Poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill Brings Celtic Otherworlds Close to Home

by Melanie Fire Salamander

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My first encounter with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (NOO-la Nee GO-nal, according to a helpful Internet blurb) came about five years ago, by way of her essay in The New York Times Book Review, "Why I Choose To Write in Irish, The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back" (January 8, 1995). I'd been to Ireland once and was to go again; went, in fact, both times to the Gaeltacht (Irish Gaelic_speaking area) on the Dingle Peninsula of West Kerry, where in part she grew up.

Her voice was so personal, so present, in that essay, and I was already interested in Irish and Ireland. So when I went to Ireland later that year, I got a couple books of her poetry and met the fairy woman with the Black and Decker:

The fairy woman came
with a Black and Decker
She cut down my tree.
I watched her like a fool
cut the branches one by one.

(from "The Tree," a translation of "An Crann," in Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, translated by Michael Hartnett.)

Which, incidentally, looks a little different in a different translation:

There came this bright young thing
with a Black & Decker
and cut down my quince-tree.
I stood with my mouth hanging open
while one by one
she trimmed off the branches.

(from "As for the Quince," another translation of "An Crann," by Paul Muldoon, in Pharaoh's Daughter.)

The original stanza goes like this:

Do tháinig bean an leasa
le Black & Decker
do ghearr sí anuas mo chrann.
D'fhanas im óinseach ag féachaint uirthi
faid a bhearraigh sí na brainsí
ceann ar cheann.

Ní Dhomhnaill, as I knew from the start, is an Irish poet who writes in Irish, so unless I learn that language I'll never really be able to taste the exact rhythms or the many shaded meanings of that poem, or any of her other poems. So here we are staring from the boat at Tir na n'Óg, and we'll never get there, because even if all of us pick up Irish-language instruction tapes (which I own) and even listen to them, we'll never have grown up speaking the language, we won't know it in our bones.

That feeling pressing upon me, it's interesting to me that even Ní Dhomhnaill herself had questions about writing in Irish:

When I myself came to write it didn't dawn on me that I could possibly write in Irish. The overriding ethos had got even to me. Writing poetry in Irish somehow didn't seem to be intellectually credible. So my first attempts, elegies on the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King published in the school magazine, were all in English. (from "Why I Choose To Write in Irish.")

When I first went to Ireland, I felt as if I belonged there. The countryside felt right. It felt like the landscape of all the fairytales I read while I grew up, felt right and true in a way that nowhere in America, neither Missouri (where I grew up) nor Washington (where I moved) felt. The land rippled correctly, the trees were the trees of folktale, the sun angled true... I can't explain it. It felt right.

But of course, I didn't belong in Ireland. Sometimes I feel don't belong anywhere. I'm an American; I'm a mongrel. My ancestors called Ireland, England, Germany, Scotland and France home  but if I go now any of those places, I can't call it home. I'm not Irish, English, German, Scots or French, as the denizens will remind me. I'm American.

Yet I often feel I can't call this land in the United States "mine," either  not the way I could if my family had lived here, in one place, for ten generations, as Native Americans have. Missouri, by this definition, is the place that's most "mine," and I'm not there. Nor do I want to be.

So, as an American, I have this standing problem of inauthenticity. It strikes me particularly as a pagan. To me, being a pagan is about being of the land, of this place here, this dirt, these fir trees, these salmonberries, these mountains. What place is truly mine? Perhaps nowhere.

This can be a strength, I know  because in reality we imperialistic mammals, Homo sapiens, own nothing, and it's useful to remember that. But often I feel this lack of ownership as a weakness, a way I'm always open to the charge of inauthenticity.

So of course I fell in love with a real Irish poet, who writes in real Irish Gaelic, who had her own species of doubt related to inauthenticity to address and did so before us all. I liked her voice even before I read her poetry.

Then I read her poetry, and they're all there, in different mixtures and straight up, not just the fey but also the Morrigan, the Mhór-Rion, the Great Queen, as well as Medb and Cú Chulainn and the Badhbh, not to mention Loki and Balder and Oedipus and the Sphinx. The creatures and beings of myth, those people from those fairytales I steeped myself in as a child, are alive and well in Ní Dhomhnaill's poetry, and in her world you can meet them down at the pub. In her writing, the otherworld is this world, and vice versa, as sometimes I can feel it myself.

She writes in Irish, she says, because it easier to bring the otherlands here in that language. She describes this, beginning with her researches into old Irish texts:

By now I must have spent whole years of my life burrowing in the department of folklore at University College, Dublin, and yet there are still days when my hands shake with emotion holding manuscripts.... This material is genuinely ineffable, like nothing else on earth.

Indeed, there is a drawer in the index entitled "Neacha neamhbeo agus nithe nach bhfuil ann" ("Unalive beings and things that don't exist"). Now I am not the greatest empiricist in the world but this one has even me stumped. Either they exist or they don't exist. But if they don't exist why does the card index about them stretch the length of my arm? Yet that is the whole point of this material and its most enduring charm. Do these beings exist? Well, they do and they don't. You see, they are beings from "an saol eile," the "otherworld," which in Irish is a concept of such impeccable intellectual rigor and credibility that it is virtually impossible to translate into English, where it all too quickly becomes fey and twee and "fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden."

The way so-called depth psychologists go on about the subconscious nowadays you'd swear they had invented it, or at the very least stumbled on a ghostly and ghastly continent where mankind had never previously set foot. Even the dogs in the street in West Kerry know that the "otherworld" exists, and that to be in and out of it constantly is the most natural thing in the world....

This easy interaction with the imaginary means that you don't have to have a raving psychotic breakdown to enter the "otherworld." The deep sense in the language that something exists beyond the ego-envelope is pleasant and reassuring, but it is also a great source of linguistic and imaginative playfulness, even on the most ordinary and banal of occasions.

Let's say I decide some evening to walk up to my aunt's house in West Kerry. She hears me coming. She knows it is me because she recognizes my step on the cement pavement. Still, as I knock lightly on the door she calls out, "An de bheoaibh no de mhairbh thu?" ("Are you of the living or of the dead?") Because the possibility exists that you could be either, and depending on which category you belong to, an entirely different protocol would be brought into play. This is all a joke, of course, but a joke that is made possible by the imaginative richness of the language itself. (from "Why I Choose To Write in Irish.")

Even in English, that imaginative richness comes through, no doubt because Ní Dhomhnaill starts with the language of her heart. Medb chastising the pint-drinking men of Ireland for putting their hands up her skirt is a pleasure to behold. And the mermaids, and the estuary of the Shannon winking from her bed:

I am welcoming, full of nets,
inveigling
slippery with seaweed,
quiet eddies
and eel-tails.

(from "The Shannon Estuary Welcoming the Fish," in Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, translated by Michael Hartnett.)

To me, as Ní Dhomhnaill writes, a central essence of Celtic writing is that sense of the interpenetration of otherworlds and this world, that if you just step sideways you might well end up in the land of the fey, or the dead, or the Celtic heroes. That's what I wanted most when I was a child, when I thought of reaching otherworlds as getting out of here, and that's what I want most now, when I think of the process as bringing that world here. Why else do I do magick, but to make the world of quick effects and shining wonder interpenetrate the world of my life? Reading Ní Dhomhnaill is another way, as sure as magick, to bring that world here.

To bring Ní Dhomhnaill's world closer to us, I can tell you she was born in Lancashire, England, in 1952, of Irish parents, and grew up in counties Kerry and Tipperary in Ireland. She has taught in Ireland and was a visiting professor at Boston College for the 1998_1999 year. She lives now near Dublin and is a regular broadcaster on Irish radio and TV. Her translators include Nobel prize_winning poet Seamus Heaney. In addition to the three books of hers I found available in the United States, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, Pharaoh's Daughter, and The Astrakhan Cloak, her collections include the Irish books An Dealg Droighin (1981), Féar Suaithinseach (1984), Feis (1991) and Cead Aighnis (1998). As I write, Wake Forest University Press is coming out with another book of hers including Irish poems and English translations, The Water Horse.

You can be sure I'll get that pretty soon after it comes out, and I hope you do too. If you haven't figured out this article is mainly an excuse to feed you gobbets of Ní Dhomhnaill's work and get you to go find more yourself, well, now I've told you. Go find her books, and read all her poems, and roll in the heather she lays out for you, and enjoy yourself sensually in the proper way of a pagan at Beltaine.

As a final teaser, I'll quote you an entire poem, though I warn you it was hard to choose one. I tried writing down my favorites from her books and ended up with about half the contents starred. But this poem seems good for Beltaine:

Blodewedd

At the least touch of your fingertips
I break into blossom,
my whole chemical composition
transformed.
I sprawl like a grassy meadow
fragrant in the sun;
at the brush of your palm, all my herbs
and spices spill open

frond by frond, lured to unfold
and exhale in the heat;
wild strawberries rife, and pimpernels
flagrant and scarlet, blushing
down to their stems.
To mow that rushy bottom;
no problem.

All winter I waited silently
for your appeal.
I withered within, dead to all,
curled away, and deaf as clay,
all my life forces ebbing slowly
till now I come to, at your touch,
revived as from a deathly swoon.

Your sun lightens my sky,
and a wind lifts, like God's angel,
to move the waters,
every inch of me quivers
before your presence,
goose-pimples I get as you glide
over me, and every hair
stands on end.

Hours later I linger
in the ladies toilet,
a sweet scent wafting
from all my pores,
proof positive, if a sign
were needed, that at the least
touch of your fingertips
I break into blossom.

(translation by John Montague, in Pharaoh's Daughter.)

Like the girl whose footprints broke into blossom, Ní Dhomhnaill draws out the living beauty of these intertwined worlds into poetry. Go pick some.

From  http://www.widdershins.org