Sarah Bennett reviews The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon

In 1986, Michael Hartnett’s translations of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Rogha Danta (Selected Poems) allowed monolingual English speakers a glimpse of a startling poetic imagination. Since then, there has been an increasing tendency towards bilingual, parallel editions of her work, published by the Gallery Press. Pharaoh’s Daughter (1990) was shared with a roll-call of foremost Irish poets, including Hartnett, Heaney, Longley and Carson. In The Water Horse (1999), the right-hand pages were the province of McGuckian and Ní Chuilleanáin. For her latest collection, The Fifty Minute Mermaid, Ni Dhomhnaill resumes her relationship with Paul Muldoon, who was the sole interpreter of The Astrakhan Cloak (1992).

The consequences of a parallel edition are manifold. It solidifies the order of things: awareness of genesis and progeny, and a synchronous consideration of the two, is made necessary. Visually, there is indication of the translator’s formal fidelities and infidelities. In The Fifty Minute Mermaid, there is also a teasing reminder that while acquaintance with Ní Dhomhnaill’s subject may well last a concise fifty minutes for the monolingual reader, the affair will be at least one hundred minutes, an céad nóiméad mhurúch, for the fortunate bilingual.

Ní Dhomhnaill’s text can offer provocative typographical stimuli for the reader unversed in Irish. These come most coquettishly in her italicisations. “Borrowed” words from other international languages― words that have been assimilated into most spoken Irish lexicons (certainly Ní Dhomhnaill’s)― are highlighted for the strain of their difference. In “An Crann” from Rogha Danta, an offending ‘Black & Decker’, whose unwarranted intimacy with “an crann” [“the tree”] is at the centre of a marital tiff, is given the italic treatment. Muldoon responded to “An Crann” with “As for the Quince” (1985), first printed in the TLS. In this poem, Muldoon sees Ní Dhomhnaill’s macaronic games and raises it. A parallel, but upright ‘Black & Decker’ is ingeniously rhymed with the Latin ‘et cetera et cetera’. In “Mo Mháistir Dorcha”  (“My Dark Master”) from The Fifty Minute Mermaid, a dead-pan monologue from a woman who has relinquished her services to Death, we have ‘D’iarr sé orm an rabhas hire-áilte’ (“He asked me if I was hired.”) “Áilte” is the adjectival past participle, often employed as a suffix to acclimatize English loan-words. But here, rendered in its disjointed components, the emphasis estranges “hire” from its context. Peculiar, particularly given that this line is an Irish translation of a line from a popular Irish song in English, “The Rocky Road to Dublin” (“Asked me was I hired / wages I required / I was almost tired of the rocky road to Dublin.)  To the reader without Irish, the italicised hire seems to jar as an Americanism (where the car is emphatically hired and not rented), and the absurdity of the morbid scenario is inflated by the jargon employed. This suggestion is delightfully received by Muldoon, who makes “hire”, which features nowhere else in the Irish, the key player in his translation:

            I’ve gone and hired myself out. I’ve hired myself out to Death

                        When I met him at the hiring-fair
                                    he inquired if I’d yet
been taken 

There are many problems of assimilation in Ní Dhomhnaill’s curious new collection. The Fifty Minute Mermaid tells of the fate of na murúcha (“the merfolk” in Muldoon’s politic rendering) on dry land, closing gradually on ‘an murúch seo ’gainne’, ‘our own mermaid’: her domestic trials, and her eventual return to the land of her kind, ‘an Tír-fó-Thoinn’ [“the Land-Under-Wave”]. Ní Dhomhnaill invests Hans Christian Anderson’s melancholic tale “The Little Mermaid” with a contemporary, diurnal realism. In case the reader is in any doubt of the poet’s stance on the Disneyfication of myth, the volume opens with a three-poem overture on the theme of death, including “Mo Mháistir Dorcha”, and the commanding, sermonic “Dubh” [“Black”], written after the Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia. In the first of the Mermaid poems, “Na Murúcha a Thriomagh”, Muldoon gives “a thriomagh” [“that were dried out”] a smoother surface in his chosen title, “The Assimilated Merfolk”. Ní Dhomhnaill’s is an ailing poem, putting mythology into biological practice, as the sensitive merfolk suffer from new skin conditions (windgall and moonstroke among them) whilst adjusting to Life-Above-Water.  The central importance of “triomaithe” – the stiffness, the debilitation, even the anti-creative connotations of drying up and out, are invoked later in the collection, in a postscript to the poem “The Merfolk and Music”:

’Sé bunús an scéil go léir, ar ndóigh, ná tráma a dtriomaithe
[The basis of this whole story, of course, is the trauma of their drying.]

Again, Muldoon misses the opportunity to wreak the multiple resonances― indeed, the real trauma― of this dehydration, opting frivolously for the apparently irresistible cliché: ‘the trauma of their being left high and dry’.

In “Na Murúcha a Thriomagh”, dried-up is imaginatively related to “washed-up”, and the poem ends with a startling metaphor of memory’s debris:

Fágann na rabhartaí earraigh a rianta fós           
ar chlathacha cosanta a n-aigne; gach tonnchosc díobh
ina ghlib ag bruth farraige is ag brúscar raice
focail a scuabtar isteach mar a bheadh carbháin charraige

The high spring tides leave their mark
on the sea-walls of their minds, the edge of every breaking wave
ragged with flotsam and jetsam and other wreckage,
words carried ashore like the shells of sea-urchins

Ní Dhomhnaill’s close, internal rhymes (rianta / cosanta) have their more ostentatious counterpart in Muldoon’s ending-rhymes (edge / wreckage; flotsam and jetsam), and versions of her assonant vowels (farraige / raice / charraige) can be heard in the English (high / tide / minds). The guttural alliteration (“chlathacha cosanta” ; “carbháin charraige”) that dramatises this gritty passage in the Irish is not, however, so comfortably transported.

In Anderson’s tale, the mermaid’s love for an earthly prince moves her to strike a bargain with the Sea Witch, and sprout legs in return for the tool of her unparalleled gift for song: her tongue. On dry land she captivates the prince with her beauty, but her incapacity for speech causes her intended lover to overlook her for another. Dumbness is a trope explored subtly by Ní Dhomhnaill, in this volume’s persistent concern with literature and language.  It illuminates a further significance in the term “triomaithe”. “Na Murúcha agus an Litríocht” (“The Merfolk and Literature”) describes how on land, though they have not forgotten their language, the merfolk have no impulse to use it:

Níor chumadar is níor cheapadar
is níor chuir gothaí na n-údar orthu féin.

They neither compiled nor composed
nor were afflicted by any of the affectations associated with
            authors.

“Afflicted” is Muldoon’s insertion― and a revealing one. He is, of course, making a pompous display of his own alliterative affectations. Yet the verb is raised to be negated: un-afflicted, un-affected, seemingly unmoved, the merfolk’s literary legacy is a list of ‘theidil na leabhar nár scríobhadar’ (‘titles of books they didn’t get round to writing’). The real curiosity is the passive, indifferent endurance of this voicelessness― and whether it is, indeed, presumptuous to describe the predicament of Ní Dhomhnaill’s na murúcha as an affliction.

The final line of the poem directs a joke towards the Blaskets, the immortalised Western Isles:   ‘Fágann said na cúraimí sin / faoi na Blascaodaigh’ (‘They leave that kind of carry-on / to the crowd from the Blaskets’). The Western-Islanders were largely illiterate in Irish in the mid-nineteenth century, when Tomás Ó Croimthainn learnt to write the language in order to record their experiences in An tOileánach (The Islandman). There is a desperate sense, in the text’s inception and its keen reception, of a scramble to preserve a dying culture. This nostalgia for ‘the old ways’ receives the brunt of the merfolks’ sneer in “Na Murúcha agus an Litríocht”. The sneer is delivered in the midst of a collection whose first language can only be received by a small, overwhelmingly native readership. It is delivered in a volume whose cover exhibits a watercolour by AE― the wistful mystic whose intense yearning for the world beyond-the-veil made W. B. Yeats seem like a wizened sceptic.  The question is raised as to Ní Dhomhnaill’s position on the “seanré”, the “old order”, and the inextricable matter of language.

The answer is perhaps best found in “Teoranna” (“Boundaries”). This poem is narrated in a voice that recurs in The Fifty Minute Mermaid: the voice of the scholarly text-book, or the governmental sociologist. The voice owes something to Marianne Moore, and her wildlife and sealife poems. There is also an acknowledged debt to Jorge Luis Borges, whose story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” provides Ní Dhomhnaill with something of a linguistic model:

Ón méid a thugimíd i dtaobh teanga na murúch
ó bhloghtracha fánacha den ‘Ursprache’
is ó leideanna eile atá ar fáil againn,
is féidir a aithint go raibh sé difriúil ar fad
leis na teangacha Ind-Eorpacha,
nó, déanta na fírinne,
le gach uile ghrúpa teangan eile atá ar aithne go dtí seo.

From what we can make out about the merfolk’s language
based on the odd snatches of the ‘Ursprache’ that remain
and such other clues as are available to us
it’s immediately obvious it’s absolutely different
from the Indo-European languages
or, if truth be told,
from any other previously known language group.

The linguistic category arrived at is ‘peiligeach’ (‘pelagic...since it covers the seven seas’). The language of the sea, of course, recognises no regional or national boundaries. Nor is it concerned with the rigid application of nouns, but with expression through ‘n-ainm briathartha’: verbal nouns (‘gerunds and participles’, as Muldoon glosses). This might help to explain a strange grammatical quirk earlier in the collection, in “An Mhurúch agus Focail Áirithe” (“The Mermaid and Certain Words”). Here Muldoon responds to a sequence of two parallel participles in the Irish, ‘ar fógairt’ (“declaring”), and ‘ag cur’ (“sending forth”) with a peculiar, violent outburst of verbal nouns and participles:

and she’ll never hear again the loud neighing of the kelpie or
            water horse
claiming its blood relation with her at the darkest hour of night,
causing her to break out in goose pimples and having sweat lashing off her
while she’s fast asleep.

This passage is a rare instance where Muldoon leaves alone the opportunity for ironic echo of a staid metaphor (‘brat allais’ interpreted as “a blanket of sweat”), in favour of a cumbersome locution that dramatically realises the fevered temperature of the original. We are reminded that the mermaid’s is a linguistic fever, and words, thrown up on the wall of the mind with the high tide, are the central anxiety of this collection.

The volatility of a borderless, pelagic language is echoed in the mermaid’s chaotic deportment, and her indifference to personal space. No longer the empirical naturalist, it is a voice more familiar with both reader and subject (though nonetheless confounded by the latter), delivering this triumphant simile:

Ritheamair go léir isteach ina chéile, ba dhóigh leat uaithi,
faoi mar a bheadh na dathanna ó smearadh íle
ar an mbóhar tar éis cith báistí.

We all ran into each other, you’d swear to listen to her,
like the different colours in an oily puddle
after a shower of rain.  

Here we realise that far from a static mythological figure, our mermaid is, in fact, an exasperated post-structuralist, whose philosophy of language is as fluid as the theorist’s hypertext.  On re-consideration, the ‘peiligeach’ category of language and text recalls Paul Muldoon’s “The Briefcase”, from Madoc: A Mystery (1990). In this short dedication to Seamus Heaney, the speaker holds onto his eelskin briefcase, containing ‘only the first / inkling of this poem’, in torrential rainstorm,

for fear it might slink into a culvert
and strike out along the East River
for the sea. By which I mean the ‘open’ sea.    

Back into this ‘open sea’, where text, once propelled, can no longer be fixed or owned, where readers are active and authors are unrecognised entities, ‘an mhurúch seo ’gainne’, ‘our own mermaid’, returns.  Ní Dhomhnaill’s comments on fluid, boundary-dissolving text strike another self-reflexive note in a calculatedly bilingual collection. As she and Muldoon chimed harmoniously in “Immram” / “The Voyage”, the wave-riding, island-hopping sequence that closes The Astrakhan Cloak, it seems that the ungrounded, unstable ocean that surrounds and, ultimately, consumes The Fifty Minute Mermaid is an enabling environment for two such poetic sensibilities.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill/Paul Muldoon, The Fifty Minute Mermaid.  Gallery Press, €13.90.

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.