Selected Essays

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Oona Frawley (Editor)

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Ireland, Irish Literature, Nonfiction, Criticism

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (born 1952) is an Irish poet.

Born in Lancashire, England in 1952, of Irish parents, she moved to Ireland at the age of 5, and was brought up in Corca Dhuibhne and in Nenagh, County Tipperary. Her uncle was Monsignor Pádraig Ó Fiannachta of An Daingean, the leading authority alive on Munster Irish. She studied English and Irish at UCC in 1969 and became part of the 'Innti' school of poets. In 1973, she married Turkish geologist Dogan Leflef and lived abroad in Turkey and Holland for seven years. Her mother brought her up to speak English, though she was Irish herself. Her father and his side of the family spoke very fluent Irish and used it every day, but her mother thought it would make life easier for Nuala if she spoke English instead.

One year after her return to County Kerry in 1980, she published her first collection of poetry in Irish, An Dealg Droighin (1981), and became a member of Aosdána. Ní Dhomhnaill has published extensively and her works include poetry collections, children’s plays, screenplays, anthologies, articles, reviews and essays. Her other works include Féar Suaithinseach (1984); Feis (1991), and Cead Aighnis (2000). Ní Dhomhnaill's poems appear in English translation in the dual-language editions Rogha Dánta/Selected Poems (1986, 1988, 1990); The Astrakhan Cloak (1992), Pharaoh's Daughter (1990), The Water Horse (2002), and The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007). Selected Essays appeared in 2005.

Dedicated to the Irish language she writes poetry exclusively in Irish and is quoted as saying ‘Irish is a language of beauty, historical significance, ancient roots and an immense propensity for poetic expression through its everyday use’. Ní Dhomhnaill also speaks English, Turkish, French, German and Dutch fluently.

An article on- and interview with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill by Éamonn Ó Dónaill can be read (in Irish only) here: http://beo.ie/alt-nuala-ni-dhomhnaill...

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

In the nineteen fifties, poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (Noo-la Nee Go-nall) was sent to live at her aunt's home in an Irish speaking village on the Dingle peninsula in south-west Ireland. A neighbour who met the five year-old child some time afterwards and figured she wasn’t anyone he knew, asked her, Cé leis tú? by which he meant Who are you? but which translates literally as Who do you belong to?
Nuala already knew some Irish so she heard his question literally and answered literally: Bhaineann mé go fein or I belong to myself. That was an interesting and spirited answer, but the correct answer, according to the codes of the language, would have explained who she was in relation to other people the neighbour knew: I’m Paídín Sheáin’s daughter, for example, or I’m Máire Sheáin’s niece. These names are not mentioned in the text but I use them to make a point: Paídín and Máire, in the example, are linked to their father Seán, written Sheáin because the name is in the genitive/possessive case, meaning 'belonging to Seán', further emphasising the notion of 'belonging to' mentioned in the original question.

In this way, families who’d lived in the same place for generations were known to each other not so much by a surname, because they often shared the same surnames, but by a father’s or mother’s name and this practice was sufficient to allow each Paídín and each Máire in a locality to be identified precisely in conversation. If there were people with the same names and a further identifier was needed, the townland they lived in might be tacked onto their name, as for example Máire Sheáin Farranacarriga so that it would be clear that it was Máire Sheáin of 'The place of the rock' who was in question. In this way, the people belonged to their fathers and mothers but also to the place they came from. They were 'of' that place which brings us to the subject of place names and 'dinnsheanchas' or the tradition of placename lore in Irish culture which Ní Dhomhnaill meditates on in the main essay in this collection, Cé leis tú?

I too have a memory from early childhood that echoes the themes she examines. Though the area I grew up in was no longer Irish speaking, and hadn’t been for more than seventy-five years, many of the place names still recalled the language. The names of towns had mostly been anglicised by the British Ordinance Surveyors in the last decades of the nineteenth century (see Friel’s Translations) but the smaller townland names remained unchanged and still do to this day.
The practice of calling people by their father’s or mother’s name had almost disappeared too, but not quite. My father sometimes mentioned a distant cousin he called Tom Had-the-honey, or that’s how the name sounded to my child’s ears. I never met this man nor saw the name written down so I was content to imagine pots and pots of honey whenever he was mentioned, and I thought he was very lucky to have so much golden honey.
At some point I must have understood that the name referred to the place where he lived but I didn't think about him or it again until I read this essay. Then his name came back to me, and I found myself wondering what it might have meant. I know that in Irish, 'ait a chonaí' means 'the place where one lives' or the 'homeplace' (and 'ait' can be pronounced with a 'h' aspirate making it sound like the word 'had' and 'chonai' sounds like 'honey') so I figure that the distant cousin of my father’s must have lived in the remote 'homeplace' of his and my father’s ancestors, that he was the lucky one who still 'belonged' in that original place.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is certain that she belongs to the place she moved to at age five. In this essay, she examines her relationship with that place, a place she is not 'from' but 'of', a place she now feels is central to her existence though she has lived in other parts of the world before and since. Her links with the geography, history, and mythology encapsulated in its place names have become so strong that when she began to write poetry she chose to write it only in the Irish language, and she uses the geographical features of the Dingle peninsula, and the mythology associated with them, as the trigger for many of her poems. And though her fiercely independent spirit, as witnessed by her feisty answer to the question Who do you belong to?, pervades her poetry and her essays, the mythology of that place outweighs even that. She doesn't bow to patriarchy or religion, but she bows to the stories embedded in the placenames, the stories that are hidden beneath every tree and rock and craggy outcrop of that locality.
She bows to her inheritance.

In Baile an tSléibhe
is Cathair Léith
and below it
the house of the Dunleavies;
from here the poet Sean
went to the Great Blasket
and from here the red hair
and gift of poetry came down to me
through four generations.
Translation by the author.

[Padraic · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK - you probably haven't heard of her. You probably wonder (as I did) how to even pronounce her name. If you're Irish American, you may not even know there was a language called Irish.

Read the essay in here called "Why I Chose to Write in Irish: The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back." Don't worry. It's in English.

And wonder what happens to a culture that loses its tongue.

[Christin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was familiar with many of these essays from thesis research, but many of the versions appearing in this volume have been marvelously expanded, particularly "Ce Leis Tu?" and offer an incredibly detailed portrait of both the cultural and psychological context that produced much of Ni Dhomhnaill's best work. A must-read for anyone interested in NND criticism.

[Tim Morrissey · Rating 5 out of 5]

There really isn’t anyone else in the world like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is there?