Getting to the heart of language and identity

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Louis de Paor, poet and director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUIG, will be exploring the issue of language and identity this Saturday at 3pm in the Aula Maxima NUIG, alongside journalist Manchán Magan and Regina Uí Chollatáin of UCD.

You Are What You Speak is part of the Arts Festival’s First Talk series which kick off this weekend, exploring the theme of identity. Cork-born Louis, who studied Irish at UCC, is well placed to discuss how our national language shapes our identity and the thorny issue of its place in Irish life.

He’s the editor of a newly published bilingual anthology, Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession – the first comprehensive anthology of modern Irish-language poetry accompanied by English translations, it forms a sequel to Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella’s ground-breaking 1981 anthology, An Duanaire, 1600-1900 / Poems of the Dispossessed.

Leabhar na hAthghabhála is published by Bloodaxe, which is the largest poetry publishing company in the UK and Ireland. That means that 26 leading Irish-language poets from the 20th century can take their place alongside their peers who write in English, in bookshops worldwide.

That was one of Louis’s aims with this anthology.

“Early Irish poetry is well served and poetry from the bardic era was well served but poetry from the 1890s to the present was a closed book to most people,” he explains

Poets such as Eoghan Ó Tuairisc and Máire Mhac an tSaoi as well as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Biddy Jenkinson appear, alongside younger writers such as Gearóid Mac Lochlainn and the editor himself.

Their works have been translated by a skilled group including Paul Muldoon, Thomas Kinsella, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Brendan Kennelly Mary O’Donoghue, Alan Titley and David Wheatley.

People involved in translating the poems for this anthology were required to have sufficient Irish to engage directly with the original work, so “a high degree of linguistic competence as well as literary ability – and patience –  was needed”, Louis says.

“The bottom line was that there should be nothing in translation that wouldn’t be in the original and nothing in the original that isn’t in the translation. A curious reader should be able to move from the English across the page to the Irish,” Louis says.

“An appropriate deference and as little difference as possible between the two – that was the ambition.”

Once that was achieved, the most important thing was that “Irish poets and their poetry would get a platform”.

Louis reads “books and books of poetry and even in the best poetry sections of the best bookshops, Irish language poetry is not there, so how do you get it out of the ghetto? It’s not the fault of Irish publishers that it’s difficult to get into shops internationally.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.