Poetry: In a country where English is compulsory from an early age, does writing in Irish make much sense?
Is it one of those activities that contributes to the difficulty of the language that the Taoiseach famously complained about in the Dáil? A good place to start to answer these questions might be in two new collections of selected poems from Gabriel Rosenstock and Louis de Paor. Both Rosenstock and de Paor were associated with the pioneering publication Innti, founded by Micheál Davitt in 1970, and they have over the years made their own the journal's credo to make Irish-language poetry a living idiom of expression rather than the moribund relic of the school primer.
For Rosenstock Irish is as much a way out as a way in. A way in because his poetry draws on native Irish mythology, folklore, song (Liadhain, Seán Ó Conaill, Storyteller, Mé an Mhuir Mhór) but a way out because from Aztec mythology (Xolotl) to the expropriation of indigenous peoples (Laoi an Indiaigh Dhíbeartha/The Lay of the Displaced Tribesman) to the trials of Japanese sake tipplers (Syójó), an interest in the difference of Irish becomes the basis for an interest in the differences of others.
Rosenstock indeed becomes a kind of global Sweeney, swinging from one branch of human expression to the next, the longer poems such as Xolotl and Laoi an Indiagh Dhíbeartha sustained by the ever-present oracular energy of the speaking voice.
There is a danger in all this, of course - sanctimonious shamanism or the po-faced prattle of New Age mystique - but Rosenstock is ruthlessly alert to the petty tyranny of Western self-importance. The opening poem (Portráid den Ealaíontóir mar Yeti/A Portrait of the Artist as a Yeti) is unforgiving.
Tuirsíonn na Himáilithe mé
gan de chomhluadar agam
Ach naoimh istigh i bpluai
sean na (chuirfidís soir thú)
The Himalayas wreck my head
no company
Only saints in caves (they'd
drive you to drink)
Some of the most striking poems in the collection are to do with the more private geographies of intimacy, however. Dún do Shúile/Close Your Eyes or Mar Ulchabhán/Like an Owl are all the more affecting and the more convincing because they carry within them a kind of menace that thwarts the easy compromise of sentiment. Rosenstock is the author of more than 100 works of fiction, prose and translation, and such productivity in a poet usually excites more suspicion than acclaim. The publication of this rigorous selection of Rosenstock's poetry should do much to highlight his very real strengths as one of the most innovative poets writing in the language.
A traditional function of the poet in medieval Gaelic society was to praise his patron and all belonging to him. In late modernity, however, poets have in a sense become their own patrons. Now when they compile the duanaire - the anthology of the contemporary self - it is the lives and deaths of their own mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandparents or the birth and growth of their children that are recorded in the verse. So it is in Ag Greadadh Bas sa Reilig/Clapping in the Cemetery, where a number of poems (Greim an Fhir Bháite/The Drowning Man's Grip, An Chéad Lá Riamh/The First Day Ever, Sorcha) tease out the complex entanglements of family inheritance and transmission.
De Paor in the best of these poems manages to go beyond the inherent privacy of these relationships to consider the gift and the burden of belonging, as in the fraught poet-patron who is forced to confess in Corcach/Cork:
B'fhada liom go dtréigfinn
an chré róbhog
dar dim é
(I couldn't wait to get away
from the soft soft earth
that had made me)
An enduring twilight fiction around Irish is the mellifluous harmlessness of the Celt. Nice language for an auld tune or to be "Enya-ed" into astral muzak, but it has no business lending its ear to the dissonant strains of the political. In Oileán na Marbh/The Isle of the Dead, Fáilte Uí Dhonnchú/O'Donoghue's Welcome, and Didjeridu, de Paor contests these images of the language as his articulate outrage at smugness and indifference highlights a long tradition of barely repressed satirical fury in Irish-language writing that goes from the poets of the Bardic schools to the contemporary verse of an Eoghan Ó Tuairisc or a Liam Ó Muirthile.
De Paor's attentiveness to detail, his creativity in the use of the formal resources of Irish and a consistent emotional honesty could have no better showcase than this particular selection of poems.
Both collections come with parallel English-language translations. On the whole, Rosenstock is better served by his translator, Paddy Bushe, who uses a wonderfully wide array of techniques including non-translation and Irish-language words in English to capture the puckish self-reflexivity of Rosenstock's writing.
The translations in the de Paor collection were done by the poet in collaboration with Biddy Jenkinson, Mary O'Donoghue and Kevin Anderson. They are more uneven and there is a tendency in places to opt for a strained jokiness or a heightened colloquialism that does not do justice to the stylistic sure-footedness and sobriety of de Paor's originals. But then again, English need not be compulsory and the shortcomings of translation are surely the best invitation to learn about the gains that lie behind the losses.
Rogha Dánta/Selected Poems, By Gabriel Rosenstock, Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 193 pp. €14
Ag Greadadh Bas sa Reilig/Clapping in the Cemetery, By Louis de Paor, Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 232 pp. €14
Michael Cronin is director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University and co-editor of The Irish Review. His latest work, Translation and Identity, will be published by Routledge this spring