A Little More Abjection: Commentary on “Abjection and Disorderly Elements of Corporeal Existence in the Irish-Language Poetry of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Biddy Jenkinson”

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mads T. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Language Poetry ◽  
Irish Language

Translating Contemporary Irish Language Poetry

Wasafiri ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clíona Ní Ríordáin
Keyword(s):  
Language Poetry ◽  
Irish Language

‘The best English-Irish poetry before Yeats’

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Moulden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Traditional Songs ◽  
High Level

‘[T]he best Irish-English poetry before Yeats’: thus, in The Listener in 1970, John Holloway described a genre of exuberantly worded songs that employed complex patterns of rhyme deriving from Irish language poetry, many of which were among the nineteenth-century ballad sheet collections of Sir Frederic Madden, held in Cambridge University library. Items in this form seem to have surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, soon after the appearance of the earliest eight-page songbook to be printed in Ireland, and probably the first anywhere in the ‘British Isles’. This essay traces the development of this genre towards, perhaps its finest manifestation, the luxuriously florid bawdry of ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest’, probably composed by the northern-born but Drogheda-based weaver poet John Sheil (c.1784–1872). Many commonly known and apparently innocuous traditional songs are found as bawdry in early collections and employ a range of sexual metaphors, well understood at that time among men but not (openly) among women or more recently. The combination of verbal flourish and double entendre together with a consummate control over the complexity of rhyme and rhythm forced John Holloway to recognize vernacular verse as, not a debased version of ‘educated’ poetry, but as a genre with its own standards, a parallel form that bears comparison at a high level.

‘So much Gaelic to me’: Beckett and the Irish Language

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Graham
Keyword(s):  
National Language ◽  
Official Language ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
History Of

This essay explores the ways in which Ireland's sacralised national language figures in Beckett's work. Oblique references to Irish in the Beckett oeuvre are read against a history of Anglo-Irish investment in the language as a mode of ‘impatriation’, a means by which to circumscribe anxieties surrounding an identity fraught with socio-political anomalies. In addition, the suspicion of ‘official language’ in Beckett's work is considered in light of his awareness of the ‘language issue’ in his native country, particularly in relation to the powerful role of the Irish language in the reterritorialisation of the civic sphere in post-independence Ireland.

The Changing Face of Irish Ireland: Séamus Ó Grianna's and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fictions of the Donegal Gaeltacht

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-380
Author(s):  
Ríona Nic Congáil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Insight Into

Séamus Ó Grianna and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, whose lifespans overlapped only briefly, rank among the most prolific Irish writers of the twentieth century. Their bilingualism, moreover, offers them access to two languages, cultures, and viewpoints. Their shared interest in the Donegal Gaeltacht during the revivalist period, and their use of fiction to explore and represent it, provide their readers with a remarkable insight into the changing ideologies of twentieth-century Ireland, and particularly Irish-Ireland, touching on broad issues that are linguistic, cultural, political, gendered, and spatial. This essay begins by analyzing the narrative similarities between Ó Grianna's Mo Dhá Róisín and Ní Dhuibhne's Hiring Fair Trilogy, and proceeds to examine how both writers negotiate historical fact, the Irish language, the performance of Gaelic culture, the burgeoning women's movement, and the chasm between rural and urban Ireland of the revival. Through this approach, the essay demonstrates that the fictions of these two writers reveal as much about their own agendas and the dominant ideas of the epoch in which they were writing, as they do about life in the Donegal Gaeltacht in the early twentieth century.

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