Three Irish Poets – Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

‘Ceist na Teangan’/ ‘The Language Issue’

Modern poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill writes in the Irish language. ‘Ceist na Teangan’ which we look at in this section is the final poem in her 1990 volume Pharoah’s Daughter. The poems in this bilingual collection are translated into English by a range of other poets including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciarán Carson and Michael Longley. The critic Patrick Crotty has highlighted Ní Dhomhnaill’s importance as a ‘key figure in continuing the dialogue between the poetries of Ireland’s two languages’ (Crotty, 1995). 

Below you'll find the poem in both Irish and English, as well as an audio recording of Nuala reading the poem herself. The title of the poem gives us an important clue as to its theme. How does the speaker of the poem represent the theme of language? Why the reference to the ‘Pharaoh’s daughter’?

You will most likely have noticed that the Old Testament story of Moses is used as a metaphor for the poet’s use of the Irish language. The poet is imagined as a mother who commits her hope for the future to Irish, just as Moses’s mother set him afloat in a basket of rushes.

In the book of Exodus this part of the story ends happily as Moses is rescued by the Pharoah’s daughter.  Politically speaking she is an enemy of the Hebrews but she still takes pity on the baby and adopts it, allowing Moses to survive to manhood and become a great leader. So perhaps the poem is suggesting that although the Irish language is something fragile and vulnerable now, it will have enough strength in the future to survive oppression and bear hope.

But if we recall the context of the original Bible story the message is perhaps less optimistic. Moses is only put in the basket to save him from the Egyptian massacre of Hebrews. When Moses grows up he becomes a hero but is burdened with the task of liberating the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. If we emphasise this part of the story, the ‘little boat’ of language is always overshadowed by the danger of extinction, in spite of the maternal faith and care of the writer.

As we saw earlier, the poems by O’Leary and Tynan also focused on the image of the courageous mother. It’s interesting that Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem in fact dramatises two maternal figures - Moses’s birth mother and the Egyptian princess - and you might like to think about the reasons for this.

In dialogue with the poet

Below we've included an interview with Nuala Ní Dhomnhaill and Angus Calder.

The conversation covers a wide range of topics concerning language, translation, gender and identity in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry which you might find interesting to link back to the discussions of Irish women’s poetry featured in our other articles. Here however we will focus on just a couple of these points.

Questions of translation

In the interview, Ní Dhomhnaill explains why Irish is such a natural and inspirational language for her to work in as a poet. Given this, we might expect her to be quite sceptical about translations of her work.

Listen now to the first part where Angus Calder asks what has been lost in Paul Muldoon’s English translation of ‘Ceist ne Teangan’. Is there anything that strikes you as interesting about what Ní Dhomhnaill has to say here?

Transcript 103.6 KB

Language, gender and poetry

Ní Dhomhnaill is well known for addressing feminist themes in her poetry and for making a very important contribution to the body of literature in Irish by women. In this part of the interview, Calder asked the poet which is more important-- the fact that she is a woman writing, or the fact that she writes in the Irish language. What did you think was the gist of Ní Dhomhnaill’s argument about gender and language?

Transcript 93.8 KB

Download this audio clip.Audio player: 36513_nuala_ni_dhomnhaill_full_interview.mp3

Taking it further

We hope you enjoyed working through this material and reading these three Irish poets. This material has been adapted from the ‘Literature and Gender’ unit of the past Open University course A210, Approaching Literature. If you want to explore these topics further you could opt to study A100 The Arts Past and Present which includes material on Irish national identity in the unit ‘Tradition and Dissent’. A multi-disciplinary course, AA100 also introduces you to literary study.  If you enjoy in-depth discussion and analysis of literature, you might be interested in taking the second-level course A230, Studying Literature.