Disconsolate labours : Derek Mahon and Nerval

Abstract

This essay examines some of the ways in which Derek Mahon has been influenced by the poetry of Gerard de Nerval. The first half explores Nerval's impact on Mahon's poetic consciousness as it developed during the 1960s. Analysis of some of Mahon's early poems, such as "After Nerval" and "Glengormley", reveals his irony-tinged affinity with Nerval's vision of a noumenal world existing beyond the limits of sensory experience. This world is contrasted with the physical world and its incumbent political, religious and emotional tensions. The second half of the essay focuses on Mahon's version of Nerval's sonnet cycle, Les Chimères, which explores Mahon's responses to personal loss. Mahon does not simply translate Les Chimères, however. He adapts and disrupts this already highly personal series of poems to examine his own sense of disconsolation with a religious inheritance in which he discerns the fundamental aspects of existential absurdity.