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Abstract
This essay analyses contemporary poetry by Irish and Galician women and assesses how it is affected by tensions between national discourses and those that reach beyond the nation. Gender and national identity are permeated, to various degrees, by transnational ideologies such as feminism, Celticism and Catholicism, but these are transformed by the sociocultural specificities of each community. Local interests move to alliances with other nations which are seen as sharing similar objectives, while language choice, torn between the vernacular and the global, becomes a decisive constituent of the writers' self-image. The study demonstrates that many Irish and Galician women poets express their disaffection towards national and transnational discourses that construe them as symbolically central but grant them little social agency.
Notes
1 The research for this essay was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, through the project ‘Poetry and Gender: Contemporary Irish and Galician Women Poets’ (HUM2005-04897/FILO), by the Xunta de Galicia/ERDF (PGIDIT06PXIC204071PN), and by the ‘Rede de Lingua e Literatura Inglesa e Identidade’ 2007/000145-0).
2 All translations from the Galician are my own. Translations from the Irish will be attributed to their respective translators in the footnotes.
3 The Galician language originated as ‘Galician-Portuguese’ in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula. Galician-Portuguese was the language used in lyrical poetry in this and other regions of the peninsula from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Both languages still have strong linguistic and cultural ties.
4 For more on the emergence of contemporary Irish and Galician women poets, as well as on the interests these writers have in common, see Palacios-González and González-Fernández (2008) and Palacios and Lojo (2009).
5 Other thoroughgoing critiques of national injunctions are collected in Walshe (1997), which explores discourses about sexual identity that are alternatives to the heterosexual norm prescribed by the state.
6 González-Fernández (2005: 67–8) suggests that this could explain the absence of Galician re-readings of biblical texts, an aspect that I shall return to below.
7 Translated by Paul Muldoon. The full text of this poem is also available at <http://www.irishpage.com/poems/pharoah.htm>. 9 Jan. 2009. Note the spelling of ‘pharaoh’.
8 Curiously enough, the French government created a new Ministry in 2007 named the ‘Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Mutual Development’ (Ministère de l'immigration, de l'intégration, de l'identité nationale et du développement solidaire).
9 According to the Secretaría Xeral de Política Lingüística (2001), 91.04% of people can speak the Galician language. The 2006 Census in Ireland, carried out by the Central Statistics Office Ireland (CSO) (2007), shows that 41.9% of the population has the ability to speak Irish. However, ability does not mean actual everyday use, which would considerably reduce these figures in Galicia and Ireland.
10 The symbol @ is often used in informal Galician and Spanish texts as a gender suffix which combines the masculine ‘o’ and the feminine ‘a’, in order to challenge the linguistic norm of using the masculine form to apply to both male and female referents. ‘Antepasad@s’ attempts to make the feminine visible in language and I opted for its translation as ‘fe-male ancestors’.
11 María Xesús Nogueira-Pereira (2006) has traced the various allusions to the Penelope myth in contemporary Galician poetry and has drawn special attention to poets like Xohana Torres, Ana Romaní, Chus Pato, Marta Dacosta and María do Cebreiro, whose Penelopes, tired of waiting for Odysseus to return from his travels, decide to head out to sea and discover the world on their own.
12 Translated by Ciaran Carson.
13 According to the Lebor Gabàla Érenn, Amergin was one of the mythical sons of Mil who left Galicia and, after defeating the Thuatha Dé Danann tribes, invaded Ireland. The Galician national anthem claims that Galicia is the home of Breoghan, Amergin's great-grandfather.
14 María do Cebreiro Rábade-Villar is both a poet and an academic. She signs her poetry books with just her first name (María do Cebreiro), while she uses both first and last names for her academic publications.