The Aistriuchan Cloak: Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language

Abstract

As readers of "Twice" from The Annals of Chile (1994) will know, there is often as much going on around the edges in Muldoon as there is at the center. In that poem, "Lefty" Clery runs from one end of a group of posed classmates to the other, taking advantage of the camera's "leisurely pan" to appear twice in a school photograph. 1 Among the numerous marginal details, in Muldoon, and one for which the analogy to "Twice" is particularly appropriate, is his use of Irish: Irish was the language of his first teenage attempts at poetry and has come to a new prominence in his work in recent years. There are three principal aspects of Muldoon's involvement with the Irish language, all present in his work from the outset of his career. First, the influence of Irish language models on his work, most obviously--but far from exclusively--in "Immram" from Why Brownlee Left (1980); second, Muldoon's work as a translator from the Irish of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Michael Davitt, and other writers; and third, the presence in his poems of the language itself. In an interview with John Haffenden, he recalls how an Armagh teacher, Seán O'Boyle, who appears in "The Fridge," "taught me Irish and gave me [. . .] a sense of this marvellous heritage of song and culture in Gaelic." 2 He quickly abandoned his schoolboy attempts to write in Irish, however, because of his lack of a "real control of the language." 3 It was not until the 1996 volume Kerry Slides that Muldoon felt sufficiently confident to collect a poem in Irish, but no less important than work written in Irish is his use of the language as a macaronic presence in a work like "Yarrow." Though each aspect has had a different effect on his work, each use of the language has been present from the outset.