#Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

[majestativa]

A hiss like thunder [...] Persephone's poplars And her dark willow trees.

— Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Selected Poems, (2009)

[tikkisaram]

You will find yourself alone Accelerating down a blind Alley, too late to stop And know how light your death is; You will be scattered like wreckage, The pieces every one a different shape Will spin and lodge in the hearts Of all who love you.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Death and Engines

I feel conflicted about this fragment from Ní Chuilleanáin. Lets start with the positive: I like the final image of pieces lodging in the hearts of loved ones and I think it is a clever metaphor. Its meaning seems to be intentionally twofold: the death of someone close to us is extremely painful, but some part of them stays with us forever in our memories. The ambiguity here works well to convey the complexity of death.

I am, however, strongly irritated by the messiness of the poet's expression. Her use of punctuation is completely arbitrary — she uses two commas, but twice she chooses not to  (after 'alone' and 'pieces'). Her use of line breaks is no less logical — she generally puts them correctly at the ends of phrases, but why does she write "blind/Alley"? This jarring cut is made worse by the fact that she chooses to capitalise every line, which is absurd in this case. These oddities and inconsistencies make it especially difficult to parse the lines "too late to stop/And know how light your death is;" — since there is no punctuation, it would be logical to read it as 'too late to stop and [to] know', but that doesn't really make sense. Why would it be too late to know how light your death is? Since Ní Chuilleanáin follows these lines with a description of how light our death is, and we know that her lines breaks and punctuation are placed basically at random, we should probably see it as a separate imperative — 'know how light your death is!'. This is not the ambiguity of good poetry; this is confusion caused by gross incompetence. A minor note is that this stanza switches to a car metaphor, while the rest of the poem is about planes and plane crashes; cars and planes may have the "engines" part in common, and I suppose both types of accidents can be deadly, but it still seems like the poet muddled her metaphors.

This poem has its merits from the semantic perspective, but the execution of Ní Chuilleanáin's ideas is so shockingly shoddy that I cannot help but feel unconvinced. ;^|

I rate this quote 5/10 Russian cats.

[calf-middle]

The Second Voyage, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, 1977

Odysseus rested on his oar and saw The ruffled foreheads of the waves Crocodiling and mincing past: he rammed The oar between their jaws and looked down In the simmering sea where scribbles of weed defined Uncertain depth, and the slim fishes progressed In fatal formation, and thought                                                          If there was a single Streak of decency in these waves now, they’d be ridged Pocked and dented with the battering they’ve had, And we could name them as Adam named the beasts, Saluting a new one with dismay, or a notorious one With admiration; they’d notice us passing And rejoice at our shipwreck, but these Have less character than sheep and need more patience.

I know what I’ll do he said; I’ll park my ship in the crook of a long pier (and I’ll take you with me he said to the oar) I’ll face the rising ground and walk away From tidal waters, up riverbeds Where herons parcel out the miles of stream, Over gaps in the hills, through warm Silent valleys, and when I meet a farmer Bold enough to look me in the eye With ‘where are you off to with that long Winnowing fan over your shoulder?’ There I will stand still And I’ll plant you for a gatepost or a hitching-post And leave you as a tidemark. I can go back And organize my house then.

                                                    But the profound Unfenced valleys of the ocean still held him; He had only the oar to make them keep their distance; The sea was still frying under the ship’s side. He considered the water-lilies, and thought about fountains Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares, The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle, The flat lakes bisecting the rushes. He remembered spiders and frogs Housekeeping at the roadside in brown trickles floored with mud, Horsetroughs, the black canal, pale swans at dark: His face grew damp with tears that tasted Like his own sweat or the insults of the sea.

[nsantand]

Eiléan Ni Chuilleanéin - A serenata de Hofstetter

"A serenata de Hofstetter", um poema de Eiléan Ni Chuilleanéin

A serenata de Hofstetter(Máire Ní Chuilleanáin1 1944-1990) Senti a corrente de ar há pouco, enquanto digitava os números –a data de sua morte, ocorrida há vinte e cinco anos;estamos em maio, mas a noite clara está ficando mais fria,o denso fardo se abriu e a dor se disseminouao longo desses anos desconhecidos para ela2, e se eu forprocura-la, devo desenrolar e esticar o fio que ela nos deixou,…

[mariastadnicka]

Across Language: Translation & Opportunity

Across Language: Translation & Opportunity

Belfast Book Festival Vahni Capildeo, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Maria Stadnicka, Brian Holton & Paddy Bushe  Across Language: Translation & Opportunity Date: Saturday 11 June 2022 Time: 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM Price: Pay What You Want – recommended price £7 Age Range: 16+ years Venue: The Crescent Is writing in another language an opportunity for creative freedom? How is poetry affected by poets…

[ukdamo]

Crossing the Loire

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

I saluted the famous river as I do every year Turning south as if the plough steered, Kicking, at the start of a new furrow, my back To the shady purple gardens with benches under plum trees By the river that hunts between piers and sandbanks—

I began threading the long bridge, I bowed my head And lifted my hands from the wheel for an instant of trust, I faced the long rows of vines curving up the hillside Lightly like feathers, and longer than the swallow’s flight, My road already traced before me in a dance

Of three nights and three days, Of sidestepping hills and crescent lights blinding me (If there was just a bar counter and ice and a glass, and a room upstairs: But it rushed past me and how many early starts before The morning when the looped passes descend to the ruined arch?)

She came rising up out of the water, her eyes were like sandbanks The wrinkles in her forehead were like the flaws in the mist (maybe a long narrow boat with a man lying down and a rod and line like a frond of hair dipping in the stream) She was humming the song about the estuary, and the delights Of a salt ocean, the lighthouse like a summons; and she told me:

The land will not go to that measure, it lasts, you’ll see How the earth widens and mountains are empty, only With tracks that search and dip, from here to the city of Rome Where the road gallops up to the dome as big as the sun.

You will see your sister going ahead of you And she will not need to rest, but you must lie In the dry air of your hotel where the traffic grinds before dawn, The cello changing gear at the foot of the long hill,

And think of the story of the suitors on horseback Getting ready to trample up the mountain of glass.

[poetrycorner]

The Swineherd (by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin) When all this is over, said the swineherd, I mean to retire, where Nobody will have heard about my special skills And conversation is mainly about the weather. I intend to learn how to make coffee, at least as well As the Portuguese lay-sister in the kitchen And polish the brass fenders every day. I want to lie awake at night Listening to cream crawling to the top of the jug And the water lying soft in the cistern. I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks, Where it gets dark early in summer And the apple-blossom is allowed to wither on the bough.

[brauronia]

Behind me the waves of darkness lay.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, "Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Night".

[la-cocotte-de-paris]

Do you like poetry? What are some of your favourite poems. :D

I do! I go through phases of poetry reading tbh haha, though I do feel bad for not making enough time to read more of it. I adore Shakespeare's sonnets (I would list some specific ones but my book is not with me atm, alas!), and earlier this year I got into Charles Baudelaire (two poems by him I like off the top of my head are the two 'Femmes Damnées'/'Doomed Women' ones, which are part of Les Fleurs du Mal ).

I also really like 'Ambulances' by Philip Larkin, as well as 'Kilcash' which was translated by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and 'Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht' which is also by Ní Chuilleanáin. One poem which has been sticking in my mind lately has been 'The Wild Dog Rose' by John Montague. There's been some poetry translated from Arabic that I thought was very beautiful too that I read a while back, but I'm raging that I never wrote down the titles! I'm quite aware I need to broaden my poetic horizons.

I'm always open to reading/poetry/film recommendations (and music too!), so if you'd like me to check something out that you adore, do let me know! And thank you for thr lovely ask, dear Anon! I do apologise for answering this a bit late!

[majestativa]

You will be scattered like wreckage, The pieces, every one a different shape Will spin and lodge in the hearts Of all who love you.

— Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Selected Poems, (2009)

[tikkisaram]

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin — National Poet, Devil Worshipper

The Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin — appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2016 — is not the most assuming of poets. She is far removed from the outrageous excesses of Baudelaire or the eccentricities of Cummings. In fact, she is very ordinary. Some might even say — bland.

And yet, beneath the inconspicuous surface, Ní Chuilleanáin exhibits a far more sinister nature. Her poetry is teeming with strange references to obscure knowledge, allusions to occult practices and Satanic symbols. The first examples of this darker side of her work were provided to me by an anonymous member of the Tikki Troops, to whom I am immensely grateful for sparking this extended investigation, the fruit of which I will share with you in this blessay.

Because numerology plays a significant part in occult symbolism, I decided to start with a cursory numerological analysis of one of Ní Chuilleanáin's poems — Street. There are two main ways of calculating the significant number of a word or text — the simpler Pythagorean system, and the gematria form, which is Hebrew in origin but can be applied to the English language as well. Applying these two systems to the poem's title gave the same result — the number 6. This is significant — 6 and 11 are the two most important numbers to Satanists. 1 What's more, the poem has 11 lines. Carrying out the analysis on the full text of the poem gives — remarkably — the same result in both systems as well: 7. This number is not specifically associated with Satanism, but it is of enormous importance in numerology in general — it may well be the most important number of all. It is significant in Hindu, Muslim, Judeo-Christian, Ancient Egyptian and Native American tradition, among others.2 The focus on the shoes being "paired" may be meaningful, because Pythagoras associated the number 2 with disorder, evil and the underworld.3 This linking of sacred and Satanic numbers is representative of Satanism in general, which often employs sacred elements in a profane way — for example, the drinking of blood instead of wine from a chalice in a parody of Christian mass. Dates are also often given a numerological significance in occult practice, and I immediately thought of the poem To Niall Woods and Xenya Ostrovkaia, married in Dublin on 9 September 2009 with the bizarrely conspicuous date in its title. The value of the date simplifies to 11 — a Satanic number, of course — but more importantly, expressing the date as 09/09/09 makes the 999 contained in it explicit; 999 is considered powerful in Satanism because it is simply an inversion of 666.4 Incidentally, Ní Chuilleanáin's latest poetry collection, The Mother House, came out on 31 October 2019 — yes, the date of Halloween. A strange decision to say the least. I imagine that a comprehensive numerological analysis of the entire body of Ní Chuilleanáin's work would be extremely insightful; it is, however, well outside of the scope of this blessay.

Doors are frequently seen in Ní Chuilleanáin's poetry, usually associated with some mystery hidden behind them — The Door is the most obvious example, but they also feature prominently in Street and All For You. Stairs and keys are no less a common theme; all three of these symbols represent the hidden, forbidden, esoteric knowledge involved in all kinds of occult practice. This reminded me of a rather strange interview with Ní Chuilleanáin that I read in which she explains the prevalence of nuns in her poetry by saying that "...nuns have always had their own way of living, their own community, their own rituals and festivals — they are surprising people."5 Their hermetic community and special rituals are definitely not the first thing I would think of if asked about nuns. Ní Chuilleanáin seems oddly fixated on secrecy and esoteric practices revealed only to members of a specific group; why might this be, I wonder?

The moderately alert reader will find a wealth of occult allusions and symbols in Ní Chuilleanáin's poems, especially relating to witchcraft. Street mentions bloody crescents imprinted on the stairs; a blood moon was historically connected to occult practice and two crescents together with a circle — one like the "ring" seen in the poem — constitute the Triple Moon symbol in Wicca.6 Fainfall links the mysticism of twilight, dawn and fog with a ghostly presence. Cats — the most famous of witch familiars — are common in her poetry, including the strangely forced reference in The Bend in the Road — "A tall tree like a cat's tail waited too." Kilcash references bonfires and features the oddly apocalyptic line "our ancestors' house will rise up." The Pig-boy features the kind of bestialisation associated with human sacrifice. which is employed by Satanists to signify the dominance of human carnal nature.7 Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Nicht seems to concern a witch in its entirety. And the poem's bizarre title is the opening line of a 15th-century poem by William Dunbar called — wait for it — The Birth of Antichrist.

Deaths and Engines features a curious allusion to the divinatory art of chiromancy (palm-reading) — "the lifeline in your palm// Breaks". This made me think about other methods of divination, of which perhaps the most famous is taromancy — a form of cartomancy which employs the Tarot deck, especially its 22 picture cards, called the Major Arcana. I looked through several of Ní Chuilleanáin's poems to see if I could spot obvious references to it, and I soon struck gold with To Niall Woods..., which focuses on the imminent journey of a newlywed couple. I immediately identified allusions to five cards of the Major Arcana: The Fool, The Tower, The Stars, The Lovers and The Emperor, all of which fit the poem's theme nicely. The Fool represents a new journey; The Tower, a radical change; The Stars, hope and fulfilment; The Lovers, affairs of the heart; The Emperor represents authority, but given the context of stealing from him we can take the inverted meaning of the card, which is authoritarianism and an abuse of power. We thus have lovers experiencing a radical change by leaving what they know to pursue their hopes and dreams on a new journey, freeing themselves from their constraints — "Leave behind the places that you knew:/ All that you leave behind you will find once more." We thus see that Ní Chuilleanáin associates the events of her poetry with occult divinatory symbolism. Once again, I think that a detailed examination of her work from the angle of Tarot and other fortune-telling systems would be an exciting research opportunity.

I must admit that I have little background and knowledge in the area of Satanism and occult symbolism; I am sure that someone more familiar with this kind of material would be able to find much, much more of note in the poetry of Ní Chuilleanáin. I also regret not being able to give this investigation the amount of time and effort it merits. Nonetheless, I think that even this shallow analysis reveals a trove of secrets about one of the most famous Irish poets alive and allows us to view her work in a new — bloodier, more sinister — light.

“Occultist Numerology Numbers and Meanings.” Exposing Satanism, https://www.exposingsatanism.org/occultist-numerology-numbers-and-meanings/. ↩︎

Kathryn Wilkinson (ed.), “Signs & Symbols.” (Dorling Kindersley, 2008). 295. ↩︎

Ibid. 294. ↩︎

“Occultist Numerology.” ↩︎

“Interview with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.” Wake Forest University Press, https://wfupress.wfu.edu/an-interview-with-eilean-ni-chuilleanain/. ↩︎

“Signs & Symbols.” 193. ↩︎

Ibid. 190. ↩︎

[duine-aiteach]

Irish Writers - Poetry

John Ennis [gay]

Elaine Feeney

Eva Gore-Booth [wlw]

Seamus Heaney [NI]

Patrick Kavanagh

William Keohane [ftm]

Brendan Kennelly

Alice Lyons

Pádraig Ó Tuama

Caitlín Maude [as G]

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Annemarie Ní Churreáin [LGBT, as G]

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill [as G]

W. B. Yeats

[nsantand]

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin – A torre da dama

"A Torre da Dama", um poema de Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Vazia, minha alta torre inclina-se Para trás no penhasco; meu colmo Conversa com a amplidão dispersa, Garças. A parede cinza Corta para baixo e encontra Um instável córrego inundado Por seixos, pequenas aves Mergulhadoras. Lá embaixo, meus porões sondam. Atrás de mim, as oblíquas veias da colina Se deslocam; úmida está minha cozinha, Aranhas escondidas sob tonéis marrons. Eu ouço a corrente…

[k00244552]

Story

Initial Ideas & Research

For this project I’m taking inspiration from the poem “Lucina Schynning in the Silence of the Nicht” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. This is my favourite poem because I relate to the silver lining after the struggle Ní Chuilleanáin expresses. The line “I felt moonlight on my head, clear after three days rain” really resonates with me. The poem also provides me with great visual imagery.

I plan to focus on Graphic Design Communications in the design department for this project.

[bucketsof-moonbeams]

Swineherd

When all this is over, said the swineherd, I mean to retire, where Nobody will have heard about my special skills And conversation is mainly about the weather.

I intend to learn how to make coffee, as least as well As the Portuguese lay-sister in the kitchen And polish the brass fenders every day. I want to lie awake at night Listening to cream crawling to the top of the jug And the water lying soft in the cistern.

I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks, Where it gets dark early in summer And the apple-blossom is allowed to wither on the bough.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

[pwpoetry]

Q&A with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

M: Can you talk a bit about the period of time in which your wrote The Mother House and the preoccupations that inspired it?

E: My last book The Boys of Bluehill (2015) started out with what I thought was a preoccupation with cloth, and then I realised that much of the energy was coming from thoughts about my late (younger) sister, a professional violinist who died in 1990. I hadn’t been able to write about her after her death, but when more than twenty years had passed, I found myself returning to the subject and unexpectedly able to manage it.  

The year 2016 was the centenary of the 1916 Rising, in which my grandparents (also it was the centenary of their marriage) and other family members were heavily involved, so I was asked to write poems for both unofficial and official celebrations. There was also a commission to write a poem on the Irish Famine of the 1840s.

Another major preoccupation is with the history of Irish nuns and convents. This goes back a long way in my experience – I grew up at a time when nuns were a major presence in Ireland, three of my aunts were nuns, and I have written about convents from my first published collection on. I learned that a historic convent in my native city of Cork was about to be redeveloped as a cultural centre and I felt genuinely compelled to go and see the place before that happened.  The original founder, Nano Nagle, was breaking the law in starting schools for poor Catholic girls, and she was also resisting Church law by making her followers go out of the convent to teach. I wanted to celebrate her work, but also to include poems about the very ordinary lives of the nuns I knew, their work, their connection with their families. I used anecdotes from nuns I knew.

That leaves a number of poems written after my husband died in 2018. He had been ill in hospital for a few months, but his death came as a great shock to me, and there are poems that are as much about shock as grief. ‘A Journey’, ���The Unreconcile’, ‘Fastnet’ ‘The Morandi Bridge’ are some of them.

The poems in the book are not in chronological order of writing but grouped by theme.

M: Are there any texts or works of art with which you feel the book in conversation?

E: Yes, but they’re a mixed bunch. A children’s story by Maria Edgeworth, ‘The Basket-woman’, her novel Ormond (where I got the jailbreak in ‘Kilmainham’), Hofstetter’s Serenade, obviously. ‘The Small Museum’ is about El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz’. ‘A Roomful of Seicento Frames’ is meant to conjure the pictures one sees in older galleries – the British portraits of property owners in landscape, the continental scenes of martyrdoms and mythology.  But no particular pictures in that poem.

M: How has your extensive work as a translator affected your own writing? Is there a language in particular you prefer working from, and why?

Translation keeps one’s hand in when one doesn’t have ideas for poems, I find. Also, I think that exposure to many languages and their different rhythms has given me more formal options when writing in English. Since ideas, rather more than words, are the spur to my own writing, and ideas are more translatable than poetic form, I am comfortable with translation. Though of course, much of the actual work in writing has to do with finding the best word. That comes later.

I’m more drawn to particular poets than to particular languages, and in any case much of my translation work is done by invitation, and people know that I translate from Irish, Italian, and Romanian, so that’s where the invitations come from. Romania, the country, was a fresh discovery for me and I find the language attractive, but I have a much longer connection with Italy and Italian - and then we have texts in Irish and Italian that go back to the early Middle Ages, whereas the literary canon in Romanian is so much newer. It's a whole different take on language and identity, with folklore playing a part too as it does in Ireland.

The poetry I've translated from Romanian (mainly Ileana Malancioiu) has a national importance for the country. I've translated Antonella Anedda, the Sardinian poet, from Italian into Irish, and she seems to me to have a particular importance as the voice of a community. But I've also translated some local Italian poets who are not particularly well known, for a festival in Umbria. M: I’m Romanian (and a native speaker!) so I’m delighted by this. Do you compose primarily in Irish or English? 

E: I write mainly in English. The two poems in Irish in The Mother House were composed in Irish – one, because it’s about the house of my childhood where Irish was the main language, and the other, because I was asked to write something for an Irish-language section in a magazine. When I write in Irish, or translate into Irish from Italian or Romanian, I have to put English out of my head and somehow revisit a deep layer of memory. That’s hard, but worthwhile. The translation process is harder because the dictionaries work through English.

In general, I write slowly and revise a great deal. I start from an idea or an image and gradually find the words for it and then the form.