The Aistriuchan Cloak: Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language

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.

In his F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture, "Getting Round: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica," Muldoon offers as one of five images that have "made their way into [his] consciousness" a nineteenth-century Irish navvy in the United States digging a canal. ⁴ He imagines the navvy "calling out" to him in Gaelic, in lines from the seventeenth-century poet Séamas Dall MacCuarta's poem "An Lon Dubh Báite," ("The Drowned Blackbird"). The blackbird has drowned in a bucket of lime, washing its black to white, a color recurrently associated with death in Muldoon's collection Hay (1998). Burial in quicklime dissolves a dead body, yet while the death of the Irish language has frequently been proclaimed, its corpse has consistently refused to rot away. This has resulted in a problematic relationship between Irish poets writing in English and the Irish language since at least the mid-nineteenth century. In the classic Yeatsian or revivalist paradigm, such a relationship is dominated by feelings of guilty nostalgia and disconnection. Thomas Kinsella spoke in 1966 of how cut off he felt from the Gaelic tradition to which he would dearly love to belong:

Why can I not make living contact with that inheritance, my own past? Others have. It is because I believe I would have to make a commitment to the Irish language; to write in Irish instead of English. And that would mean loss of contact with my own present--abandonment of the language I was bred in for one which I believe to be dying. It would also mean forfeiting a certain possible scope of language: English has a greater scope, if I can make use of it, than an Irish which is not able to handle all the affairs of my life. So that even with a commitment to the Irish language, a full contact with the old tradition--a contact between two whole entities--is, I believe, impossible. ⁵

Muldoon's relationship with the Irish language is very different from Kinsella's. Rather than being...