Tagged: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Evening Harvest: January 13, 2013

Somewhere to Disappear

Somewhere To Disappear, a film by Laure Flammarion & Arnaud Uyttenhove with Alec Soth

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Athair (Father) – Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

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Essay – My Backlogged Pages – John Feffer

By late Saturday afternoon, the organizers of the sale reduced the price to $1 for whatever you could fit into a bag or box. Even on my meager newspaper route savings, I could afford to splurge. I ranged far from my comfort zone of science fiction. I judged books by their covers. I stuffed any and all recommended reads into my sack.

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“Of Dolls And Murder” shows how dollhouses are used to recreate creepy crimes | Nerve.com

John Waters narrates Of Dolls and Murder, an upcoming documentary about the Nutshell Studios of Unexplained Death, which consists of crime scenes recreated in dollhouses to help police solve murders.

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The Neglected Books Page » Blog Archive » A Honeymoon Experiment, by Margaret and Stuart Chase

Their hypothesis was simple: with perserverence, they would be able to land jobs earning a decent wage and survive on solely on what they made. They gave themselves nine weeks.

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Grace by Christian Wiman

Is there not something supremely admirable, even heroic, here? To have inherited a fortune and an illness at the same time, to have fought off the latter in order to give away—perhaps by means of giving away—the former; to have transformed one’s own abstract and overwhelming unhappiness into the concrete and lasting happiness of others; to have done all this and asked for nothing in return? Depression intensifies, even as it poisons and deadens, one’s sense of self. Anyone who has experienced this, or even been around someone experiencing it, knows how excruciatingly difficult it is to make the least gesture toward the world. And here is a life of such gestures. Here is a heart that, though blighted with sadness, yet flowered in thousands of others.

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Book Review – ‘Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever – Stories,’ by Justin Taylor – Review – NYTimes.com

In 1981, Raymond Carver advanced a literary genre with “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The movement wasn’t dirty realism or minimalism, but “vaguely titled fiction”: stories concealing their intensity and anxiety behind titles full of pronouns and ennui, signifying nothing much about their narratives.

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Telling Tails – Tim O’Brien – The Atlantic

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

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Gan do Chuid Éadaigh – Without Your Clothes

A Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all! I have to admit that this isn’t actually my favorite day of the year; downtown St. Paul, where I work, is hub of St. Pat’s festivities in the Twin Cities, and Rice Park was awash in all manner of green tchotchke and inebriated revelry. I went to the parade, of course, but just long enough to see the Brian Ború pipe band and scout for in-laws (none spotted, mission accomplished).

Instead, I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by sitting down with some Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Here’s my attempt at translating “Gan do Chuid Éadaigh.”

Gan do Chuid Éadaigh

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Is fearr liom tú
gan do chuid éadaigh ort,
do léine shíoda
is do charabhat,
do scáth fearthainne faoi t’ascaill
is do chulaith
trí phíosa faiseanta
le barr feabhais táilliúrachta,

do bhróga ar a mbíonn
i gcónaí snas,
do lámhainní craiceann eilite
ar do bhois,
do hata crombie
feircthe ar fhaobhar na cluaise–
ní chuireann siad aon ruainne
le do thuairisc,

mar thíos fúthu
i ngan fhios don slua
tá corp gan mhaisle, mháchail
nó míbhua
lúfaireacht ainmhí allta,
cat mór a bhíonn amuigh
san oíche
is fhágann sceimhle ina mharbhshruth.

Do ghuailne leathan fairsing
is do thaobh
chomh slim le sneachta séidte
ar an sliabh;
do dhrom, do bhásta singil
is do ghabhal
an rúta
go bhfuil barr pléisiúrtha ann.

Do chraiceann atá chomh dorcha
is slim
le síoda go mbeadhg na habhann
go ndeirtear faoi
go bhfuil suathadh fear is ban ann.

Mar sin is dá bhrí sin
is tú ag rince liom anocht
cé go mb’fhearr liom tú
gan do chuid éadaigh ort,
b’fhéidir nárbh aon díobhail duit
gléasadh anois ar an dtoirt
an ionad leath ban Éireann
a mhilleadh is a lot.

Without Your Clothes

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

I would rather see you
without your clothes on,
your silk shirt
and your necktie,
your umbrella under your arm
and your smart
three piece suit
of excellent tailoring,

your shoes
freshly polished,
your doe-skinned gloves
on your hands,
your crombie hat
cocked toward your ear–
none of these things
add up to you,

for underneath
and unknown to the world
is a body without scar, blemish,
or defect,
lithe as a wild beast,
a lion that is out
in the night
leaving terror in its wake.

Your broad shoulders
and your flank
are smooth as drifted snow
on the mountain;
your back, your slender waist,
and at your crotch
the root
of highest pleasure.

Your skin is so dark
and smooth
like silk and velvet
spun together
smelling of meadowsweet
and watermead
that can drive
both men and women mad.

And that is why
when you are dancing with me tonight
though of course I would rather
see you without your clothes on,
it would probably be best
that you cover yourself quickly
rather than drive half
the women of Ireland mad.

My translation notes: As always, I’ve tried to land somewhere between literal and interpretive. My edition of Pharaoh's Daughter has a translation by Paul Muldoon, who also did the translation for The Language Question. His translation is far more interpretive than mine, particularly in adding a rather arch tone (“your snazzy loafers/and, la-di-da,/a pair of gloves”) that I don’t quite hear in this poem.

Muldoon also, to my surprise, rendered the … er … uncomfortable-to-English readers stanza in language just on the edge of florid romance novel euphemism. “the root that is the very seat/of pleasure, the pleasure source” is how he does the lines that for me came out “and at your crotch/the root/of highest pleasure.” Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a way to render “is i do gabhal” as anything except “and at your crotch,” and I’ve got a pretty big dictionary. My trepidation was undone by Ní Dhomhnaill’s own words:

It is almost impossible to be “rude” or “vulgar” in Irish. The body, with its orifices and excretions, is not treated in a prudish manner but is accepted as “an naduir,” or “nature,” and becomes a source of repartee and laughter rather than anything to be ashamed of.

My favorite lines in this poem are “chomh slim le sneachta séidte/ar an sliabh;”–”smooth as drifted snow on the mountain”–for all the “sh” sounds (“slim”, “sneachta”, “séidte”, and “sliabh” all have the slender “s” sound, which is like a slightly breathier English “sh”). That “shush” sound whispers just like the snow that Ní Dhomnaill is describing.

Ceist na Teangan – The Language Question

Recently at work, I was trying to fix a problem with the search index of a big website that launched last week: some of our PDF files weren’t being indexed, and it wasn’t clear why. As part of my troubleshooting, I put out a copy of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Oileán: I figured I’d get no false positives on “glinniúint” or “fiondruine” in scouring the index, plus I’d be able to confirm that non-English documents were indexed (there was already quite a bit of content on the site in French and Swedish). It turned out to be a surprisingly practical use for poetry.

The marketing manager for the site got wind of it through an Irish employee working in Sweden. “An obscure Irish poet,” was how this Irish ex-pat described Ní Dhomhnaill, to which I had to object: Michael Davitt is an obscure Irish poet, but not Ní Dhomhnaill. If Ní Dhomhnaill were writing in English, I opined, she’d be as well-known as Seamus Heaney. (Appeals to Seamus Heaney’s fame are apparently not the best way to make the case for one’s favorite Irish poet.) I proceeded to recite from “Oileán,” which is probably not the most work-safe of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems (though by far not the least), but I subscribe to the theory that let a local bar put a scandalous Brendan Behan quote (in Irish) on their t-shirts: those who would be offended would be unlikely to understand it, and those who could understand it would be unlikely to be offended. Ní Dhomhnaill is no longer on the site (nor are Dick Van Dyke and the dancing penguins from “Mary Poppins”), but I’m glad that she made a brief appearance anyway.

A couple years ago, I led up to St. Patrick’s Day with frequent translations of Irish poems. I had a lot of time on my hands that March, and I have (thankfully) much less now, but I thought I’d try to squeeze in a few. Since it was a Ní Dhomhnaill poem that got me thinking of this project again, here’s a short one by my favorite poet about the language that keeps her from being as famous as Seamus Heaney, first in Irish and then in my rough English translation:

Ceist na Teangan

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Cuirim mo dhóchas ar snámh
i mbáidín teangan
faoi mar a leagfá naíonán
i gcliabhán
a bheadh fite fuaite
de dhuilleoga feilastraim
is bitiúman agus pic
bheith cuimilte lena thóin

ansan é a leagadh síos
i measc na ngiolcach
is coigeal na mhan sí
le taobh na habhann,
féachaint n’fheadraís
cá dtabharfaidh an sruth é,
féachaint, dála Mhaoise,
an bhfóirfidh iníon Fharoinn?

The Language Question

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

I put my hope a-swim
in the little boat of language
as one might place an infant
in a cradle
of tightly woven
iris leaves
with bitumen and pitch
smeared on its bottom

and then lay it down
among the reeds
and cat-tails
beside the river,
watching without knowing
where the stream will carry it,
perhaps, like Moses,
into the care of a Pharaoh’s daughter?

A couple of notes:In my translation, I’ve tried to be more literal than Paul Muldoon’s that is published in the collection I own: Muldoon has earned some liberties that I dare not take. One phrase in the poem for which I wish I could find a more playful rendering is “coigeal na mban sí,” which I’ve given as cat-tails. That’s what my dictionary gave me, but the literal meaning is a little more tightly packed: “coigeal” is “distaff” (the spinning tool), and “coigeal na mban sí” would be something like “the fairy woman’s distaff” (“ban sí” comes into English as “banshee,” the keening harbinger of death; “mban” is the genitive case of “ban”). It’s a more accurate description than cat-tail, I think, and with the images of cradles and Pharaoh’s daughter, a nice feminine image.

“Fite fuaite” gave me a little trouble. “Fite” is woven, and “fuaite” is sewn, two rather different ways of making a boat. I thought about sticking with “sewn,” since that echoes the boat in “Oileán” with its tidy stitching, but I ended up at “tightly woven” because it’s how I imagine one would make a boat from iris leaves and because it echoes “fite dlúth” in “Coinleach Ghlas an Fhomhair,” which is coming up in a day or two.

I stuck with the word “bitumen” rather than “tar” even if “tar” would have been clearer: Irish has a word for “tar” already (“tarra”), and I’m sure Ní Dhohmnaill would have used it if she’d wanted just to name a sticky black substance used for waterproofing. “Bitumen” is formed from decomposing organic material (and so a kin of peat), and was used to adhere the bricks of the Tower of Babel, which has some linguistic echoes indeed.

This is the poem that gives the title to one of Ní Dhomhnaill’s better-known collections–not the “Language Question” (or “Language Issue,” as Paul Muldoon’s translation has it), but “Pharaoh’s Daughter.” It’s an interesting choice for a title, since the poem is Moses, borne on the cradle of the Irish language, into the arms of the Pharaoh’s daughter, who I suppose would be the English-speaking readers who will care for this strange foreign child.

Dún – Stronghold

Dún

le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Id ghéaga daingne
ní bhfaighfidh mé bás choiche
ní thiocfaidh orm aon sceimhle,
ní líonfaidh orm anbhá.
Ní chloisfidh mé
ag gíoscán ins an oíche
fearsad na cairte fuafaire
a ghluaiseann trí pháirc an áir.

Is dún nó daingean iad
do ghéaga i mo thimpeall
do ghuailne leathana
am chosaint ar a lán.
Ag cuardach fothaine dom
ó gharbhshíon na cinniúna
tá gairdín foscaidh le fáilt
idir do dhá shlinneán.

Is sa ghairdín sin
tá beacha is ológa
ta mil ar luachair ann
is na crainn go léir faoi bhláth
i dtús an fhomhair
mar ní thagann aon gheimhridh
is gaoth an tseaca
ní luíonn air anáil.

Is lasmuigh dínn
tá críocha is ciníocha
ag bruíon is ag bunú sibhialtachta
ag puililiú ar an gclár.
Dá mbeadh ceithre creasa
na cruinne in aon chaor lasrach
dá n-imeodih an cosmos
in aon mheall craorag amháin.

Ba chuma liom, do ghéaga
a bheith im thimpeall
níorbh ann do scáth nó eagla
níorbh ann don ocras riamh.
Nuair a fhilleann tú mé
go cneasta isteach id bhaclainn
táim chomh slán sábháilte
leis an gcathair ard úd ar shliabh.

Coinnigh go daingean mé
laistigh den gciorcal draíochta
le teas do cholainne
le teasargan do chabhaile.
Do chneas lem chneas
do bhéal go dlúth lem béalaibh
ní chluinfead na madraí allta
ag uallfairt ar an má.

Ach níl in aon ní ach seal:
i gcionn leathuaire
pógfaidhh tú mé ar bharr m’éadain
is casfaidh tú orm do dhrom
is fágfar mé ar mo thaobh féin
don leaba dhúbailte
ag cuimhneamh faoi scáth do ghuailne
ná tiocfaidh orm bás riamh roimh am.

Stronghold

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

In your arms’ fortress
I will face neither eternal death
nor terror,
panic will not fill me.
I will not hear
the grinding in the night
of the war carriages’ axles
rolling through the battlefields.

You arms are a fortress
around me,
your broad shoulders
completely protecting me.
I seek my shelter
from fate’s storm
in the shaded garden ring
between your shoulder blades.

And in that garden
are bees and olives
with honey on the rushes there,
the trees in full bloom
even at the start of Autumn;
winter never comes there,
the frosty winds
never blow there.

Beyond the fortress
walls are people
struggling and building civilizations,
a mad hullabaloo.
If the four corners of the globe
were one flaming berry
if the cosmos were rolled
into one crimson ball

It wouldn’t matter to me, your limbs
still around me;
no room for shadow or fear,
no room there for hunger.
When you fold me
gently inside the bend of your arm
I am safer than
the city high on a mountain.

The fortress keeps me
within the magic circle
with the body’s heat
with the body’s deliverance
skin on skin
mouth on mouth
I will not hear the wild beasts
howling on the plain.

But nothing outlasts its time:
in a half an hour
you will kiss the top of my forehead
and turn from me on your back
in the double bed
and I will think about your shoulders’ shadow
and not that death is always approaching me.

Last month, a reader wrote to request some help with this poem; they were dissatisfied with the translation by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, which appears in Pharaoh's Daughter, and had some questions about a few of the trickier lines.

I’ve noted before that I consider Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill far beyond my translation skills, in either Irish or English, but I decided to give it a shot. I don’t think my translation is as good as Ní Chuilleanáin’s (an accomplished poet in her own right; here’s an example); it’s a bit more literal, though, which is what I think my reader was looking for in the kinds of questions in the e-mail.

Any translation is an interpretation; some things are harder to write in English than in Irish, and vice versa, and some things that make perfect sense in one language are pure nonsense in another. Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation of this poem is certainly more interpretive than mine, and takes some liberties that I, surely far less familiar than Ní Chuilleanáin with Irish idiom, dare not take.

This poem is a good companion piece to the other Ní Dhomhnaill poem, “Oileán”, that I’ve tried to translate. Like “Oileán,” “Dún” is a sensuous poem, but the sensuousness is undercut by some of its recurring images. “Oileán” posits love in the midst of loneliness; “Dún” places love in a bleak landscape of destruction. Safety, protection, and certainty are contrasted with images of war and tumult and wild beasts; but at the same time, the safety is represented by a fortress, a martial image that echoes the war carriages and battlefield of the first stanza.

My favorite word in this poem is “puililiú”; my dictionary sent me to “fuilibiliú”, which gave me “hullabaloo; halloo, yell.” Ní Chuilleanáin doesn’t translate this line directly–she gives “multiplying on the globe” for what the people beyond the stronghold’s charmed circle are up to–but I simply had to use it, even if it clashes a bit with the rest of the poem.

I also love the internal echoes of “le teas do cholainne / le teasargan do chabhaile.” I can’t render it very well in English. “Teas” is “heat”; “teasargan” is “deliverance” or “rescue”. Both “colainn” and “cabhail” are words for “body”; I’m sure there are subtle distinctions between them of which I’m not aware, and that further enhance that lovely balance between “teas” and “teasargan.”

“Dún” should probably be translated as “Fortress”–it appears in many Irish place names associated with ancient forts–but I like the title Ní Chuilleanáin chose because it echoes the holding arms and strong back that are the poem’s central images.

Oileán – Island

The April 2009 issue of Poetry is the translation issue. It’s full of poetry translated into English from French, German, Chinese, and Spanish. And, lo and behold, there’s even a poem by Biddy Jenkinson, translated from Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

Ní Dhomhnaill was the first contemporary Irish poet I encountered, with a translation exercise from Sean T. Kelly in the basement of the Irish Well. She’s one of the easier Irish poets to find–a well-stocked American bookstore may well have a dusty copy of “Pharaoh’s Daughter” or “Rogha Danta” tucked away on the poetry shelf. She’s also pretty accessible, with a strong vein of lyricism that reaches back into the oral tradition. And she’s amazing. Which is why I’ve avoided translating her–I can’t do her justice, and prefer to leave the work of rendering her into English to people who are up to the task (like Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon).

But since it’s almost National Poetry Month, and since Ní Dhomhnaill has offered up a translation of her own, here’s one that I’m pretty confident of. This is a poem that I’ve committed to memory, and which I recited (to the glee of John Dingley, who procured the beer and whiskey, and the consternation of my bride, who bristles at my efforts at speaking foreign languages unless it results in coffee and pastries in Barcelona or Florence) at my wedding. I only glanced a couple times at John Montague’s translation in Pharaoh’s Daughter, enough to know that his rendering is much freer, and better, than mine.

Oileán

le Nuala Ní Dhomhaill

Oileán is ea do chorp
í lár na mara móire.
Tá do ghéaga spréite ar bhraillín
gléigeal os farraige faoileán.

Toibreacha fíoruisce iad t’uisí
tá íochtar fola orthua is uachtar meala.
Thabharfaidís fuarán dom
í lár mo bheirfin
is deoch slánithe
sa bhfiabhras.

Tá do dhá shúil
mar locha sléibhe
lá breá Lúnasa
nuair a bhíonn an spéir
ag glinniúint sna huiscí.
Giolcaigh scubacha iad t’fhabhraí
ag fás faoina gciumhais.

Is dá mbeadh agam báidín
chun teacht faoi do dhéin,
báidín fiondruine,
gan barrchleite amach uirthi
n&aacucte; bunchleite isteach uirthi
ach aon chleite amháin
droimeann dearg
ag déanamh ceoil
dom fhéin ar bord,

thógfainn suas
na seolta boga bána
bogóideacha; threabhfainn
trí fharraigí arda

is thiocfainn chughat
mar a luíonn tú
uigneach, iathghlas,
oileánach.

Island

by Nuala Ní Dhomhaill

Your body is an island
in the middle of the ocean.
Your splayed limbs on the sheets
are bright as gulls’ wings.

Your brow is a spring well
with blood in the depths and honey above.
You are a cooling fountain
in the sweltering heat
and a healing drink
to my fever.

Your two eyes
are mountain lakes
on a bright August afternoon
when the sky
glimmers in the water.
Your eyelashes are rushes
ringing the shore.

And if I had a little boat
to carry me to you,
a boat of findrinny,
with neither a top stitch

nor bottom stich out of place,
but a single feather
of white-backed red
to make my music
at sea,

to raise up
the soft white sales
full-bellied with wind; plowing
through high seas

and come beside you
where you lie back,
solitary, emerald,
islanded.

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