Meeting the English: Hard and Soft Borders in Recent Anglo-Irish Poetry

Following George Bornstein on “the politics of the page”, this article contends that, by examining the material decisions of writers, editors, and publishers on the design of recent bilingual editions of Irish-language poetry, one gains insight not only into Ireland’s shifting attitudes toward Irish Gaelic and its place in society, but also into the changing conceptions of “Irishness” itself. It distinguishes three stages in the evolution of bilingual publishing in Ireland: collaborative, adversarial, and deconstructive, with each stage represented by a slightly different “generation” of poets. Representative of the first wave is Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s 1990 collection, The Pharoah’s Daughter, the design of which suggests a collaborative venture, of Irish poet with Irish poet, who together realize a bilingual diptych of interdependent texts. Rather than a mutually beneficial enterprise, the second wave of Irish-language poets viewed translation as an extension of the linguistic imperialism that had marginalized Irish in the first place, and that may yet bring about its extinction. Second wave reactions ranged from outright rejection of translation into English, to a reversal of accepted layout practices by moving the Irish poem to the dominant recto position. The third wave of recent Irish-language poetry is “deconstructive” in that its practitioners have sought to undo the original/translation and Irish/English binary, either by mixing the two languages, producing bilingual versions in which neither version claims the status of “original”, or problematizing the cross-page correspondence of original and translation. All three developments have implications for how books are read, and how poetry in translation is best presented to its target audience.