{"id":6607,"date":"2016-07-04T10:27:32","date_gmt":"2016-07-04T09:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6607"},"modified":"2016-07-05T07:51:55","modified_gmt":"2016-07-05T06:51:55","slug":"leabhar-na-hathghabhala-poems-of-repossession-ed-by-louis-de-paor-bloodaxe-books-15-00-reviewed-by-david-cooke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6607","title":{"rendered":"Leabhar na hAthghabh\u00e1la, Poems of Repossession<\/em>, ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a315.00"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nLouis de Paor\u2019s bilingual Leabhar na hAthghabh\u00e1la, Poems of Repossession<\/em>, is the first major anthology of Irish language poetry for a quarter of a century since Dermot Bolger’s Bright Wave: An Tonn Gheal<\/em> (Raven Arts Press, 1986) and An Crann Faoi Bhl\u00e1th, The Flowering Tree<\/em> (Wolfhound Press, 1991), edited by Declan Kiberd and Gabriel Fitzmaurice. It includes work from twenty-five poets ranging from P\u00e1draig \u00d3 h\u00c9igeartaigh (1871-1936) to Gear\u00f3id Mac Lochlainn (b. 1966). The volume also includes a substantial critical apparatus. Alongside the introduction, in which De Paor charts the history of modern poetry in Irish, elucidating its social and linguistic contexts, there are also detailed biographies of the poets, useful notes on many of the poems, and a fascinating selection of comments by the translators on how they have approached their work. <\/p>\n

Concentrating, by and large, on the most significant figures, De Paor has been discerning in his choices. A dozen poets chosen by Kiberd and Fitzmaurice have not been included here, presumably because they didn\u2019t make made it across De Paor\u2019s critical threshold or, like Breand\u00e1n \u00d3 Beach\u00e1in, aka Brendan Behan, may be considered to have made their mark more substantially in English or in a different genre. Most significantly, perhaps, only two poets have been added who were too young to be included in The Flowering Tree<\/em>: De Paor himself, who has included just three of his own poems, and Gear\u00f3id Mac Lochlainn who has five. Moreover, as if to enhance the canonical status of his anthology, De Paor\u2019s title echoes that of Thomas Kinsella\u2019s monumental An Duanaire. 1600-1900<\/em>; Poems of The Disposessed<\/em> (Dolmen Press, 1981) and even takes as its opening poem P\u00e1draig \u00d3 h\u00c9igeartaigh\u2018s \u2018My Sorrow, Donncha\u2019, which was the latest poem chosen by Kinsella and considered by him to be \u2018a moving end to the high literary tradition of three centuries\u2019.<\/p>\n

In a brief review, there is insufficient space to comment on all the issues raised in De Paor\u2019s magisterial introduction, other than to emphasise his plea for cultural pluralism and to applaud his insistence that translations are respectful of the work that inspires them. Hitherto, Irish poetry has frequently been presented in Lowellesque \u2018imitations\u2019 by celebrity poets, who play fast and loose with meaning. De Paor is acutely aware of the dangers inherent in this method: \u2018Even where a handful of poems in Irish are included in anthologies…there is a strong sense than an English language aesthetic is operating to the detriment of work written in another language with its own acoustic sense, its own distinctive tradition and aesthetic\u2019. For De Paor there is a duty to provide versions that not only work well in English, but are also faithful enough to offer readers with some grasp of the language a way into the Irish text. Thus, there are two versions of Liam S. G\u00f3gan\u2019s \u2018Tercets\u2019. In one, David Wheatley is praised by his editor for giving a strong sense of \u2018the metrical dexterity\u2019 that characterizes G\u00f3gan\u2019s work. However, in \u2018Notes on individual poems\u2019 there is also a version by De Paor in which, line by line, meaning is rendered more literally. <\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the parlous situation of the Irish language in the Twentieth Century, one detects a certain \u2018siege mentality\u2019 in some of the work included here. There are no monoglot speakers of Irish and many who have opted to write in it have learned it as a second language. Given the alternative of writing in a global language that one has learned from the cradle, their decision to do so might be considered Quixotic or maybe heroic, depending upon one\u2019s point of view. This is the subject of Nuala N\u00ed Dhomhnaill\u2019s \u2018The Language Question\u2019:<\/p>\n

I send my hope afloat
\nin the small boat of a language
\nas you might lay a baby
\nin a basket cradle \u2026<\/p>\n

Tensions are also evident in the work of Se\u00e1n \u00d3 R\u00edord\u00e1in, considered one of the founding fathers of modern Irish poetry. Brought up in a bilingual village in County Cork, he is on occasion apologetic about the quality of his Irish, a language he addresses in one poem (not included here) as only \u2018half-mine\u2019. His first collection shocked many conservative elements with it startling neologisms, comparable in their effect to the early work of his anglophone Welsh contemporary, Dylan Thomas. His uneasiness comes to the fore in \u2018Go Back again\u2019:<\/p>\n

Close your mind on all that has happened
\nSince the Battle of Kinsale was lost,
\nAnd since the load is heavy
\nAnd the road is long, free your mind
\nFrom the yoke of English civilisation,
\nShelley, Keats and Shakespeare \u2026<\/p>\n

Presumably, only a man who loved the poets in question could have written these lines. In Cathal \u00d3 Searchaigh\u2019s \u2018Native Speaker\u2019 the tone is more ironic: \u2018He had hoover\u00e1iled<\/em> the flat, \/ jeyes-fluide\u00e1iled<\/em> the bins, \/ harpic\u00e1iled<\/em> the loo, vime\u00e1iled<\/em> the bath\u2019; while Gear\u00f3id Mac Lochlainn who, unlike \u00d3 Searchaigh, is not a native speaker, is more scathing of the \u2018self-satisfied monoglots\u2019 he takes to task in \u2018Translations\u2019, and yet it is hardly their fault if they have been deprived of their linguistic heritage and don\u2019t, understandably enough, have the time or inclination to perfect what is for them a second language.<\/p>\n

The above is not to suggest, however, that poetry in Irish is obsessively inward looking. One of the fascinating aspects of this anthology is to note the cross currents and influences that have shaped the poetry included in it and to see how a legitimate desire to preserve one\u2019s roots does not necessarily cut one off from the wider world. One of the earliest poets selected by De Paor, and one whose work, for this reviewer at least, has been a pleasant surprise, is Liam S. G\u00f3gan. Born in 1891, his first collection was published in 1919 and thus well before the work of the more frequently anthologized \u00d3 Dire\u00e1in and \u00d3 R\u00edord\u00e1in. In \u2018Fantastical Fog\u2019 the ambiance evoked is more reminiscent of Baudelaire or T.S. Eliot than rural Ireland:<\/p>\n

The fogs of November
\nconstrict round the low,
\nunhappy light of the street lamp
\nat the edge of the green where I lie,
\nthe lamp-post itself an apparition
\nin this yellow half-world.<\/p>\n

M\u00e1irt\u00edn O Dire\u00e1in, too, who left Aran to work as a bureaucrat in Dublin, evokes the dreariness and chaos of life in the city in his long poem \u2018Our Wretched Era\u2019: \u2018a prisoner before me, \/ a prisoner behind, \/ and I between them \/ a prisoner like all \/ since we took our leave \/ of land and strand.\u2019 However, his vision is always coloured by nostalgia for the peasant simplicity of life on his native islands. The work of Derry O\u2019Sullivan, a Capuchin monk, is influenced by his long residence in France. Eoghan \u00d3 Tuarisc adapts the ritual of the Catholic mass to memorialize the victims of Hiroshima; while Caitlin Maude sings defiantly of love against the backdrop of the Vietnam War: \u2018They said we had no shame \/ parading our love \/ in the midst of this desolation\u2019. Se\u00e1n \u00d3 Curraion in his extended narrative, Beairtle<\/em>, seems almost to be updating Kavanagh\u2019s The Great Hunger<\/em> for the age of the EU, as he takes his protagonist from the Connemara Gaeltacht to exile in Dublin and then Paris, where he reads Sartre, Camus and the Nouveau roman<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By the early 1970s the new generation of poets were wide open to the world and experimenting with influences from across the Atlantic. Cathal \u00d3 Searchaigh and Michael Davitt absorbed the influence of the Beats and the lyrics of Bob Dylan. In \u2018One Special Day\u2019 \u00d3 Searchaigh takes the poetics of Rimbaud\u2019s Illuminations<\/em> and transplants them to the Donegal Gaeltacht. Michael Davitt\u2019s \u2018Shortening the Road\u2019 is in one sense a freewheeling poem about two strangers meeting up \u2018on the road\u2019 while being at the same time a celebration of community and linguistic roots:<\/p>\n

A Muskerryman for sure, I thought,
\nBut no, \u2018A Corkman born and bred.\u2019<\/p>\n

That lit a fuse and we launched
\nInto Irish, tracking each other
\nThrough lanes of memory
\nAnd God it\u2019s a small world
\nThat both of us had travelled
\nThe very same backroads of dialect \u2026<\/p>\n

Nuala N\u00ed Dhomnaill, like Davitt, was associated with the influential Innti<\/em> group in the early 70s, and is probably the most widely translated contemporary Irish language poet. Her work is informed not only by native mythology but by the years she spent abroad, most notably in Turkey. In \u2018Venio ex Oriente\u2019 East meets West in imagery as lyrical and sensual as The Song of Songs<\/em>:<\/p>\n

There is henna in my hair
\npearls at my throat
\nand a crock of wild honey
\nis hidden in my navel.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another fragrance on my body,
\nthe scent of honey from Imleacht Slat
\nthe smells of turf and water-mint
\nand its colour is dark. <\/p>\n

Like her predecessor, M\u00e1ire Mhac an tSaoi, Ni Dhomhaill\u2019s feminism and her sometimes frank avowal of female sexuality have challenged the repressive morality of traditional Catholicism. In \u2018Mary Hogan\u2019s Quatrains\u2019, Mhac an tSaoi\u2019s protagonist proclaims: \u2018I care little for people\u2019s suspicions, \/ I care little for priest\u2019s prohibitions, \/ for anything save to lie stretched \/ between you and the wall…\u2019 Other notable feminine voices here are Deirdre Brennan, whose richly textured poems exploring motherhood deserve a much wider audience, as does the work of that elusive poet whose nom de plume<\/em> is Biddy Jenkinson and who, at least in Ireland, has previously refused to allow more than a handful of her poems to be translated into English. So perhaps we can leave the last word to her: \u2018The writing is a matter of love \u2026 a stretching back along the road we have come, a stand here in the present among the outnumbered and beleaguered but determined survivors of Gaelic Ireland.\u2019
\n 
\nDavid Cooke<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Louis de Paor\u2019s bilingual Leabhar na hAthghabh\u00e1la, Poems of Repossession, is the first major anthology of Irish language poetry for a quarter of a century since Dermot Bolger’s Bright Wave: An Tonn Gheal (Raven Arts Press, 1986) and An Crann Faoi Bhl\u00e1th, The Flowering Tree (Wolfhound Press, 1991), edited by Declan Kiberd and Gabriel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nLeabhar na hAthghabh\u00e1la, Poems of Repossession, ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a315.00 - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6607\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Leabhar na hAthghabh\u00e1la, Poems of Repossession, ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a315.00 - 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