Eilean Ni Chuilleanain Research Articles

Introduction: Medieval Literature and Contemporary Irish Writing

The invitation to Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O’Donoghue, and Frank McGuinness to contribute the following set of papers to the Irish University Review was prompted by the 2013 International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS) conference in Dublin, organised by Mary Clayton of University College Dublin and Alice Jorgensen of Trinity College Dublin. The conference was the largest ISAS gathering to date, with 210 delegates. Its theme was ‘Insular Cultures’, focusing on the connections between Britain and Ireland in the early Middle Ages. One of the highlights was the reading in the National Museum by Seamus Heaney on 29 July – one of his last public appearances – in which he read translations and poems inspired by Old English and Old Irish poetry, including part of his Beowulf, his very early ‘Trial Pieces’, whose starting point was the Wood Quay excavations of Viking Dublin, his version of the Old English ‘Deor’, ‘Colmcille the Scribe’, and ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’. It was obvious from the reading how steeped Heaney was in the medieval literatures of both islands. Heaney’s Beowulf, like his translations of Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables (2009), owes an obvious debt to the texts of Old and Middle English literature that were standard on university curricula on both sides of the Irish Sea up to recently. Other contemporary Irish writing also bears witness to this influence, such as the many versions of Old English poems by Irish poets in The Word Exchange (2010), edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, which includes translations by Greg Delanty, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Bernard O’Donoghue, and many others as diverse as Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer (2006), Frank McGuinness’s play Someone to Watch Over Me, and Bernard O’Donoghue’s verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In order to mark the occasion of the 2013 ISAS conference, hosted for the first time in Ireland and with its focus on pre-conquest connections and exchanges

A chastened communion: modern Irish poetry and Catholicism

In this most welcome and insightful book of essays, Andy Auge sets about analysing the role of Catholicism in the work of 7 modern Irish poets: Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Durcan and Paula Meehan. Clearly, you have in this choice a mixture of highly decorated figures, one a Nobel Laureate, and some less well-established voices, although all extremely well-established among the reading public. The overall impression given as one r...

Book Review: Susana Bayó Belenguer, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, & Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, editors, assisted by Giulia Zuodar (2013). TRANSLATION RIGHT OR WRONG. Four Courts Press, Dublin.Hardback 304pp. June 2013; ISBN:978-1-84682-372-5

This collection of essays published in 2013 has its origins in an international conference held in Trinity College Dublin in 2009. The three editors (assisted by Ph.D. student Giulia Zuodar), are Susana Bayo Belenguer, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Cormac O Cuilleanain, members of faculty at Trinity College where they teach Spanish, English and Italian respectively, as well as lecturing on the MA in literary translation there. The title of the collection could possibly cause some unease, seeming to hark back, as it does, to the traditional tendency of commentators over millennia to view translation as a question of success or failure rather than of endless possibilities. To once again try to approach translation from a right versus wrong perspective could possibly seem a retrograde step but any fear in that regard in relation to this volume is unfounded. The anachronistic ring to the title is deliberate and provocative but in reality there is nothing at all predictable, rehashed or a wearisome about this truly exciting collection of essays. Somewhat unusually, the work starts with a substantial introduction of almost 30 pages, in which the editors resist the temptation to limit themselves simply to short summaries of the chapters that follow and opt instead to launch into an invigorating and far-ranging discussion of the rights and wrongs of translation across civilisations and centuries in a wholly success effort to bring “new perspectives to bear on a long-lived and sometimes controversial issue”. Here you can find references to Sappho, St Jerome and Luther, on one page and, Milan Kundera, and translation theorist, James Holmes, on the next. One chapter explains the subtleties of fan-translation in contemporary pop culture while another deals with the Quechua language of the Andes. Refreshingly, the work includes output from a more diverse range of scholars and topics than would typically be represented at a single conference or in a single publication. Over the last 20 or so years, the growth of interest in translation studies has been such that there is frequently a tendency for scholarship on, say, literary translation to be accommodated in one type of conference, journal or book where research on audiovisual translation, for example, would be unlikely to appear side-by-side. Here, however, subtitles are discussed in one breath and literary classics in the next.

Metaphor as Metalanguage in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s “The Horses of Meaning”

Eilean Ni Chuilleanain’s innate concern with poetic language per se, as a poet, translator, and scholar, is evident in many of her poems, such as “Early Recollections”, “Studying the Language”, “Translation”, “The Horses of Meaning”, and “Gloss/Clos/Glas”, among others. For this reason, this article investigates, from the perspective of Jakobson’s theoretical considerations in “Linguistics and Poetics”, Chuilleanain’s handling of poetic language specifically in “The Horses of Meaning” (Selected Poems, 2009), in order to evaluate not only how the interaction among the different functions of language becomes concretized in the verbal structure of the poem, but also how the use of metaphor and metalanguage – conveyed by the title and developed throughout the poem – will further emphasize the predominance of the poetic upon the metalingual, referential, emotive, and conative functions. In this way, “The Horses of Meaning”, besides being a “visual and auditory experience”, becomes paradigmatic of Jakobson’s statement that “the poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function”.

Modern Versions of Nostos and Katabasis: A Survey of Homeric Hypertexts in Recent Anglophone Poetry

Since its heyday in the 1950s and 60s, myth criticism has been accused of taking a reductive approach to literature because it tended to neglect cultural and historical differences between ancient Greek myths and their current renderings and, more damagingly perhaps, to marginalise the specific properties of literary works that redeploy ancient myths. While this article does not have a New Historicist agenda, it seeks to show how prevalent ancient Homeric myth still is in contemporary poetry, despite the desacralised and often more humble post-Modernist world of current letters. The article analyzes how poets such as Lorna Goodison have gone against the grain of ancient myths (as many feminist writers have done), and in what ways Homer's Odyssey has been given unexpected extensions that provide the battleground not for epic extravaganzas but for familial issues treated in a post-Confessional mode. The study focuses primarily on poems by Peter Redgrove, Ted Hughes, Michael Longley, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, John Montague and Paul Durcan. After having given an outline of the various ways in which recent poets employ myth, the survey focuses on a particular case in point in the field of Irish poetry to show that myth criticism can also be attentive to the specificities of the texts its seeks to examine in an archetypal light.

On Trevor Joyce

The Irish poet Trevor Joyce is distant cousin of his novelist namesake, as I learned when glazier repairing window of Joyce's house, broken in fit of rage by poetry critic at party that concluded an poetry festival held in Cork, said that if he'd known of relationship he'd have done work for half-price. That's work reputation can do in Ireland, and, though tensions that led to that incident of broken window were not exclusively literary, it does provide fitting image for knockabout absurdities of distinctions between mainstream and avant-garde that readers expect to hear when one reviews poet like Trevor Joyce. Yes, they take these matters seriously in Ireland, as elsewhere--which is pity, as such divisions are surely as slippery and unhelpful in Irish context as they are, to my mind, in North America or U.K. By rights there ought to be community of interest between readers of challenging mainstream poets like Thomas Kinsella, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson, and readers of challenging avant-garde poets such as Joyce, Maurice Scully, Catherine Walsh, and Randolph Healy. The obstacles in way of bridging such audiences are persistent but (I think in my more optimistic moments) not likely to be permanent in long run, despite resistance from various quarters. (1) But I'm moving too fast, or letting my hopes distract me from text at hand, collected poems of an author who has now been writing for almost four decades but can still expect response Who's Trevor Joyce? from even that sliver of public that follows contemporary poetry. Trevor Joyce was born in Dublin in 1947. While still in his teens he met poet Michael Smith, who, five years his senior, became an important friend and mentor. In 1967 they cofounded New Writers' Press in order to do something about what they pugnaciously diagnosed as the stagnancy of Irish poetry scene relative to what had happened in U.S. and Europe, with its emphasis on a provincial literature, unambitious in its concerns, formally conservative, and rural in its outlook. (2) It was an auspicious time for such venture: NWP and its associated journal The Lace Curtain formed part of remarkable wave of little presses and journals that changed English-language poetry in 1960s and 1970s. NWP published wide variety of contemporary Irish poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Pearse Hutchinson, Anthony Cronin, Paul Durcan, and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, and major program of international authors--Borges, Vallejo, Spicer, Neruda. The sheer diversity and ambition of NWP's activities should not be forgotten, even though it is now most closely identified with its most significant achievement: rediscovery and republication of 1930s generation of Irish modernists (Brian Coffey, Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin, et al), of whom only Samuel Beckett was visible on canonical literary maps. NWP's period of greatest activity ended with 1970s (by which point it had produced over forty titles), though imprint continues to exist, revived on an occasional basis for special projects such as 1990 edition of Brian Coffey's Mallarme translations or present edition of Joyce's collected poems. Joyce's first phase as writer climaxed with full-length collection (NWP 1972). In his early poetry (presented in generous selection under tide Pentahedron & others in with first dream), Joyce demonstrates strikingly complete absorption of nineteenth-century and modernist influences. The poems' city- or townscapes are registered through sensibilities of late-modernist skeptical observer, as series of objects, part-objects, and living creatures at once oppressively plentiful and yet failing to add up to anything like full and living world. The poems' fragmented observations are bounded on all sides by streets, walls, cobblestones, public monuments, bridges, canals, and churches, an environment neither natural nor sufficiently human. …

The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers

What Foremothers?, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill Voices of Maria Edgeworth's Comedy, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain Hyacinth and the Wise Man - Lady Gregory's Comic Enterprise, Mary Lowe-Evans Homour with a - Somerville and Ross and The Irish RM, James M. Cahalan Crumbling Fortress - Molly Keane's Comedies of Anglo-Irish Manners, Rachael Jane Lynch Iris Murdoch's Moral Comedy, Flora Alexander (S)he Was Too Scrupulous Always - Edna O'Brien and the Comic Tradition, Michael Patrick Gillespie History, Gender and the Postcolonial Condition - Julia O'Faolain's Comic Rewriting of Finnegan's Wake, Theresa O'Connor Lashings of the Mother Tongue - Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's Anarchic Laughter, Mary O'Connor.