An outspoken poet who is read throughout the world, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is a poet of note.
Early Life and Influences
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was born in the northern English town of Lancashire in 1952. When she was five years old, she moved with her Irish-born parents to the Gaeltacht, or Irish speaking area, of Dingle in County Kerry. The family also spent time in Nenagh, Tipperary when she was growing up.
At that time the Gaeltacht in the southwest of Ireland, or Munster, was shrinking. However, many poets and academics, especially at the University College Cork, had been working to promote Munster Irish language and literature from the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, Ní Dhomhnaill was influenced by one of these poets, Sean O Riordain, when she attended Irish language summer school in 1969, and her uncle Pádraig Ó Fiannachta, a native of the Kerry Gaeltacht, is considered the leading authority on Munster Irish.
Ní Dhomhnaill would graduate from University College Cork in 1972 with a BA in Irish and English, having become part of the Innti school of poets, who took their name from an Irish language literary journal started at the school by Michael Davitt.
After marrying the Turkish geologist Dogan Leflef, Ní Dhomhnaill lived abroad in the Netherlands and Turkey for several years, then returned to the Gaeltacht in 1980 where she started to publish poetry in earnest. She and her family now live in Dublin.
Works
In addition to a volume of essays, several children's plays, and miscellaneous poems and prose, Ní Dhomhnaill has published several book-length collections of poetry. The first two, An Dealg Droighin (1981) and Féar Suaithinseach (1984) are Irish only, with an English Selected Poems/Rogha Danta appearing in 1985 and in a bilingual edition the following year with two subsequent editions in 1988 and 1990.
Then followed Pharoah's Daughter in 1990, a bilingual edition with translations to English by many leading Irish poets from both the north and south of Ireland, such as Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, John Montague, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. This may still be her best known collection. In the titular poem, Ní Dhomhnaill makes the analogy between her use of the Irish language and the Biblical story of Moses, put in a basket of rushes in the hopes of being found someday by "some Pharoah's daughter."
Her subsequent publications are Feis (1991), The Astrakhan Coat (1991,1992) with translations by Paul Muldoon, Cead Aighnis (1999) this time with translations by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian, The Water Horse (2000), and The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007).
Criticism and the Media
Ní Dhomhnaill has been the subject of various critical essays by literary scholars in Cork, the rest of Ireland and throughout the world. She has naturally attracted attention for her decision to write in Irish and what it means to be a modern Irish language poet.
Much of her work deals with myth and alternative realities, and she has been quoted as saying "I think it is downright pernicious to underestimate myth; it’s like pretending the unconscious does not exist, and that we are just composed of rationality."
A complete list of critical essays on Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and quotes pertaining to her artistic vision can be found here.
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