gratefully acknowledge the kind permission of the Gallery Press (www.gallerypress.com) to quote from Pharaoh's Daughter (1990), The Astrakhan Cloak (1993) and The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007).

6. Unless otherwise stated, all gloss translations are mine.

7. Please note that the glossed English titles of poems by Ní Dhomhnaill provided in this article may not be the same as the titles in the published English translations.

8. The closest (but still inadequate) English translation for sídhe is “fairies”.

9. The wide world and his mother piled

into their cars

and as the man said about the big crap

done in the middle of the road

just to have it put out on the Gaeltacht Radio –

they came from east and west and north and south

to look at it. [My translation]

10. “Glory Be!” translates aililiú [Hallelujah] and “Her Majesty's Customs” translates fir chustaim [customs men].

11. As we have seen, a “translated” form of English already exists in anglophone Irish literature, for instance in Gregory's Kiltartan. Strategies of subversive literalism may result, perhaps fruitfully, in language that intersects with these existing forms. As we have also seen with the example of Stage Irish, however, some forms of Hiberno-English have also acquired associations with cliché and caricature. Through strategies of subversive literalism, translators might pay homage to the Hiberno-English often found in anglophone Irish literature by reinvigorating the practice of subjecting English to the grammatical and idiomatic features of Irish.