The Female Figure in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry

CHAPTER 7 - Transformation and Translation

CHAPTER 7 Transformation and Translation I listen to their accents, they are not all From this island, not all old, Not even, I think, all masculine. ‘Studying the Language’ (SP 89) The copious dark in the final poem of The Sun-fish, discussed at the end of the last chapter, has applications not only to space and place but also to language. In discussing the value of Renaissance rhetoric, Ní Chuilleanáin notes the many alternative ways of expressing an idea, what she defines as ‘copiousness’: ‘I find that when I write something – when I write a line – I sometimes look at it and say what could I change about that? What could be different?’1 The issue of difference and the ways in which language both insists upon and allows for diversity underpin many of Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetic strategies; she chooses from the multiple meanings inherent in words, creating what Irene Gilsenan Nordin has described as other ‘meanings hiding in the shadows struggling to be set free’.2 This strategy, which can be applied not only to words but also to images, is illustrated in her own original poems as well as in both what we can loosely call adaptations of poems by other writers, and her translations from other languages. In all three of these categories, issues of gender surface as Ní Chuilleanáin focuses on established views and beliefs, particularly as these involve female figures as subjects and speakers. In the poems ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’ and ‘Studying the Language’, for example, the relationship between language and gender, as these reflect the lives of women and men, are central to an understanding of both poems. Likewise, in her ‘rewritings’ or adaptations of some well-known poems by male poets, Ní Chuilleanáin creates female figures where there are none in the 128 original texts, in so doing giving us a new and different way to view the settings and themes of the poems. Finally, in her translations of a female poet like the Romanian Ileana Mălăncioiu, the abundance of female figures in the original poems allows Ní Chuilleanáin to demonstrate another side of ‘copiousness’, the translator’s many options to express the similarities and differences between poets writing in different languages. ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’ (SP 119), the last of her Selected Poems, shows us that Ní Chuilleanáin’s attitudes towards poetic voices and potential meanings embedded in words are also connected to issues of gender. Placed before two translations in the ‘Coda’ in the collection The Girl who Married the Reindeer, this poem explores not only the variety of meanings implicit in words but also how words may be related to one another yet distinct in themselves. Finally, the poem comments on the ways in which words in one language have no equivalents in another. One of the central themes in the poem revolves around the adjectives ‘his’ and ‘hers’ and the ways in which different languages use, or do not use, such terms. The poem focuses on a male language scholar late at night, searching to unlock the meaning of words. When asked whether there was a model for this figure, Ní Chuilleanáin answered: ‘I suppose it could be my father in that he was a scholar, but I think I wanted more to have a male figure and a female figure meeting each other in that poem.’3 The scholar’s work is complicated by the alternative and multiple meanings words can have, which Ní Chuilleanáin glosses in her choice of images in carefully worked alliterative and assonantal lines, and repeated consonantal words like ‘clós’ and ‘close’. The scholar, ‘stiff as a shelf ’, is seeking in his dictionaries ‘the price of his release’, searching for: Two words, as opposite as his and hers Which yet must be as close As the word clós to its meaning in a Scots courtyard Close to the spailpín ships, or as close as the note On the uilleann pipe to the same note on the fiddle – As close as the grain in the polished wood, as the finger Bitten by the string, as the hairs of the bow Bent by the repeated note – From English to Scots to Irish, from courtyards to ships, from uilleann pipe to fiddle notes, from woodgrain to bitten fingers and bow hairs, Ní Transformation and Translation 129 Chuilleanáin glosses...