Cead Aighnis. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. An Sagart. £6.
O Rathaille. Michael Hartnett. Gallery Books. £7.95p. Hardback £13.95p.
The immediately obvious connection between Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Michael Hartnett is the " farewell to English ": that they both, at different times and with varying constancy, declared their intention to abjure English and write in Irish, a medium which for both of them was originally a second language. Ten years after his Farewell to English in 1975 Hartnett returned to writing mostly in English; Ni Dhomhnaill has written exclusively in Irish, leaving it to a team of grand translators (Hartnett prominent amongst them) to provide facing English versions of her poems.Often, as in the case of Cead Aighnis, the poems are only in Irish - thus far at least.
Yet the matter is a good deal more complicated than this suggests. Between them these two major figures in contemporary poetry in the South of Ireland (there is a strong case for calling them the two major figures) have created a a powerful symbiotic relationship between poetry in Irish and English. Some of Hartnett's finest poems are his vernacular English translations of his own Irish lyrics (as in A Necklace of Wrens) and of Ni Dhomhnaill's Rogha Danta; remarkably, Ni Dhomhnaill has become known as one of the best known Irish poets worldwide, stimulated by a feminist readership but more because of her great mythopoeic power, in an era which has become used to encountering some of the greatest poetry - Akhmatova, Herbert, Holub - in translation only. Few modern Irish poems are better known than Ceist na Teangan, the beautiful title poem of Ni Dhomhnaill's Pharaoh's Daughter. Her standing is striking testimony to the progress made by Irish as a literary language over the past generation, in which, of course, she has been arguably the principal figure.
Cead Aighnis is divided into three parts: the first " Mo Mhaistir Dorcha", which takes up more than half the book, does indeed begin with a series of unprecedently dark shorter poems ,many death dominated but some powerfully political, like "Dubh" on the fall of Srebrenica in 1995 (translated by Paul Muldoon last year).
But the essential positiveness of Ni Dhomhnaill's energetic temperament cannot be suppressed, and the section ends (after the breathlessly wonderful winter-poem " An Chaor Aduaidh " which recalls Heaney's " Haw Lantern" ) with one of her greatest achievements to date " Aurora Borealis", a celebration of the Borey Dancers, linking the cosmological and the personal. The book's second section is eight short translations into Irish, an eloquent repayment by Ni Dhomhnaill, including a luminous translation of Michael Longley's " An Amish Rug" from Gorse Fires, sustaining her book's theme of blackness.
The third section, " Na Murucha a Thriomaigh " ("The Beached Mermaids"might be an over interpreted translation) is more classic Ni Dhomhnaill, with all her fire and wit and fearlessness , showing that the graver voice of much of the new poetry is still founded on the characteristically sensual energy of the "Mor" poems so well translated by Hartnett in the 1980s.
Many years ago, Hartnett praised Frank O'Connor for giving a voice to Aodhag an O Rathaille; in O Rathaille he is giving an updated voice to a small representative sample - 24 poems - of the great East Kerry poet. Translating O Rathaille remains a problem, on ideological as much as technical grounds. We are not disposed to be moved in our era by laments for the passing of a nobility, whether native or invasive, as Corkery noted in The Hidden Ireland.
And yet there are moments of incomparable sympathy in O Rathaille, especially in the personal elegies at the approach of the poet's own death which Hartnett translates wonderfully. (The translations are best where Hartnett employs the spare and calculatingly rough-hewn vernacular of which he is such a master. ) The poem that Yeats's "The Curse of Cromwell" has made the most familiar to an English readership, Hartnett entitles " The Poet on his Deathbed," ending with the celebration of the Blackwater, " the river that flows to Youghal from Kerry's mountains":
I will stop now, forever. Death comes close, does not delay, since the dragons of our regions have lost their rights. They were loved by heroes. I will follow to the grave the lords my elders served before the death of Christ.
Corkery famously stressed O Rathaille's representativeness as a writer in a European tradition who speaks for a people rather than, in the English poetic way, as an individual. Whatever about the truth of this distinction, Hartnett certainly shares O Rathaille's wish to speak for a people and a region (Munster).
As a representative of the Irish poetic tradition, O Rathaille's versatility is extraordinary. In him we hear the late Tudor lamenting voice of O Heocaidh in the wonderful "In the Time He Moved beside Tonn Toime", side by side with the satirical brio of Merriman in the excerpt from Ar Bhas Ui Cheallachain and the Rabelaisian O Rathaille's Answer to Domhnall Na Tuille.
Most celebrated of all of course is that famous challenge to translators Gile na Gile. Hartnett's beautiful - and beautifully titled - version "Silver of Silver" surpasses Mangan and O Connor.
Ni 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 O Rathaille . Her forte is not as a representative, as much as a voice of extraordinary and unmissable personal force, however affectingly she enters into contemporary issues, from the political condition of women to Bosnia.
Ta's agam nach bhfuil se ceart, coir na cothrom rud beag chomh suarach lem' chroise a chur I gcomparaid le feinimean siorai, le rud ata chomh dosharaithe le soilse na bhFlaitheas, le hiomrothlu na bplainead.
("Aurora Borealis")
The constituency represented by poetry which combines the personal and the universal to this degree is the human species. And the expression of it through a language of few speakers is one of the great miracles of modern Ireland.
Bernard O'Donoghue teaches Medieval Engligh at Wadham College, Oxford. His latest book of poems Here nor There has just been published by Chatto and Windus