Peter Costello
Tipperary poet Aine Ni Ghlinn The Best-Loved Poems from the Irish,
selected translations of Gabriel Fitzmaurice, introduction by Alan Titley
(Mercier Press, €14.99)
These days when there is clearly an official drive to make us all more conscious of the Irish language, there yet remain as great many people for whom ‘the Irish’ remains a closed world. Here in the compass of a pocketable volume is an answer to their needs.
Gabriel Fitzmaurice in an accomplished writer, a gaelophone as well as an anglophone. Here he has collected his best versions as he sees them of poems very largely of modern or recent writers in Irish. Some eighteen voices are included altogether, in what is rightly called a personal choice.
Of course, there are poems here that we all learnt at school, such as ‘Cill Chais’ and ‘Mise Rafterí’, but I think for many the real eye – rather mind – openers will be the poets from recent times.
The last poem in the book ‘As Gafa i nGaza / From Trapped in Gaza,’ are lines that might have been plucked from today’s headlines. The poem was written at Christmas 2023, and shows just how an Irish poet of humane sensitivity reacts to that that genocidal situation
Chan seo na Trí Ríthe
ag techt lena dtíolacthaí
ach Gorta, Pláigh agus Bás . . .
No three Wise men
come with their gifts
but Famine, Plague and Death.
No wondrous Baby
Comes to light us from the cradle
only the bloody corpse of our hope . . .
Poetry may indeed make nothing happen, as another poet once observed, but the words survive, becoming a source of hope of their own accord.
That is a remarkable poem. But so too, among the rest, a decade of poems by Tipperary poet Áine Ni Ghlinn about a countryman exiled, indeed quite lost, in darkest North London, trying as he can to save face at home and keep up the pretence of ‘getting on’ in his communications with the family at home, as in ‘Turas Abhaile / A Visit Home’:
Thiomáin Páidin abhaile don Nollaig
i ngluaisteán a mbíodh a ghob
ag doras an tséipéil
is na ritha deiridh
fós ag teach isteach an gheata
Choinnigh sé na cáipéisí
ón áisíntechatha hireala
i bfohfolach go doimhin
i bpóca ascaille
a sheaicéid Dhomhanagh
Páidin drove home for Christmas
in a car whose front bumper would be
at the church door
while the back wheels
were still coming in the gate
He kept the documents
from the rental company
hidden deep down
in the inside pocket
of his Sunday jacket.
Far his native rural roots Páidin is barely surviving in an alien city among alien faces. How well I recall myself the contrast between the prosperous professional men and Labour adherents at the Irish Club contrasted with what could be seen on any afternoon on the high street in Camden Town.
The poems are a contrast to the poet best known work writing for children in Irish.
Now these samples, all we have room for here, give a good idea of what the book contains. The talents of a fine selection of poets in one language being recast by another poet equally skilled in both languages.
All in all, this is an anthology of remarkable performances, that anyone with the mildest curiosity about what Irish literature is about today will be richly enlightened by, thanks to the sensitive linguistic wizardry of Gabriel Fitzmaurice. Don’t think of this as something to ‘help the kids at school.’ This is a remakable achievement to be read and admired by all classes of readers.