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ABSTRACT
This essay explores how one of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s self-translated autobiographical merfolk poems “A Remarkable Admission/Admháil Shuaithinseach” draws on Ireland’s influential pseudohistory Lebor Gabála Érenn/The Book of the Taking of Ireland to recover the archaic essence from Land-Under-Wave. After considering the practice of self-translation as a re-creation that produces “a second original,” and after interpreting the role of her Uncle Thomas as a revenant merman, the essay performs a close reading of the dual language poem, comparing her “crib,” or English version, to the works of her translators Art Hughes and Paul Muldoon. Ultimately, the essay argues that having Ní Dhomhnaill’s English self-translation alongside her Irish poem provides a “double vision” reading that breaks down binaries of identity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by author(s).
Notes
1. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Linguistic Ecology,” 85.
2. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 135. The boarding school was the Convent of the Faithful Companions of Jesus at Laurel Hill in Limerick.
3. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 135; 142.
4. On how Ní Dhomhnaill makes use of Irish mythology, see Sewell, “Irish Mythology Early Poetry”; Haberstroh, Women Creating Women; Potts, “When Ireland was Still”; and O’Connor, “Breaking the Rules.” On how Ní Dhomhnaill works specifically with the Táin Bó Cúailnge, see O’Connor, “Sex, Lies and Sovereignty” and Romanets, “Degenerating.” Ní Dhomhnaill’s Biblical sources are analysed in Mac Giolla Léith, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis.”
5. Romanets, “The (Translato)logic of Spectrality,” 175.
6. For a textual history of Lebor Gabála Érenn (hereafter LGÉ), see Carey, New Introduction. The first translation of LGÉ appeared in 1884 as The Book of the Taking of Ireland.
7. Brief overview of the LGÉ based on Carey, New Introduction, 1; and Carey, Lebor Gabála (hereafter LG), 44.
8. Ní Dhomhnaill’s references to the LGÉ, the Milesians, the Tuatha Dé Dananna, Ériu/Éire, Banba and Fotla/Fodhla are found in her Selected Essays, 48, 128, 167; Poet’s Chair, 54; and “Mother Ireland,” 193.
9. Krause, “Why Bother with the Original?” 127. Krause contends that self-translation became an established practice in Scottish Gaelic poetry beginning with Sorley MacLean in the 1930s. For more on self-translation in Scottish Gaelic poetry, see McLeod, “The Packaging of Gaelic Poetry.” On self-translation in Welsh poetry, see Davies, “Sleeping with the Enemy.” Poets in Ireland who rely on a mixture of self-translation and translations by others include Gearóid Mac Lochlainn and the late Michael Davitt.
10. See Krause, “Why Bother with the Original?” 136–38.
11. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Linguistic Ecology,” 88.
12. Her pre-1988 Irish volumes are An Dealg Droighin (1981), Féar Suaithinseach (1984).
13. Her post-1988 Irish volumes are Feis (1991) and Cead Aighnis (1998). Her other dual-language editions consist of Pharaoh's Daughter (1990), The Astrakhan Cloak (1992), The Water Horse (2000) and The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007).
14. Unlike fellow poets Biddy Jenkinson and Eibhlín Ní Mhurchiu who refuse to have their work rendered into English, Ní Dhomhnaill encourages others to translate her writing into English.
15. Cordingley, “Introduction: Self-Translation,” 2; Stocco, “Approaching Self-Translation,” 142; and Klinger, “Translated Otherness,” 114.
16. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Poetry Being Composed,” 16. For more on Irish connected to the Mother/the feminine, see Ní Dhomhnaill, Poet’s Chair, 156 and Kirkley, “Hélène Cixous’s Autre Bisexualité.”
17. Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian, “Comhrá,” 12.
18. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Hidden Ireland,” 115.
19. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 14–15.
20. In correspondence, Ní Dhomhnaill has clarified that she writes English drafts “in prose” and that it is the translator’s task to put the drafts into poetic shape. She also refers to those rough drafts as “working poems” that document her thoughts, her processing and “the marriage of energies within the boundaries of self.” In a published interview, she has revealed that she sends the “rough” first drafts to her colleague Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith “for his orthographic correction of the Irish.” Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. Letters to the author. 26 January 1992 and 31 October 1992; Dunsford, “Dramatis Persona,” 40–1.
21. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 200.
22. Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian, “Comhrá,” 14.
23. Irish poetry as conceived with a merman in Ní Dhomhnaill, “Interview” (1999), 100; Irish poems as babies in Dunsford, “Dramatis Persona,” 45; poems gestating for nine months in Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 142.
24. Translators as “pharaoh’s daughters” and translations as “somebody else’s babies” in Dunsford, “Dramatis Persona,” 45, 47. For more on how Ní Dhomhnaill uses the allegory of the pharaoh’s daughter rescuing the infant Moses to problematise issues of translation, see Mac Giolla Léith, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis,” 152.
25. Ní Dhomhnaill describes her “rough translation” as a “crib” in Yaeger, The Geography of Identity, 426.
26. Cordingley, “Introduction: Self-Translation,” 2.
27. Macalister, “Introduction,” LGÉ, Part II, 173.
28. I use R.A. Stewart Macalister’s English translation of Lebor Gabála Érenn/The Book of the Taking of Ireland. Made between 1937 and 1942, and accompanied by Notes and Introductions, this multiple book translation often prints two-to-three parallel versions in full, or it sets out the redactions as a series of single texts, or it compiles them into one composite narrative. For the overview of Cessair and Fintán, I work with the second book of the five-volume collection (i.e. Part II, 1939), 189–191.
29. Macalister, “Introduction,” LGÉ, 172.
30. The Dingle area of Kerry has been home to Ní Dhomhnaill’s ancestors for seven generations. For more about the importance of family and stories from Corcha Dhuibhne, see Selected Essays, 28 and also see the second stanza of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem “Mandala” in Féar Suaithinseach, 77.
31. Like Cú Chulainn’s gae bolga, the special weapon that strikes at the fundament, this would be considered “the greatest debasement of the male gendered heroic person” (Dooley, “Invention of Women,” 127).
32. Dooley, “Invention of Women,” 127.
33. “Poem no. XXIV,” LGÉ, 225.
34. Cessair and her company of women die at Cul Cessrach in Connachta (LGE, 179).
35. LGÉ, 171. The name Tul Tuinde survives in Tountinna, Tipperary, on the shore of Loch Derg (LGÉ, 235, Note #170).
36. Macalister, “Introduction,” LGÉ, 173.
37. Most of her merfolk poems are published in The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007). However, two early mermaid poems were included in Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta (1988). They are “Parthenogenesis” (for a critical analysis of this verse, see Revie, “Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Parthenogenesis”) and “An Mhaighdean Mara” (for critiques of this poem, see Poloczek, “Identity as Becoming,” 138–41; and Sewell, “Irish Mythology,” 48).
38. Potts, “When Ireland was Still Under a Spell: The Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill” (2003); Ferguson, “The Subversion of the Supernatural Lament in the Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill” (2013); and Kirkley, “Hélène Cixous’s Autre Bisexualité and the Eternal Feminine in the Works of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill” (2013).
39. Unless specified, all references are to Ní Dhomhnaill’s self-translated English-Irish poem that was published within her essay “Dinnsheanchas: The Naming of High or Holy Places,” in Yaeger, The Geography of Identity, 426–8.
40. I have searched far and wide for clarity on this, including Dinneen’s dictionary, the LGÉ, the internet, Ní Dhomhnaill’s writings, and Google Earth. Nothing has surfaced, leading me to conclude that the Náth is one of her toponomical asides that are part of the Irish writing tradition called dinnsheanchas.
41. For Ní Dhomhnaill’s biographical profile of Thomas Murphy (1906–1990), see Yaeger, The Geography of Identity, 416–26; and Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 27–37.
42. Ní Dhomhnaill was fostered out to her Aunt May and Uncle Thomas in the Kerry Gaeltacht at age five. She traces her poetic vocation to this year-long stay (from 1957–58) in Corcha Dhuibhne. See Selected Essays, 49–50, 197–201; Poet’s Chair, 79.
43. Thomas Murphy as a storyteller/poet in Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 40–41.
44. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 37.
45. The 4th century BCE genre called “Socratic conversations” are written by others (i.e. Plato, Xenophon) and are based on imagined reconstructions of Socrates’ dialogues with someone else (i.e. Euthyphro, Crito, Phaedo). See Plato, Apology and Related Dialogues, 14.
46. Fintán’s accounts of the Gael are found in a later Middle Irish tale. See Best, “Settling of the Manor of Tara.”
47. Cf fn 17.
48. Stocco, “Approaching Self-Translation,” 142.
49. I use the term “Irish paradox” whereas Kiberd talks about “Celtic categories.” See Inventing Ireland, 61.
50. Cronin, Translating Ireland, 4.
51. Ní Dhomhnaill returned to Ireland in 1980 after an extended stay in Turkey with her Muslim husband Dogan Leflef. She described her re-entry into the Gaeltacht as a “dis-ease” and as a form of “the bends.” See Selected Essays, 148.
52. Whereas I use “code-switching” to interpret the embodied narrator’s diglossic and diasporic responses to Ireland, it should be noted that Klinger uses the term to refer to “in-between” languages, like Pidgin English or public patois. See Klinger, “Translated Otherness,” 114.
53. While Hughes’s English version was published before her dual-language self-translation appeared in print, we can assume she followed the ritual of sending both of her “working poems” to him, giving him access to her thoughts/her processing. See fn 20 for more clarification.
54. All references to Hughes’s translation are to “A Remarkable Revelation.” Poetry Ireland Review 47 (Autumn/Winter 1995): 11–12.
55. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 26.
56. All references to Muldoon’s translation are to “A Remarkable Admission” in Fifty Minute Mermaid 86–9.
57. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 26.
58. Murphy, “Blaskets to Bologna,” 13.
59. Yaeger, The Geography of Identity, 426; Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 37.
60. For more on how Ní Dhomhnaill’s male translators often depart from her poetic agenda and replace the misogyny from traditional representations, see Romanets “(Translato)logic of Spectrality,” 176–85 and Welch, “Translation as Tribute,” 129.
61. Mac Giolla Léith, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis,” 150; Nic Dhiarmada, “Going For It,” 3. Muldoon has also been referred to as “a Northerner…[who doesn’t] have Irish.” Critics complain that he tends towards “autonomous writing” that mixes an “urban slangy target-language…[and] reshapes Ní Dhomhnaill’s psychogeography.” See O’Connor, “Breaking the Rules,” 83; Romanets, “The (Translato)logic of Spectrality,” 184–5.
62. Ní Dhomhnaill, Selected Essays, 170.
63. Ní Dhomhnaill, “Hidden Ireland,” 106.
64. See note 1 above, 89.
65. Term coined by Romanets, “The (Translato)logic of Spectrality,” 174.
66. Cf fn 24.
67. All references to “Parthenogenesis” are to the translation by Michael Hartnett, The Bright Wave/An Tonn Gheall, 126–9. For other interpretations of “Parthenogensis” see Revie, “Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Parthenogenesis”; Haberstroh, Women Creating Women, 180–1; and Poloczek, “Identity as Becoming,” 141–4.
68. O’Leary, “A Night with Nuala,” 22.