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7 Translation and collaboration in Renaissance Dublin Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Translation is an essential activity of a literate age, when that is also an age of multilingual communication. This truth seems especially relevant in Ireland, which like the rest of Europe inherits the polyglot culture of a Christianity inflected by classical learning. In addition, Ireland (like many European countries) is a place where the dominance of a single vernacular has been impossible for almost one thousand years.1 While the Irish middle ages are alive with translation, the
This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
9780719075636_4_008.qxd 16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 142 8 Architectural metaphors: representations of the house in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke Lucy Collins Feminist criticism frequently employs metaphors of space to interrogate the position of women within society and their ability to articulate that position to a wider world. The idea of ‘clearing a space’ from which to speak suggests that for women freedom of expression can only be achieved in ‘empty’ space, space that is unmarked by ideological and aesthetic convictions. Yet such
of focus’.13 While noting 9 Mark A. Hutchinson, ‘The emergence of the state in Elizabethan Ireland and England, ca. 1575–99’, Sixteenth Century Journal 45:3 (2014), pp. 659–82, at p. 661. 10 Andrew Carpenter, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork, 2003). 11 The correspondence of James Ussher, 1600–1656, 3 vols, ed. Elizabethanne Boran (Dublin, 2015). 12 Herron, ‘Introduction: A fragmented Renaissance’, pp. 19–39. 13 Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Óenach: Journal of the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland: Reviews, 1:1 (2009), pp. 1
16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 128 Poetry Flanagan’s appearance as a recognisable contemporary jobber hints at contemporary moral values driven by a desire for profit at the expense of the moral outcome of that action. Time is distended in the poem, the human tragedy of Jesus’ final humiliation overshadowed by a cute Irish ‘apparition’ who elides the significance of the moment with his casual profiteering, a chronological conflation that Lucy Collins adroitly identifies in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Kennelly’s epic sequence is a powerful indicator of the
mythological are profoundly linked. In English some inescapable figures are Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ciarán Carson, Martina Evans, Sinéad Morrissey and Leontia Flynn (the predominance of women in the lists in both languages is striking). But no Irish writer in the modern era and idiom is unaffected by it. And of course it is not confined to Ireland: a celebrated early twenty-first century instance is the acclaimed Scottish poet-novelist John Burnside. In the end, the distinction I made at the outset here between the terminology and the spirit of the spiritual is not
105 6 The poetry of accumulation: Irish-American fables of resistance Eamonn Wall Writing on Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin’s poetry, Andrew J. Auge, in a devastating piece of reportage, describes the recent change that has taken place in the reputation and role of Irish Catholic Church: ‘by the turn of the millennium, the once imposing edifice of Irish Catholicism appeared increasingly derelict’ (Auge 2013: 145). Given all we have learned from reports into how the Church has dealt with abuses committed by its clergy and cover-ups initiated by its hierarchy, it