Poet
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1952)
© The Gallery Press
Biography
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was born in Lancashire, England in 1952 to Irish physicians, and was sent to live with relatives in the Kerry Gaeltacht at the age of five. She studied English and Irish at UCC in 1969, where she became part of the ‘Innti’ school of poets. Ní Dhomhnaill lived abroad for seven years in Holland and Turkey with her Turkish husband, Dogan Leflef. Her first collection of poetry, An Dealg Droighin (1981) was published one year after her return to Co. Kerry in 1980. More importantly, Ní Dhomhnaill expands her target audience in Ireland and beyond Ireland’s borders with English translations created by prominent Irish poets, including Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. She feels that translation into English is necessary in order to reach a wider audience. Moreover, she believes that translators must leverage the full potential of English in order to capture the spark and electricity of Irish. Ní Dhomhnaill questions translation approaches that call for extreme fidelity to the original Irish text, and prefers instead to grant her English translators with full creative license to render her original Irish poems into aesthetic texts for English-speaking audiences.
Ní Dhomhnaill\'s poetry portrays women and the postcolonial subject as strong and active, as well as fragile and vulnerable. This plurality of identity helps to liberate both marginalized roles from their traditional stereotypes in contemporary Irish culture. Her reimagined roles for women and the formerly colonized attain a national and international context through the medium of English translation.
© Beverly Parayno
Bibliography Poetry
An Dealg Droighin, Mercier Press, Cork, 1981
Féar Suaithinseach, An Sagart, Dublin, 1984
Rogha Dánta- Selected Poems, translated by Michael Hartnett Raven, Arts Press, Dublin, 1988
Pharaoh’s Daughter, Gallery, Oldcastle, 1990
The Astrakhan Cloak, Gallery, Oldcastle, 1992
The Water Horse Gallery, Oldcastle, 1999
The Fifty Minute Mermaid, Gallery, Oldcastle, 2007
Links
http://thelink.concordia.ca/view.php?aid=38976
(from a Canadian perspective)
http://www.usna.edu/EnglishDept/ilv/nuala.htm
(article on US Naval Academy website)
http://www.parametermagazine.org/Nuala.htm
(essay in British literary journal)
http://www.nualanidhomhnaill.com/
(official website under construction)
http://home.kanto-gakuin.ac.jp/~kg061001/PoetryKanto/dhomhnail.html
(The Language Issue - poem)
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill on Lyrikline
Poems
Poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère