Liam Donnelly
Fód An Imris: Ard Oifig An Phoist 1986
Anso, an ea, ’athair, a thosnaigh sé?
Gur dhein strainséirí dínn dá chéile?
Anso, and ea?
Fastaím a shílis riamh dár mórchuid cainte –
Fiú nuair aontaíomar leat:
Oidhrí ar eachtra nár aithin bolaith an phúdair
Ná na heagla,
Nár chaith riamh ruchar feirge
Is is lú ná san
A sheas . . .
D’éalaíomar uait thar Pháil na Gaelainne isteach;
B’shin terre guerre ba linn fhéin,
Is chuaigh sé de mhianach an Olltaigh
Ionatsa
Ár lorg a rianadh,
Ár dtabhairt chun tíríochais –
Civilitie Spenser
D’oibrigh irtsa a chluain.
Leanamarna treabhchas na máthar:
Kranz barrghaoitheach na Mumhan;
Ba tusa san seanabhroc stróinsithe,
Scheamhaíl ort ag paca spáinnéar.
Le haois ghnáthaoímar a chéile thar n-ais;
D’fhoghlaimís carthain,
Ach b’éigean fós siúl go haireach;
Do mheabhair agues th’acfainn chirt
Níor thaithigh cúl scéithe;
Comhaos mé féin is an stat,
Is níor chun do thola do cheachtar.
Óigfhear in easnamh, anaithnid, thú, ’athair,
San àit seo –
Ceileann neamart is tuathal an eochair ar m’intinn –
Ach an seanóir a charas le grà duaisiúl,
Cloisim a thuin aduaidh:
An cuimhin leat an t-aitheasc a thugais
Nuair nà raibh faiseanta fós?
Mar seo do ràidhis é:
I see no cause for rejoicing
That Irishmen once again
Are killing other Irishmen
On the streets of Belfast!
–Máire Mhac an tSaoi
Trouble Spot: General Post Office 1986
Was it here, father? Is this where it all began?
Here we became strangers to each other?
Was it here?
You dismissed what we talked about as nonsense –
Even when we agreed with you:
Inheritors of the event who never smelt the gunpowder
Nor felt the fear.
Who did not shoot in anger,
Or worse,
Stood still . . .
We escaped from you, ran away to our country;
That was our familiar terre guerre,
And your Ulster heritage
Could not find our tracks
Or tame our barbarism –
Spenser’s civilitie
Had beguiled you.
We followed the tribe of our mother:
The high winds of Munster;
You were the old badger reluctant to change
Run to ground by howling spaniels.
In later years, we joined and tried again;
You learned to love
But we still had to tread carefully;
Your mind and sense of justice
Never practised betrayal;
I am the same age as the state
And neither grew to be as you wished...
you have been removed from this place, father,
Youth who went missing –
Regret and awkwardness hide the key from my mind –
But then I heard, the Ulster accent
Of the elder man I loved with hard devotion:
Do you remember the rebuke you delivered
Before it became fashionable?
It went like this:
I see no cause for rejoicing
That Irishmen once again
Are killing other Irishmen
On the streets of Belfast!
–Translated from Irish by Liam Donnelly
Trouble Spot: General Post Office 1986
Here, father, is this where it started?
Here we became strangers to each other?
Was it here?
You called what we talked about nonsense –
Even when we agreed with you:
Inheritors of the event who did not understand the smell
Of gunpowder, or of fear,
Or did not shoot in anger,
Or worse,
Stood still . . .
We ran away from you, into the Pale;
That was our familiar terre guerre,
And your Ulster heritage
Could not find our tracks
Nor tame our barbarism –
Spenser’s civilitie
Had beguiled you.
We followed our mother’s heritage:
The high winds of Munster;
You were an old badger reluctant to change
Run to ground by howling spaniels.
In later years, we joined and tried again;
You had learned to be charitable,
But we still tread carefully;
Your mind and sense of justice
Never practised deception;
I am the same age as the state
And neither turned out as you wished . . .
You are absent in this place, father,
Youth who went missing –
Negligence and errors hide the key from my mind –
But I hear now the Ulster accent
Of the elder man I once loved with hard devotion:
Do you remember the rebuke you delivered
Before it became fashionable?
It went like this:
I see no cause for rejoicing
That Irishmen once again
Are killing other Irishmen
On the streets of Belfast!
–Translated from Irish by Liam Donnelly
Irish English
(An erasure of my interview with Neil Donnelly)
I have a basic understanding of Irish
Speaks Irish English
Many people in our family have had some level of Irish comprehension,
a higher understanding the farther back on the family tree you go.
Grandma Mary probably has the best understanding of Irish in our family, but is also not fluent.
Our ancestors spoke Irish,
go back pretty far to find anyone who spoke fluently
Irish
was
wiped out
Irish
facilitate storytelling between generations,
group singing.
the general culture of community that is still present today.
The English prevented the use
discouraged its use
kill it.
the Penal Laws.
learned Irish in secret,
rebellions
go back far. Irish had always been the dominant language on the island, until the colonization
the majority of people still spoke Irish.
not too much happens from a family perspective
all Irish speaking school from four to ten, spoke it all the time. in trouble for speaking English.
–Liam Donnelly
Translator’s Statement
Máire Mhac an tSaoi was born in Dublin in 1922 to parents who were both active in the Irish Republican movement. Her father was a politician in Belfast and fought in the 1916 Easter rising (Poetry International and de Paor), and her mother was a courier in the movement. Her parents’ involvement in the republican movement is what led her into the foreign service, which was her career, and to the Irish language, which she wrote in and helped keep alive. Since she was two years old, she spent up to 5 months a year in the Munster Gaeltacht, a place designated by the government where the primary language is Irish(The Irish Times). She served on the Irish delegation to the UN General Assembly. As a child, she learned Latin and French alongside Irish, and when she was 4, she aided in the translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone”. She began writing poetry in the early 1940s to help with her friend’s Irish language literary magazine, and continued to write until her death in 2021, promoting the Irish language and women’s involvement in literature.
The poem I chose to look at was “Fód An Imris: Ard Oifig An Phoist 1986” (1986, which I would translate as “Trouble Spot: General Post Office 1986”). It was published in the midst of The Troubles in Ireland and seems to act as a reflection on them, as well as previous conflicts over the same issues in the past. The Troubles were a conflict between the Provisional IRA and The British Government over the independence of Northern Ireland. There was a lot of violence, with car bombs and fertilizer bombs being used to bomb many places around the British Isles. A resolution was reached in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, but the conflict had still left scars in the minds of the Irish people, both North and South. The poem has no standard line length or style, being written in free verse, and there is no rhyme scheme present. The poem instead tries to focus on conveying meaning through the words, rather than through form. The poem acts as a monologue spoken by the poet to her father and is a reflection and a discussion of the many conflicts in Irish to regain and remain independent. The poem has strong themes of sadness and regret shown throughout it, particularly over the loss of land and people in the conflicts. There are also strong themes of resentment towards the father, with many lines accusing him of a variety of actions, again over the same subjects as the theme of sadness. To help reflect this, imagery and figurative language are used such as in the line “the smell/Of gunpowder, or of terror”. This line helps to reflect the imagery associated with war and conflict. There are also words in French, like “terre guerre,” as well as in German, like “Krantz”. I thought the French could possibly be trying to connect the struggles in Ireland to those in French history. As for the German word, I still don’t quite know how it fits in and adds to the poem. Along with those uses of non-Irish languages, another language used is English in the last stanza. Because it was already in English, I didn’t translate it in my translations, as I have no idea what I would even do if I had to translate it. All I did with that section was put it in italics to demonstrate its difference. I think that the use of English is to signify the difference between the ideas of the poet and those of her father. It perhaps relates to his position as a politician in Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland, a part of the UK, but as he was an active member of the Republican movement, I struggle to think why his thoughts would be English oriented.
Overall, the translation process was a bit of a challenge for me. I really enjoyed it, but there were times where it got a bit stressful. First: scheduling. A friend of our family named Patrick McDonagh graciously agreed to help me on my translation journey, but because of the way the weekend I was to meet with him shaped up, I was unable to meet with him until Monday night, which left me feeling both stressed, as it was way closer to the deadline than I wanted it to be, and tired, because it was at night. The second issue that arose was one of dialects. This proved to be a continuing theme in my translation process, as the dialect the poem was written in was not the same as the one Patrick spoke. Because she spent time in the Munster Gaeltacht, Mhac an tSaoi wrote in Munster Irish, whereas Patrick, being from Galway, spoke Connacht Irish. Thankfully, this didn’t end up being a big issue, as we were able to use certain online resources to help with those words, but it did act as another roadblock in the process. The last challenging part came with the interpretive translations themselves, where because of the differences between Munster Irish and standard Irish, I had some trouble finding alternative meanings for words.
The two features I focused on were the two that I mentioned earlier, those being the themes of sadness and resentment. I feel like sadness and resentment are two different aspects of the larger reaction to conflict in the poem, and I tried my best to represent them both in their own separate poems, despite the dialectical differences between the dictionaries and the poem, and the occasional lack of multiple meanings. For example, in my first translation, the one about sadness and regret, I literally changed the word “reneging” to “regret” to very directly show what themes I wanted to show. I also changed “snuck away” to “escaped” to demonstrate how much more gravity the situation had. In my second translation, the one about resentment towards the father, I also changed that line, but to “ran away” to drive home a similar, but slightly different point about how they had to run away from the father, showing how they resent the father.
This project didn’t change what I thought a good translation was very much, but it did make me understand the complexity of translation more. I always believed that the meaning should be the goal, not just a literal translation of the words, and having spent many hours on Wordreference for my French class, I knew that there are multiple meanings for different words. I think that the idea of multiple translations makes a lot of sense, so that all the possible ground could be covered, so every possible facet of meaning could be understood.
Throughout this unit, I really feel like I’ve become closer with the Irish language. I knew very basic words going into this process, but after starting this project, I got a lot more interested in certain things. I now feel like I have a really good understanding of accents in Irish, and I’ve refined the pronunciation of the phrases I do know to be better than they were. I also feel like I’ve gotten closer to this aspect of my family through discussing it with my dad and Patrick, as well as in school. I already knew about the oppression of the Irish language by the British, but the focus on Irish in my process, as well as in examples in class make me think about it much more. For example, we learned about how “Imperial education policies were made to create colonies of the mind” (wa Thiong'o 4). I could see in those readings how the oppression related both directly and indirectly to Ireland. The English prevented and punished the use of Irish, especially in schools, with severe consequences for speaking it. English domination came about by only allowing English in courts, schools, and any official place, leading to the near death of Irish as a language. Another way in which I connected Irish to what we were learning about was when reading about French in Africa, where the author discusses “social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube [...] literally spreading the word” (Peltier and Morales). This reminded me about modern use of Irish and more specifically, the band KNEECAP. They rap in both Irish and English, spreading their language and belief across the internet in the form of songs and videos that allow Irish to be shared with many more people than it originally could’ve ever been. Aside from these school connections, my discussions with my dad and Patrick also helped to deepen my connection with Irish language and culture, and more specifically my dad helped a lot with my connection to Irish when I interviewed him for my erasure poem.
My interview process went pretty well. I interviewed my dad, and we already speak to each other about many different, random things, so I think that this interview was an extension of that. It felt very natural, and I think our flow was very conversational, which made the process feel a lot less robotic. We did end up going on many tangents, but they were all still related to the larger question about language heritage, and helped to provide more context to the interview. I didn’t learn too many new things from the interview. We mostly just discussed things that we had either previously discussed, or that I already knew, though it was kind of interesting to have everything compiled in that conversation. I did learn about one story that my dad told me about Native Americans working with the IRA. I later looked into it after Eric helped me find a source which proved the validity of the story after previously wondering if my dad misremembered the story, as I had trouble finding a source on my own.
When making my erasure poem, I chose a lot of words relating to how lost Irish has become. That was the whole theme of our interview, but I think my word choices help to illustrate it more. I also played a lot with the spacing, which I kept sort of wide, partly because I think it just looks cool, and partly because it helps to represent the fractured state of the Irish language, and how my connection to it isn’t the most clear or direct. I do feel like I deviated from the guiding question a little bit when making the poem, more reflecting the state of the language than my relationship to it, but I also feel like the state of the language right now also happens to reflect my relationship with, as I previously said. The fractured nature of my poem relates to the fractured nature of my relationship with the Irish language, with only a few shards of it really resonating with me. That really showed the state of my relationship with Irish before this project, but I feel like after it, my relationship with Irish has gotten at least a little bit more connected.
Works Cited
Peltier, Elian, and Hannah Reyes Morales. “How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time (Published 2023).” The New York Times, 12 December 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/world/africa/africa-french-language.html. Accessed 1 June 2025.
Poetry International, and Louis de Paor. “Máire Mhac an TSaoi.” www.poetryinternational.com, www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-22456_Mhac-an-tSaoi.
The Irish Times. “Máire Mhac an TSaoi Obituary: Acclaimed Poet, Critic and Diplomat.” The Irish Times, 17 Oct. 2021, www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/maire-mhac-an-tsaoi-obituary-acclaimed-poet-critic-and-diplomat-1.4702933.
wa Thiong'o, Ngugi. Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas. Penguin Books, 2025.