Leabhar na hAthghabhála: Poems of Repossession

By Louis de Paor

Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

Irish-English bilingual edition

This is the first comprehensive critical anthology of modern poetry in Irish with English translations. It forms a sequel to Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella's pioneering anthology, An Duanaire 1600-1900 / Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), but features many more poems in covering the work of 26 poets from the past century.

It includes poems by Pádraig Mac Piarais and Liam S. Gógan from the revival period (1893-1939), and a generous selection from the work of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who transformed writing in Irish in the decades following the Second World War, before the Innti poets – Michael Davitt, Liam Ó Muirthile, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Biddy Jenkinson – and others developed new possibilities for poetry in Irish in the 1970s and 80s. It also includes work by more recent poets such as Colm Breathnach, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Micheál Ó Cuaig and Áine Ní Ghlinn.

The anthology has translations by some of Ireland's most distinguished poets and translators, including Valentine Iremonger, Michael Hartnett, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O'Donoghue, Maurice Riordan, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley and Mary O'Donoghue, most of them newly commissioned for this project. Many of the poems, including Eoghan Ó Tuairisc's anguished response to the bombing of Hiroshima, 'Aifreann na marbh' [Mass for the dead] have not previously been available in English.

In addition to presenting some of the best poetry in Irish written since 1900, the anthology challenges the extent to which writing in Irish has been underrepresented in collections of modern and contemporary Irish poetry. In his introduction and notes, Louis de Paor argues that Irish language poetry should be evaluated according to its own rigorous aesthetic rather than as a subsidiary of the dominant Anglophone tradition of Irish writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Apr 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781780373003

Louis de Paor

Louis de Paor was born in 1961 in Cork, and educated at Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh. He is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language literary renaissance of the 1980s and 90s, editing the influential Irish-language journal Innti for a time. He spent time as a lecturer in Irish at University College Cork and Thomond College, Limerick, before moving to Australia in 1987, where he worked in local and ethnic radio in Melbourne and taught evening classes in Irish language and literature at Melbourne University and the Melbourne Council for Adult Education. He was Visiting Professor of Celtic Studies at Sydney University in 1993 and Visiting Fellow in 1992. He returned to Ireland in 1996 and worked as proof editor of the Irish language newspaper Foinse before being appointed Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway in 2000. He was Jefferson Smurfit Distinguished Fellow at the University of St Louis-Missouri in 2002 and received the Charles Fanning medal from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 2009. His most recent dual language editions of his own poetry are Ag greadadh bas sa reilig / Clapping in the cemetery (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2005), agus rud eile de / and another thing (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2010), The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale's Tongue (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2014), and Crooked Love / Grá fiar (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2022). De Paor has collaborated with the Cork singer John Spillane under the name Gaelic Hit Factory, with uilleann piper Ronan Browne and Brooklyn based composer Dana Lyn. He has also published an anthology of 20th-century poetry in Irish, Coiscéim na haoise seo (1991), co-edited with Seán Ó Tuama; a bilingual edition of the selected poems of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, An paróiste míorúilteach / The miraculous parish (2011); and a critical edition of the selected poems of Liam S. Gógan, Míorúilt an chleite chaoin (2012). His bilingual anthology Leabhar na hAthghabhála / Poems of Repossession was published by Bloodaxe Books with Cló Iar-Chonnacht in 2016, continuing the line of Irish-language poetry where Thomas Kinsella's earlier anthology An Duanaire, 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981) left off.

Book preview

Leabhar na hAthghabhála

Poems of Repossession

Edited by Louis de Paor

Irish-English Bilingual Edition

Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

This is the first comprehensive critical anthology of modern poetry in Irish with English translations. It forms a sequel to Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella’s pioneering anthology, An Duanaire 1600-1900 / Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), but features many more poems in covering the work of 25 poets from the past century.

It includes poems by Pádraig Mac Piarais and Liam S. Gógan from the revival period (1893-1939), and a generous selection from the work of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who transformed writing in Irish in the decades following the Second World War, before the Innti poets – Michael Davitt, Liam Ó Muirthile, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Biddy Jenkinson – and others developed new possibilities for poetry in Irish in the 1970s and 80s. It also includes work by more recent poets such as Colm Breathnach, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Micheál Ó Cuaig and Áine Ní Ghlinn.

The anthology has translations by some of Ireland’s most distinguished poets and translators, including Valentine Iremonger, Michael Hartnett, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O’Donoghue, Maurice Riordan, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley and Mary O’Donoghue, most of them newly commissioned for this project. Many of the poems, including Eoghan Ó Tuairisc’s anguished response to the bombing of Hiroshima, ‘Aifreann na marbh’ [Mass for the dead] have not previously been available in English.

In addition to presenting the some of the best poetry in Irish written since 1900, the anthology challenges the extent to which writing in Irish has been underrepresented in collections of modern and contemporary Irish poetry. In his introduction and notes, Louis de Paor argues that Irish language poetry should be evaluated according to its own rigorous aesthetic rather than as a subsidiary of the dominant Anglophone tradition of Irish writing.

Cover art: Out of the Head (2012) by Brian Bourke

Leabhar na hAthghabhála

POEMS OF REPOSSESSION

20th-century poetry in Irish

LOUIS DE PAOR

a roghnaigh agus a chuir in eagar

Selected and edited by

LOUIS DE PAOR

Cló Iar-Chonnacht

dom athair agus dom mháthair

agus

i gcuimhne ar Sheán Ó Tuama

CLÁR | CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Aistritheoirí | Translators

Réamhrá | Introduction

Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh(1871-1936)

Ochón! A Dhonncha

My sorrow, Donncha

Pádraig Mac Piarais(1879-1916)

Mise Éire

Ireland

Fornocht do chonac thu

Naked I saw you

A mhic bhig na gcleas

Little master of tricks

Liam S. Gógan(1891-1979)

Trélíneach

Tercets

Liobharn stáit

Ship of state

Fantais ceo

Fantastical fog

Fantais coille

Fantastical forest

Amharclann an bháis

The theatre of death

An dá chlochar

The two convents

Máirtín Ó Direáin(1910-1988)

Dínit an bhróin

The dignity of grief

Cuireadh do Mhuire

Invitation to Mary

An t-earrach thiar

Spring in the west

Ó Mórna

Ó Mórna

Cranna foirtil

Strong oars

Blianta an chogaidh

The war years

Mí an Mheithimh

June

Ár ré dhearóil

Our wretched era

Mothú feirge

Rage

Fuaire

Cold

Berkeley

Berkeley

Ealabhean

Swan-woman

Seán Ó Ríordáin(1916-1977)

Adhlacadh mo mháthar

Burying my mother

Cúl an tí

The back of the house

Malairt

Switch

Cnoc Mellerí

Poet in the monastery

Oíche Nollaig na mBan

Epiphany

An bás

Death

Saoirse

Freedom

Siollabadh

Syllabling

Claustrophobia

Claustrophobia

Reo

Ice

Na leamhain

The moths

Fiabhras

Fever

Tost

Silence

An lacha

The duck

An gealt

The madwoman

Fill arís

Go back again

Máire Mhac an tSaoi(1922–)

Do Shíle

For Sheila

Comhrá ar shráid

Street-talk

Finit

Finit

Inquisitio 1584

Inquisitio 1584

Gan réiteach

Intractable

Cad is bean?

What is woman?

Ceathrúintí Mháire Ní Ógáin

Mary Hogan’s quatrains

An dá thráigh

The two ebbs

Cam reilige 1916-1966

Birth defect 1916-1966

Iníon a’ Lóndraigh

Lander’s daughter

Codladh an ghaiscígh

Hero sleeps

‘Love has pitched his mansion’

‘Love has pitched his mansion’

Máiréad sa tsiopa cóirithe gruaige

Máiréad in the hairdresser’s

Bás mo mháthar

My mother’s death

Fód an imris: Ardoifig an Phoist 1986

Trouble spot: General Post Office 1986

Eoghan Ó Tuairisc(1919-1982)

Aifreann na marbh

Mass of the dead

Gach líne snoite

Each line cut

Seán Ó Tuama(1926-2006)

Ógánach a bádh

On the drowning of a young man

Christy Ring

Christy Ring

Maymount: Tigh Victeoireach a leagadh

Maymount: A Victorian house demolished

‘Besides, who knows before the end what light may shine’

‘Besides, who knows before the end what light may shine’

Tomás Mac Síomóin(1938–)

Ceol na dtéad

The music of the strings

AS Brúdlann Thomáis

FROM Thomas’s bestiary

Aibiú

Maturing

Conleth Ellis(1937-1988)

Naoi dtimpeall

Nine circuits

AS Seabhac ar guairdeall

FROM A hawk circling

Caitlín Maude(1941-1982)

Mo dháimh

My kin

Amhrán grá Vietnam

Vietnam love song

Cathal Ó Searcaigh(1956–)

High Street, Kensington 6 p.m.

High Street, Kensington 6 p.m.

Londain

London

Cor úr

A new twist

Marbhna

Elegy

Séasúir

Seasons

AS Rothaí móra na bliana

FROM The great wheels of the year

Cancer

Cancer

Ceann dubh dílis

Dear dark head

Lá des na laethanta

One very special day

Cainteoir dúchais

Native speaker

Micheál Ó hAirtnéide(1941-1999)

Fís dheireanach Eoghain Rua Uí Shúilleabháin

The last vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin

Gné na Gaeltachta

Gaeltacht face

Michael Davitt(1950-2005)

Meirg agus lios luachra

Rust and a rush fort

Hiraeth

Homesickness

Chugat

Towards you

Luimneach

Limerick

Ciorrú bóthair

Shortening the road

I gcuimhne ar Lís Ceárnaighe, Blascaodach

In memory of Elizabeth Kearney, Blasketwoman

Ó mo bheirt Phailistíneach

O my pair of Palestinians

An scáthán

The mirror

Urnaí maidne

Morning prayer

Lúnasa

August

Do Phound, ó Dhia

To Pound, from God

An dúil

Desire

Bean

Woman

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill(1952–)

Máthair

Mother

Breith anabaí thar lear

Miscarriage abroad

Venio ex oriente

Venio ex oriente

Leaba Shíoda

Leaba Shíoda

An cuairteoir

Visitor

Scéala

The news

Fáilte bhéal na Sionna don iasc

The Shannon mouth welcomes the fish

I mBaile an tSléibhe

In Baile an tSléibhe

An mhaighdean mhara

The mermaid

Na súile uaithne

Green eyes

Aubade

Aubade

An bhábóg bhriste

The broken doll

Ag cothú linbh

Feeding a child

Dán do Mhelissa

Poem for Melissa

An rás

The race

Blodeuwedd

Blodeuwedd

Feis

Carnival

Ceist na teangan

The language question

Éirigh, a éinín

Rise up, little bird

Dubh

Black

Áine Ní Ghlinn(1955–)

Cuair

Curves

An chéim bhriste

The broken step

Deirdre Brennan(1934–)

Saorghlanadh

The cleansing

Marbhghin

Born dead

Gan teideal

Untitled

Liam Ó Muirthile(1950–)

Do chara liom

Friendship

An parlús

The parlour

Codladh na hoíche

Night’s sleep

Portráid óige 1

Portrait from boyhood 1

Mise

Yours

Thuaidh

North

Caoineadh na bpúcaí

Caoineadh na bpúcaí

Tobar

Well

Ultrasound

Ultrasound

Cad é?

Whatsit

Na deilgní broid

The spurs

Micheál Ó Cuaig(1950–)

Uchtóga

Armfuls

Leá

Thaw

Traein

Train

Seán Ó Curraoin(1942–)

AS Beairtle

FROM Bartley

Derry O’Sullivan(1944–)

Marbhghin 1943: Glaoch ar Liombó

Stillbirth 1943: Calling Limbo

Biddy Jenkinson(1949–)

Éiceolaí

Ecologist

Liombó

Limbo

Leanbh lae

Day old child

Crann na tubaiste

The cross of misfortune

Aubade

Aubade

Crannchur

Woodful

Cáitheadh

Spray

Alabama. Samhradh ’86

Alabama. Summer ’86

Eanáir 1991

January 1991

Leanbh altrama

Foster child

Gleann Maoiliúra

Gleann Maoiliúra

Iníon léinn i bPáras

A female student in Paris

‘Codail a laoich’

‘Sleep, my prince’

Colm Breathnach(1961–)

Tréigean

Abandonment

Macha

Macha

Ba chlos dom cór

I heard a choir

Nóibhíseach

Novice

An croí

The heart

Madonna

Madonna

Gorta

Famine

An fear marbh

The dead man

Louis de Paor(1961–)

Didjeridu

Didjeridu

An cruthaitheoir

The creator

Corcach

Cork

Gearóid Mac Lochlainn(1966–)

Teanga eile

Second tongue

Aistriúcháin

Translations

Ar eití

On the wing

Breith

Birth

Sruth teangacha

Stream of tongues

Ord foilsithe na ndánta | Chronology of publication

Aistritheoirí | Translators

Nótaí na n-aistritheoirí | Translators’ notes

Nótaí ar dhánta | Notes on individual poems

Logainmneacha | Place names

Tagairtí | References

Buíochas | Acknowledgements

Dánta in ord aibítre | Index of Irish titles

Aistriúcháin in ord aibítre | Index of English titles

Filí in ord aibítre | Index of poets

Copyright

Aistritheoirí | Translators

Kevin Anderson [KA]

Michael Coady [MC]

Michael Davitt [MD]

Celia de Fréine [CdeF]

Louis de Paor [LdeP]

James Gleasure [JG]

Michael Hartnett [MH]

Valentine Iremonger [VI]

Biddy Jenkinson [BJ]

Colbert Kearney [CK]

Brendan Kennelly [BK]

Thomas Kinsella [TK]

Séamas Mac Annaidh [SMacA]

Gearóid Mac Lochlainn [GMacL]

Aodán Mac Póilin [AMacP]

Paul Muldoon [PM]

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin [ENíC]

Eileanór Ní Thuathail [ENíT]

Breandán Ó Doibhlinn [BÓD]

Bernard O’Donoghue [BO’D]

Mary O’Donoghue [MO’D]

Coslett Quinn [CQ]

Billy Ramsell [BR]

Maurice Riordan [MR]

Frank Sewell [FS]

Peter Sirr [PS]

Jerry Stritch [JS]

Alan Titley [AT]

David Wheatley [DW]

RÉAMHRÁ | INTRODUCTION

This bilingual anthology is intended for readers of English who do not otherwise have access to material in Irish, and for those with some knowledge of the language who may find the English versions helpful as a bridge towards a fuller engagement with 20th-century poetry in Irish. It was prompted, or provoked, by a sense of frustration that a considerable part of the achievement of modern and contemporary Irish language poetry remains invisible and inaudible in a literary market-place dominated by English. Even where a handful of poems in Irish are included in anthologies of Irish verse, there is a strong sense that 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. More than three decades after Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella introduced a new readership to poetry in Irish from the 17th to the 19th century in their groundbreaking An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed 1600-1900, an ‘act of repossession’ is still required for Irish language poetry produced between the cultural revival of the Celtic Twilight and the economic insanity of the Celtic Tiger that brought the second millennium to a close (1981: vii). The present volume takes its title and inspiration from Ó Tuama’s and Kinsella’s landmark publication, offering a selection of the best poems produced in Irish in the last century with English translations, most of them newly commissioned, a critical introduction, and notes on individual poets and poems.

To give a sense of how the dialogue between different authors and their work developed over the course of the century, the poets appear in sequence according to the year in which their debut collections were published rather than the order of their birth. Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (1919-1982), for instance, was born before Máire Mhac an tSaoi (1922–), but his work emerged in the aftermath of the revolution in Irish language poetry achieved by Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Direáin and Mhac an tSaoi in the 1940s and 50s. In a similar fashion, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s (1952–) early work precipitated a response from other women poets, including Deirdre Brennan (1934–) and Biddy Jenkinson (1949–) who were born before her but did not publish their first collections until after Ní Dhomhnaill’s debut volume, An dealg droighin (1981), had established a feminine poetics at the centre of Irish language poetry. This alternative chronology is intended to provide the reader with a sense of how the conversation between poets and poems unfolded for contemporary readers in poetry journals and magazines and in the individual volumes in which each poet’s work was first collected.

The notes draw extensively on the critical response to 20th-century poetry in Irish by several generations of literary scholars, critics, and poets who have provided reading models that are responsive to both the texts and the various contexts, literary, historical, cultural and linguistic, in which the poems were composed. They include some clarification of allusions and references that may not be immediately comprehensible to the reader and some discussion of metre. It is hoped that the poems themselves, the translations, and the notes will not only provide access to the achievements of poets in Irish from the last century but also some sense of the particular poetics, whether shared or contested, that informs the work of Irish language poets from Pádraig Mac Piarais (1879-1916) to Gearóid Mac Lochlainn (1966–). The critical apparatus deployed here proposes that poetry in Irish should be read and critiqued in a manner appropriate to itself rather than as a tributary of the dominant English language tradition in Ireland.

The translations

The translators invited to participate in this project worked directly from the Irish without cribs or other forms of pre-text. Once the initial translation had been made, the editor offered suggestions, some of which were accepted and some rejected, the final decision resting ultimately with the translator. In many cases, no previous English translations had been published of work included here. Where other versions have previously appeared, the new translations presented here offer alternative readings, exploring different possibilities in their engagement with the original poems. The translators were encouraged to remain as close to the Irish as possible so that a diligent reader could, if s/he wished, use the English as a temporary support before crossing over into the Irish. Different approaches, however, have also been adopted where a more literal translation might occlude rather than clarify the tone and temper of the original poem in Irish.

I am indebted to all the translators who contributed to this project. The impulse to translate poetry remains, to a greater or lesser degree, a philanthropic one, motivated by a sense of fellowship with writers working in other languages, and a commitment to broadening our collective understanding of literature in languages other than our own. It requires of the translator a deeper than usual reading of the poem, a critical engagement alert to the linguistic, literary and cultural nuances of the source language, and to its particular music. For Breandán Ó Doibhlinn, who has translated from Irish to French, and from Hebrew, Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, English and French to Irish, ‘translating a poem means first of all living it to the fullest degree possible in its original language and then reliving it in its new linguistic garb’ (2000: 12). Ó Doibhlinn’s commitment to translation is linked to an awareness of the cultural specificity of individual languages, and a powerful sense that Irish ‘represents for many of us practically the only thing completely specific to us as a people, the only Ariadne’s thread guiding us through the fifteen centuries of our recorded history’ (9).

For Alan Titley, translation ‘is about the deep wells and the echo chambers, the ghosts in the grammar’ (2011: 251). Despite the translator’s best efforts to preserve the culturally specific residue in the source language, he says ‘it is nobody’s fault if the rustle of sheets in one language becomes the scratching of the bedpost in another’ (Sewell 1997: 14). The bilingual translator is, perhaps, more conscious of the irreducibilty of linguistic and cultural difference than monoglot readers of either of the two languages mediated in translation and what has been redacted from the ledger of exchange. Wrestling with this stubborn recalcitrance in the rendition of a poem from one language to another, the translator can also open up new possibilities of interpretation, extending the poem’s capacity for meaning. While the translatability of a poem should never be the final criterion for inclusion or exclusion in a project such as this, working with the individual translators has deepened my own appreciation of the poems included here. In some instances, the English versions have become part of my understanding of the poems, an additional vantage point that allows them to reveal themselves in new and interesting ways. The translators’ own reflections on the poets they translated provide further illumination of the original poems in Irish.

A note on dialect

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of dialect in modern and contemporary poetry in Irish. Allegiance to a specific regional dialect provides an indelible watermark on the work of a poet even where the relationship with that dialect is fluid or conflicted. It is also, perhaps, the first element in a reader’s response to a poem when the primary dialect is identified as Donegal Irish, Belfast Irish, Connemara Irish, Kerry Irish, Muskerry Irish, Ring Irish, or a hybrid of two or more of these, with or without a measure of standard or ‘book’ Irish. A reader’s reaction to a poem will often include a degree of approval for a preferred dialect and disapproval for a less familiar one. For an Irish language reader, Cathal Ó Searcaigh is quite clearly a northern poet by virtue of his use of Donegal Irish, while Micheál Ó Cuaig, Seán Ó Curraoin and Caitlín Maude are Connacht poets writing Connemara Irish.

It is not always the case that a poet’s dialect is that of his or her place of origin. Dubliner Máire Mhac an tSaoi, for instance, might be classified as a ‘Munster’ poet by virtue of her commitment to the Gaeltacht tradition of Corca Dhuibhne and the dialect of west Kerry. That dialect is also prominent in the poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who was born in Lancashire and grew up in Tipperary, and in the work of Cork-born poets such as Colm Breathnach, and Liam Ó Muirthile. Michael Davitt, also from Cork, wrote primarily in west Kerry Irish but used idioms and variations from other dialects to considerable effect. The tension between dialect and a written standard that has exasperated writers in Irish throughout the 20th century is evident in inconsistencies of spelling as individual poets grapple with the need to retain the sound of the spoken word while maintaining clarity for the reader.

A further defining feature of 20th-century poetry in Irish is the contribution of poets for whom Irish is a second language. For more than half the poets included here, Irish is not the first language of family or community but rather an acquired language, learned through school and study and, most importantly, perhaps, through extended contact with the spoken language of the surviving Gaeltacht communities in which Irish remains the first language of private and public communication. Dialect affiliation is pronounced in these poets as it is in poets for whom the language of poetry is the regional dialect of their place of origin. Given the achievements of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe and others, in languages of which they were not native speakers in the usual sense, the situation of Irish poets who have chosen Irish in preference to English, their first language, is less remarkable than it might appear. Rather, it seems characteristic of one aspect of the 20th-century experience, a consequence of linguistic and demographic upheaval, of geographic and cultural displacement. These poets reflect a defining aspect of 20th-century Irish life and identity in the aftermath of language change and destruction following centuries of colonialism. Whether the commitment to Irish is motivated by aesthetic or cultural political reasons, or both, the choice of a minority endangered language over a majority world language represents a significant act of cultural repossession in post-colonial Anglophone Ireland.

It is a matter of some contention that Munster Irish has provided the dominant accent for poetry in Irish in the 20th century. Patrick Crotty has argued that, in Munster, ‘the outstanding 20th-century achievement has been in the Irish language, in the work of Seán Ó Ríordáin and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, rather than in the English spoken by the great majority of the population’ (2003: 5). While almost half of the poets included in this anthology were born in Munster, the material assembled here suggests that Dublin has been the primary site for the composition and dissemination of 20th-century poetry in Irish, with Cork city and the various Gaeltachtaí providing periods of incubation for many poets who produced their best work after moving to Dublin and its environs as well as for those born there. Munster’s disputed pre-eminence, then, has as much to do with dialect affiliation as with place of birth or the coincidence of literary ability and historical circumstances.

In the earlier period of the language revival, the preference for Munster Irish owes something to the regional bias of influential writers and critic, a sense that it was more distinct from English than other dialects, more conservative and literary in its usage, and that the written literary tradition survived longer there than in other parts of Irish speaking Ireland. This may explain why Dublin-born Pádraig Mac Piarais, who had a deep affinity with the Connemara Gaeltacht, follows certain patterns more usually associated with Munster Irish in his poems. Liam S. Gógan, who was also born in Dublin, and had a prodigious knowledge of all the spoken dialects of Irish and of the Gaelic literary tradition, also uses verbal forms associated with Munster Irish in many of his best poems. As the grip of regional and dialect allegiance loosened somewhat in the latter decades of the century, there is a greater variety evident in the output of a more recent generation of poets who take the dialect they have learned as a basis for their work but are not constrained by loyalty where usages from other dialects, from literature or from dictionaries, serve the immediate needs of a particular poem. Biddy Jenkinson, for instance, follows the patterns of Connemara Irish more than she does Munster or Ulster Irish, but the language of her poems depends much less on the spoken idioms of the Gaeltacht than does that of Ó Direáin or Ó Curraoin, as she draws on a range of disparate sources to develop a literary dialect appropriate to her own poetic voice.

While the use of dialect is one of the most characteristic and continuous features of 20th-century poetry in Irish, it presents almost insuperable difficulties for a translator, not least because the relationship between dialect and standard is different in Irish and English. In Irish, the spoken dialect rather than the written word remains the most exacting standard, the principal arbiter of linguistic competence and integrity. The English translations provided here do not, for the most part, therefore, attempt to match the Irish in this regard but the notes give some indication of individual poets’ preferred dialects. Irish also has a different history and range of metrical procedures which are mentioned in the notes but generally not imitated in the translations. The reader of Irish will also notice instability and inconsistency in orthography throughout this volume, a reflection of the shifting patterns of accommodation and resistance between the spoken and the written language, between dialect and standard, between poets and their editors, and changes in the poets’ own procedures over time.

Poems of repossession: Poetry in Irish 1900-2000

Scholars and critics identify three distinct periods in the history of 20th-century writing in Irish. The revival period extends from the establishment in 1893 of Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, the single most influential organisation in the project of Irish cultural nationalism, to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In the earlier phase of the revival (1893-1922) writing in Irish was a necessary and enabling part of the revolutionary movement of national regeneration that culminated with the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. As in Irish writing in English, the tenor of literary activity in Irish was generally optimistic, tending towards the heroic, and predicated on a growing sense of cultural and national self-confidence. Both literatures, with notable exceptions, were overdetermined by a naïve devotion to the Irish Ireland ideal of an exclusive Irish identity that would be Gaelic, Catholic, rural, and traditional. Following the bitterness and divisions of the Civil War (1921-23), the idealism of the revolutionary period gave way to an antiheroic scepticism and a considerable reduction of commitment to the ongoing struggle for cultural and linguistic as well as social and political change. The impact of this particular historical pressure on the production of poetry in Irish is striking with Liam S. Gógan (1891-1979) the only substantial poet to emerge between the execution of Pádraig Mac Piarais (1879-1916) and the 1940s.

The modernist period of literature in Irish runs from 1939 to the escalation of political violence in the North of Ireland that began in 1969. It represents the single most productive period for poetry and prose in the Irish language since the 18th century with outstanding practitioners in several genres, including the novelist and short story writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906-1970), poets Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910-1988), Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916-1977) and Máire Mhac an tSaoi (1922–), and poet-playwrights Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (1919-1982) and Seán Ó Tuama (1926-2006). Their work is a late adaptation of European modernism, an Irish variant of ideas that dominated the art, literature and philosophy of Continental Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

For want of a better term, the period from 1969 until the end of the century is referred to simply as the contemporary period. Eavan Boland’s argument that ‘the woman poet is now an emblematic figure in poetry, much as the modernist or romantic poets were in their time’ (1995: xv) is strengthened by the presence of several women among the outstanding practitioners of poetry in Irish since 1970, and by the defining achievements of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Biddy Jenkinson in particular. In Irish, the closing decades of the 20th century are also referred to as the Innti period, a reference to the poetry journal established by Michael Davitt (1950-2005) and other students at University College Cork in 1970 that provided the principal forum for poetry in Irish until the turn of the millennium. Although only 15 issues of Innti were published between 1970 and 1997, it provided both a catalyst and a standard for Irish language poets and a significant audience for their work.

A further calibration of this broad chronology will clarify significant changes that took place as the century progressed.

1900-1920: No Gothic revival

This period was characterised by vehement debates about the kind of literature that might be developed in Irish as part of the project of national regeneration. The need to circumvent the overweening influence of English led to a preoccupation with markers of difference that would make a categorical distinction between English, or Anglicised, literature and new writing in Irish that would be consistent with native precedents, both oral and written. The early revival period is also one in which a remarkable generation of scholars made much of the older Gaelic literary tradition available again to a popular audience, publishing material that had become virtually inaccessible to all but a small coterie of Irish and European academics in the 19th century. Scholars such as Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), Pádraig Ua Duinnín (1860-1934), Tadhg Ó Donnchadha (1874-1949), and Osborn Bergin (1873-1950), also wrote poems that demonstrated a high degree of formal and linguistic competence and contributed significantly to the development of a new audience for written poetry in Irish who shared the cultural nationalist sentiments articulated in the poems. While this aspect of their work was a significant element in the cultural excitement of the time in which they were written, it remains, ultimately, an addendum to their scholarly accomplishment. Douglas Hyde, first president of the Gaelic League (1893-1915) and first president of Ireland (1938-1945), acknowledged in the introduction to Ubhla de’n chraobh (1900), the first volume of new poems published in Irish in the 20th century, that the apples mentioned in the title of the book may have been a little green (O’Brien 1968: 88).

While the preoccupation with separating writing in Irish from English influence, and particularly from English popular culture, led to a largely uncritical idealisation of rural life in the west of Ireland with little overt reference to the brutal poverty of living conditions among the rural peasantry, it also lead to an emphasis on the living language of the Gaeltacht, the vernacular caint na ndaoine as the basis for a literary language free of association with English. The anti-urban bias of some of the most ardent nativists, which extended in some instances to a suspicion of writers who were not native speakers of Irish, is evident in Pádraig Ua Duinnín’s response to a short story by Pádraig Mac Piarais in 1906:

I have tasted Connemara butter before now and it has its defects… but in colour and taste it is natural…. It may at times be over-salted and overdosed with the water of béarlachas [Englishism] but it is genuine mountain butter all the same and not clever margarine. I am afraid the storyette about the Píobaire smacks more like the margarine of the slums than pure mountain butter. (Nic Eoin 2005: 61)

Whatever the ideological flaws in this aspect of revivalist poetics, it revolutionised the practice of writing in Irish and established the precedence of dialect at the heart of Irish language poetry and criticism. That the language of poetry should correspond to the patterns of a recognised spoken dialect became a prescription for 20th-century poetry in Irish, to the detriment of poets such as Liam S. Gógan and Seán Ó Ríordáin, who resisted conscription to a particular regional dialect. Despite the importance attached to the spoken language of the Gaeltacht and the cultural authority of the native speaker, the number of recorded speakers of Irish declined by 40 percent between 1881 and 1926 (Browne 1985: 62).

The most perceptive critic and the most accomplished poet of the early revival, Pádraig Mac Piarais, provided a sophisticated model for a new literature in Irish that would re-establish a living connection with the pre-colonial Gaelic past while resuming its relationship with contemporary Europe, bypassing the monolithic influence of English. Mac Piarais’s insistence on a synthesis between past and present, Gaelic and European, native and non-native, avoids the pitfalls of naïve essentialism and reactionary nativism, insisting that openness to European influence was characteristic of the Gaelic tradition prior to English colonisation. ‘Do you seriously contend that we should be wise to cut ourselves adrift from the great world of European thought?… Were we then completely aloof from European thought when we were Irish, and are we more in touch with it now that we are more than half English?’ (O’Leary 1994: 56). Like many of his revivalist colleagues, Mac Piarais was a Francophone for whom French provided access to contemporary European thought and culture and an enabling alternative to English. His insistence on a dynamic tension between the old and the new, between Gaelic Irish and continental European models of literature and imagination, provides a touchstone for the most accomplished poetry and prose produced in Irish in the 20th century: ‘This is the 20th century; and no literature can take root in the 20th century which is not of the 20th century. We want no Gothic revival’ (O’Brien 1968: 31).

1920-1940: The aftermath of optimism

It is impossible to determine how Mac Piarais might have developed as a poet, but the extent of the loss to Irish language poetry following his execution in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising might be measured against the growing confidence evident in the handful of poems published in his debut collection Suantraidhe agus goltraidhe [Lullabies and laments] in 1914. The collapse of idealism following the political compromise that led to the establishment of the Free State and the Civil War also had a profound impact on the language movement and its literary programme that was part of the cultural nationalist aspiration to an Ireland that would be ‘not Gaelic merely, but free as well; not free, merely, but Gaelic as well’ (Pearse 1922: 135). The ideal of an independent nation, politically separate and culturally distinct, was now the responsibility of the State and its elected government rather than of individuals and voluntary organisations. The failure of the State to fulfil the ideals on which it was founded deepened the disillusion of those committed to political and cultural separatism, including language activists and writers, and the decline of writing in Irish during this period is part of a more general decline in revolutionary optimism and ambition.

In the literary doldrums between the Easter Rising and the outbreak of World War II, the only real successor to Mac Piarais was Liam S. Gógan. Despite his high public profile, Gógan’s aristocratic sensibility, formal experiment and linguistic complexity did not endear him to