The
Fortnight Interview:
Dark but funny and transformative
Liam
Carson talks to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
'Nuala
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 Ó Rathaile', commented Bernard
O'Donoghue in the Irish Times. Praise indeed. To which it could
be added that she is also one of this country's foremost writers
in any language. But Ní Dhomnaill has chosen to write in Irish.
Rather
than the object of contempt it sadly is for many Irish people, for
her Irish is a thing of intrinsic beauty and great cultural wealth.
She has written, "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".
For
Ní Dhomhnaill, the loss of Irish is perhaps the greatest wound inflicted
on our society. In her last collection, Cead Aighnis (Leave to Speak)
her land-locked merfolk suffer a collective psychic breakdown that
is a profoundly moving metaphor for cultural devastation. When we
met in her suburban home just outside Dublin, I wondered about her
merfolk. "They are lost, totally vulnerable; they are what epidemiologists
call a virgin population, they have no resistance. And it's true.
West Kerry, for instance, had no resistance to TB in the 1890s".
She further believes that the shift from Irish to English unleashed
'madness throughout the population'. Within Irish, there is a 'consensus
or grá which doesn't make it through to English'. Her own parents
were caught between languages. "They were working in two different
areas, and never the twain did meet...The emotions were stuck in
Irish and didn't make it through to English. So their emotions would
burst out in a totally inappropriate way over totally inappropriate
things".
Shift
In
her early life, Ní Dhomhnaill experienced her own form of linguistic
and cultural shift. She was born in Lancashire in 1952, where her
parents worked as doctors. Her family returned to the Dingle Gaeltacht
in 1957. "They came back because of sheer racism - not from the
people in the streets, but from colleagues". The Kerry they came
back to had 'no television, no electricity, no running water'. The
locals dubbed Nuala 'an cailín beag Sasanach' (the wee English girl),
and she vividly remembers being regarded as an outsider. "I had
English English, not Irish English, and people would be mocking
me. I didn't fit in".
But
she rapidly began to speak in Irish, after some initial resistance.
The move home, however, impinged on her learning. "I was a very
late reader. I had been on the point of reading when I was four.
Then I switched to Ireland, and they had a different schooling system.
In England, they did it by sound, by syllables. Then there was another
language, and everything, and I got terribly confused. I didn't
actually read until I was eight. Once I started, and realized what
the words meant, what it was all about, I was a book a day person
from then on. Lots of five find-outers and dogs and Enid Blyton.
There wasn't much in Irish...but when I went to school I had a wonderful
Irish teacher, and she had lots of books for teenagers, and Ó Ríordáin.
But basically I remember reading Wuthering Heights and Tales of
Mystery and Imagination by Poe".
Hide
Literature
became her very life-blood. At secondary school, she would hide
books in her uniform. "I had to have a book down my front,
like a talisman, otherwise I couldn't face the world". Her
reading included an introduction to mythology through a copy of
Myths and Legends of the World owned by her grandfather; she also
devoured her Uncle Ruairí's collection of Time-Life books
"on evolution, wonderful nature books...I stayed up all night
reading one on ecology".
By
the age of sixteen, she had begun to write poetry, initially in
English. In the process of writing a poem for an Irish Times competition,
she changed languages mid-poem, finding that 'the words sat properly
on the page' in Irish. "There was more going on than I knew
logically".
Perhaps
it was simply the sound of Irish that worked for her. I asked her
about the relationship between poetry and sound. "Poetry is
to a large degree sound. The sound pattern emerges first, then the
words, then the meaning, in that order. But last of all, it's the
meaning of it. The meaning can change quite arbitrarily, depending
on whether the sound is right or not".
So
can meaning in poetry be defined? "A poem means itself. You
create something, rather than define it. I do think that meaning
or logos is part of the transaction, but meaning can be something
hiding behind the words or imbuing the words".
And
Ní Dhomhnaill is also most emphatically a muse poet. "Before
all this post-structuralism, the poets had a perfectly comprehensible
way of talking about poetry which had to do with the muse...the
muse is imbued with a particular energy that causes a poem to be
written. When I had small children, they were the muse".
So
the muse in her vision is nothing vague - it is always focused through
a person, place or thing. "Through this focusing you get the
poem, otherwise it's too diverse, it's all over the place, all the
molecules are going off in a thousand directions, and you'd never
get a poem".
At
University College Cork, Ní Dhomhnaill found her literary
milieu amidst a new group of young poets that included Liam Ó Muirthile,
Gabriel Rosenstock - and Michael Davitt, the driven editor of the
poetry magazine Innti, a revolutionary force in Gaelic literature,
and to this day perhaps the most influential, imaginative and beautifully
designed literary magazine to have been published in Ireland. "We
were scamps, scalliwags, we were up to no good", she gleefully
recalls. "Davitt was to us what Diaghelev was to the Ballet
Rus, an impresario, a Piped Piper".
A
further confirmation of her poetic vocation came when she heard
Seán Ó Ríordáin deliver a spontaneous and stunning riposte to Mairtín
Ó Cadháin's lecture 'Pápeirí Bána, Pápéirí Breaca (White Papers,
Speckled Papers)'. Ó Cadháin asserted that it ill-behoved any language
to rely on lyric poetry for its survival, proposing in its place
'the prose future of the language'. Ní Dhomhnaill remembers Ó Riordáin
as "extraordinary...he reviled Ó Cadháin as a Rabelesian writer,
it was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard, and I wanted to be
a part of it".
She
still eschews a moralistic intent in literature, declaring that
'poetry comes from a place beyond good and evil'.
Husband
Whilst
in Cork, Ní Dhomhnaill met her husband, geologist Dogan Leflef.
Once married, they spent time in Holland, before living for a number
of years in Dogan's native Turkey. This was a "major culture
shock...but I had to get on with it, learning a new language, another
way of living, having kids". But she took a small piece of
Ireland with her in the form of a few Claddagh Records albums of
Irish poets, including one of Máirtín Ó Direáin. "I'd listen
to it late at night when I couldn't sleep; it was quite extraordinary
to hear this in the middle of the Anatolian night, ” Ó Direáin
intoning 'faoiseamh a gheobhadsa, seal beag gairid (I will find
solace/for a short time only)'.
She
returned to Ireland in 1980, immersing herself in poetry, and her
first collection An Dealg Droighin (The Sloe Thorn) was published
in 1981, followed by the 1984 publication of Féar Suithinseach (Succulent
Grass). She still spends her summers in Turkey, where she admits
to being uplifted by the light and warmth of the country, and to
effectively adopting a Turkish persona. "I'm inclined sometimes
to cry when I hear Turkish folk songs. And Turkish does have an
emotional timbre for me, but it's more distant, not part of my basic
identity. But when I'm in Turkey for long enough, I become Turkish
in my body movements and language. It happens in a subliminal way".
Perhaps
more than any other modern Irish poet, she is drawn to Irish folklore
and mythology as a source of inspiration. For her, myth is an essential
tool for coming to grips with human reality, a 'narrative that we
place on the chaos of sensation to make sense of our lives'. She
is scathing, however, about the diluted and cheapened versions of
mythology that crowd our bookshelves. "I can't stand Anam Cara,
or any of its arts and parts, and all that kitsch new age stuff".
To
properly comprehend mythology, she insists on the importance of
'going back to the basics', and spends many hours checking primary
sources in the Royal Irish Academy and in the Department of Folklore
in University College Dublin. She is further disturbed by the reduction
in degree courses in Celtic languages and Old Irish, bemoaning their
replacement by Irish Studies courses designed as a 'feel-good factor
for Irish-Americans'.
In
Ní Dhomhnaill's view, myth is intrinsic to understanding
our place in the world. "I'm fascinated by folklore, piseogs,
the extraordinary wide repertory of material in the Irish collective
folk memory. A lot of that is projected on the landscape, a lot
of it is dinnseanchas (knowledge of landscape and placenames). Every
parish to this day has somebody who is the chronicler, who knows
all the stories, who brings you around. I don't know if it will
last another generation. Often they are retired schoolteachers or
farmers with good memories. Somebody in each generation takes up
the baton".
Negative
I
finally ask Nuala about negative attitudes towards Irish in our
society, particularly in the manner in which the language and culture
is either ignored or ridiculed in the media. "It's despicable.
The media has agendas, and it just so happens that nobody has an
agenda that includes Irish, in fact some have agendas that disinclude
Irish. The post-colonial thing explains a lot of it. We never had
a revolution; we had a rebellion. There was a power change, where
the Catholic middle-classes took over from the Anglo-Irish middle-classes.
There was a deeply imbedded self-hatred".
For
all this, she remains optimistic, and is heartened by the fact that
there are powerful new voices emerging in Irish. She cites Gearóid
MacLochlainn, "bestriding the languages like a colossus. You
can't read his poetry without hearing the CD as well, it's all about
mixes. It's a new generation, and hip-hop is a perfectly acceptable
art-form".
Throughout
our interview, Ní Dhomhnaill laughs loud, heartily and often.
I tell her that I think people take her far too seriously sometimes,
missing the humour in her poems. She agrees, 'people just don't
get it'. There is darkness in her work - but at its heart, more
than anything else, there is a genuine belief in the celebratory
and transformative power of poetry and art.
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's next collection, The Fifty Minute Mermaid,
is forthcoming from The Gallery Press, with translations by Paul
Muldoon. Other bi-lingual editions from Gallery include The Astrakhan
Cloak, The Water Horse and Pharoah's Daughter.
Cead
Aighnis is published by An Sagart.
Nuala
Ní Dhomnaill will be reading her work during IMRAM: A Voyage of
Discovery, the Irish Language Literature Festival, which takes place
in Dublin from Wednesday 29 September 2004 to Sunday 3 October 2004.
For further details, e-mail liamog62@eircom.net.
P
r e v i e w
Issue 428
Whose
Irish News? The
rumour mill had been going overtime in Belfast for ages - the west
Belfast-based Andersonstown News was planning to go daily and the
long-established Irish News was “bricking it’’ as
one well-known journalist so succinctly put it. As it turned out,
the planned daily was not as close to hand as the Irish News feared.
by
Pól Ó Muirí
Meaning
What You Say Most
people find philosophers abstract and difficult to understand. They
would have some doubts about whether they have anything worthwhile
to say about the important events of our times, such as the 9/11
attacks and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ for example.
The interest of this book is that it shows that philosophy has a
valuable contribution to make to the understanding of phenomena
like ‘terrorism’ and ‘war’. The editor has interviewed
the two most important philosophers still alive, Jacques Derrida
and Jurgen Habermas. In two interviews Habermas and Derrida expose
their entire philosophical framework to interpret the 9/11 events
in an accessible manner. Each interview is followed by an essay
by Giovanna Borradori, contextualising the arguments developed by
the two thinkers.
by Liam O Ruairc
The
Fortnight Interview:
Dark but funny and transformative 'Nuala
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 Ó Rathaile', commented Bernard
O'Donoghue in the Irish Times. Praise indeed. To which it could
be added that she is also one of this country's foremost writers
in any language. But Ní Dhomnaill has chosen to write in Irish.
by Liam Carson
S
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