A Ghost in the Throat: Doireann Ní Ghríofa

hello everyone you're very welcome here to kenny's uh we're delighted to have you here today i'm particularly delighted to have with us uh during the grief darren is more well known as a poet but i suspect not for long because her first book of prose a ghost in the throat has just been published by trent press it's absolutely fantastic and we're really like to have her here and looking forward to to talking to her for the next wedding to start congratulations this is an absolutely fabulous book you're known to date obviously more as a poet and i'm really interested to kind of know what what made you go down this this prose route it's obviously a very different role to take and i'm just interested to see what made you made you do it yeah i suppose when i think about the path that i follow from the poetry towards the book um it's very much eileen dove's voice that carried me along you know that initially i was so fascinated by the poem itself um and that i kept returning to it over and over again and that it was almost that fascination with the poem to begin with that drew me further towards her story and her life so really when i think of what carried me from poetry into publishing a book of prose it's i leaned off is the answer you know she was the one who led me here and she's the one i have to thank for this book yeah so it wasn't necessarily a conscious decision to to branch out or to change or evolve or anything i don't think so and yes in some ways i wonder whether um artistically you become the writing that you are based on the materials that you're given so for me the type of writer that i was in terms of writing poetry and that i am in some ways um was drawn from what i was given which was these very tiny little parcels of time um and the impulse to create something had to be necessarily fitted into those little parcels of time so what i ended up making were these like very intense smaller parcels that we call poems and then as my children are getting a little older and i have these larger parcels of time maybe it's natural that there's a sense of growth well okay the the intense compression of a poem grows a little into a paragraph and as i was saying earlier today you know there are paragraphs in this book that in some ways move like a poem or like a prose poem and that are almost disguised as prose but that in essence some of the paragraphs here really are poems you know that i was still thinking in that way and making in that way at a craft level but um yeah i think that's really cool and obviously the focus of the book is i don't know but also queen artillery which is obviously a very very famous poem and as you say the book itself there's much of it is very poetic in nature whether it's excerpts from the poem or the movement of your writing or whatever so it's not a it's not a total departure i guess i suppose not in some ways um and this book was a pleasure to write you know and i often felt as though i was almost absent in the process that the book was being composed or was being written through me you know um where you i think that's always a pleasure for any kind of an artist where you're so absorbed in the process of what's being made that you're almost temporarily gone and what needs to be made is kind of coming through you so um this book in some ways just felt like it was a gift you know and and um i really enjoyed the process of making it and it did really feel very close to poems a lot of the time during that and the book that you arrived at is obviously got a conglomerate of different elements be they autobiography history poetry literature irish language and so it's it's not that easy to categorize how how would you categorize it or do you feel that it shouldn't be categorized yeah it's something i found myself thinking a lot about these past few months um and every time i i think about that i struggle and stumble and fail to eventually come up with one final category which is something that i don't envy book sellers about this prospect the bestseller section and but i suppose what i come back to when i'm thinking about that as well um like life it's it's it's kind of difficult to categorize as one genre like there's a certain falseness in in the way sometimes that we shoehorn things into different categories and uh i'm kind of i'm i'm at ease about that you know like um it's kind of a mishmash and on scientific mishmashes there's a section in the book that's like that that that's kind of how it felt to me through the process of it that when i was feeling my way around the queen and around eileen dove's life that there were elements of us that blurred lines all the time so it felt like the book itself had to blur lines in its own way you know and so it feels natural that the book became that kind of an artistic creation you know it feels true to how the process felt to me as i was exploring the material of it and um yeah if someone asked me what category my life would fit into i'd find it hard to pick one you know yeah so um yeah it is a strange one definitely maybe we need to invent a new little genre for it but i i it's interesting because it it remains accessible you could say all of these different categorizations and somebody might look at it and be daunted by it or be but it book remains very accessible even giving all these categories and different points of research i'm intrigued how did you approach writing it was it a linear kind of an a to z fashion or did you weave it together after the fact like a lot of my writing um my process is very close to dreams sometimes like i'll often work in the daytime in terms of the actual writing but when i'm thinking things through it's often in that time where between when you close your eyes to go to sleep and when you actually lose consciousness i'm really intrigued during uh to what extent is your use of the first person uh autobiographical uh it's obviously something you played with previously in your poetry and that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't and i'm just intrigued how you brought that to bear on the new book and how it you bring the reader along you reference the reader several times in this book and how it influences the journey that you're bringing the reader on so i suppose something that's very interesting to me with poetry is to look at the kind of a writer i became from when i began writing and then as i was starting to develop and that's a process that is very much still ongoing and and when i was first coming to poetry one element of poetry that i was very drawn to is persona poetry where the speaker of a poem would have a certain distance from what we might consider the eye of the writer sitting down to compose the poem and and i felt in some ways that the more distance that that i took from the eye who i am going to the supermarket say writing a list you know eggs fish whatever the distance between those two eyes allowed me to explore things that were in some ways much closer to my sense of self and so for a while as as i was writing through the books that led me to this book that distance was very helpful to me and exploring things and as i was coming closer to this book the sense of those eyes was starting to come i think closer together um in some ways the eye in this book is much closer to the eye that i recognize when i look in the mirror you know and with the question that you asked then about about the reader it was really important to me to be very open about how flawed that eye is the eye that speaks um in this book um and how that i isn't a historian doesn't have any sense of um training behind the scholarship that's in it and that i would open that whole element of how flawed the eye is up to the reader and invite the reader into the adventure that this eye is going on so there's a sense of trust there but there's also a sense of distance there between the eye in the presence of a ghost in the throat and the reader you know and the reader is invited along to observe all the mistakes and and i mean in some ways i hope that what that will create is the sense with some readers that they feel like they can follow this journey and that they can continue it and possibly find out something more you know i mean that will be the ideal scenario as far as i'm concerned um that some readers might come to this book and think okay this person attempted this and this is what she discovered what will happen if i attempt the same thing you know i mean who knows where it might bring them what might be yet to be found and totally uh and the queen itself um how much your focus was on was on her and on the poem i mean you've gone to great lengths to to reclaim her through the book and put her in context both historical and literary and indeed personal and i'm just wondering how important uh was that for you it was really important to me i suppose i feel like some of the work that i did in researching this book drew on scholarship that had been done before me you know like made nickname angela park sean otuma that there was really extraordinary scholarship there that kind of dropped the breadcrumbs that i was able to follow in terms of trying to develop whether misguided or not a sense of intimacy with someone who had lived so many years before us i i don't think it's necessarily something that's unfamiliar particularly to anyone who's done like who's researched and written their own family history you know that sense of looking into the past acknowledging that there's a big distance in terms of time between you and the character and yet the more that you learn the closer and closer you start to feel to the person um and that part of the process was fascinating to me so um i mean i i hope it will bring people back to ireland of i know that i started to feel much closer to her through the queen and then through the scholarship and then through following the threats that i followed and that it revealed a great richness to her life to me if that makes any sense and um yeah it was a remarkable journey to go on yeah and by any stretch she had a remarkable life she had yeah and the queen itself when you finish the book uh which is great in itself there's an even greater treat at the end and that there's your translation of the poem and i was conscious reading it it seems like an absolutely enormous undertaking i'm i'm treated how long did it take you to to write it because or to translate it sorry because it's it seems like it must be a huge undertaking yeah it was it was a long process um and i suppose with me oftentimes on the first draft of something i'm like a dog with a bone you know where i focus with great intensity on that single task and then i'll often have several different projects you know on the boil at the same time so i'll flip between them so i can never really um say what took this number of years because like i would go at the first draft of it in this case probably the first two drafts at it and couldn't think of anything else with a really focused amount of time which is described in the book um and then i'll keep going back over and over obsessively and every time that i was working on that sense of working and reworking and my translation of it and i would read it aloud and i would read i would read the original loud over and over again and every single time it just gets me right in the chest you know it's such an extraordinary piece of work queen and we're so fortunate to have it that was one of the biggest revelations to me as i was researching the book and then writing the book was the sense just of how lucky we are to have it you know and how easy it would have been for it to be lost like so many works of its kind must have been lost um and every time i would read it aloud during that process of translation just gratitude that we have it and astonishment and odd how finely wrought a work of art it is one thing that really struck me in reading your translation was the emotion that jumped out through it it was really visceral and i i wonder did you was that something you thought of while you were translating it were you trying to bring that out or was there any other aspects that you you felt were important to bring out it's hard to explain the process of when i'm trying to compose something and i got i get very caught up in it and it just ends up being um it's hard to even articulate it it just ends up being what it needs to be so i don't go into the process of translation saying these are the elements that i'd like to bring across through it these are the salient elements of my translation as opposed to xyz translation i'm absolutely not naming names i promised myself particularly with the forging um but it just it just becomes itself so yeah i don't consciously have anything in mind um with it it is really an act of um maybe fidelity to my slow learning of the type of character i imagine i didn't love was and to my experience of reading the poem itself over and over and over again like the sense of return the sense of speaking her words aloud and what it means to and what it means to return to a poem and speak it aloud and to feel the rush of those syllables come through your own body the gasp and the drawing breath and the places where an utterance or a sentence ends like every single full stop in ireland elves poem i have considered every single full stop and i have thought about you know the choices that were made and it just it just has it means so much to me every aspect of the text so yeah to answer your question i didn't have any um sense of intention going into it in fact if anything if i'm completely honest at the start when i was first embarking on the translation it was more a sense of resistance was my main thing because so many people have translated before and there are a number of those translations that i have a huge admiration for and really enjoy reading the translation side by side with the original poem and um the resistance would have come from the sense of what what can i add and what that was gradually overcome by was the sense of almost helplessness that like i have to yeah i have to do it you know i have to recurring in the book therein is the phrase this is a female text would you mind explaining what that means and why it's there so so frequently um the whole book the whole book began with that phrase this is female text which i came to think of as kind of a refrain you know it's refrain it recurs and it became really important to me um before i even began to write the book i remember so vividly when it first came into my head i had been to physical crave with my daughter um and had uh wrestled her into her car seat and was driving home and she had fallen asleep and as often happens when i'm driving there's something about the momentum i think that sometimes like a phrase or half a phrase will come to you and and this phrase came to me this is the female text and it just kept repeating and repeating and repeating on a loop but i didn't know what it meant like um i didn't and that was the question that was my biggest question at the start was what is a female text how can a text be gendered anyway like it was literally like the statement came first and then all the questions followed us and so a lot of the elements of it recurring as a refrain throughout the book um involved me attempting over and over again to answer that question what does this mean and that for me is part of the real enchantment of trying to create a work of literature is sometimes you don't know where something comes from it comes from elsewhere i think not to get too killing them but the process of writing a book is a process of trying to figure things out asking yourself questions that you don't have the answers to but you hope to figure them out um and that for me was an example of one of those of one of those um elements and um this is a female text i'm not sure i still know what it means all i know is that that was in many ways what began the book for me because this is a female text became a question that i had to answer and it it began when i was driving away from craig where arthur lear is buried and was one of the places that i think of recited the queen at and by the time i got home i ran into the house to jot it down because i just knew i had to figure out how to answer this question i didn't know it would lead me to writing a book i didn't know what it meant i knew it had something to do with the queen now so um yeah it's mysterious like so much of this is mysterious the queen it's one of the most famous and lauded books of the 18th century but although eileen dove's poem might be in the textbook she herself is quite often not you know her life is eclipsed really i suppose by her more famous nephew daniel o'connell do you see your book as a way of bringing her back into the general consciousness or is that not really the purpose of it yeah it absolutely yeah i guess so um like i feel like like i don't feel i have to do the work of bringing her back because she is back like she doesn't feel like she's gone to me i know that might sound kind of strange like but she feels very much alive to me um and there's like a constant presence in my life every day and has been for a long time and so i suppose what's maybe what's maybe unusual is the sense that um i'm willing to own up to that i think a lot of people maybe have these private ghosts that follow them around and that they've invited into their lives and that feel like a living presence um i think in some ways like and particularly those of us who are quite bookish you know there are certain characters that remain with us or maybe you know maybe there's a person that you're that you know well when you're a child a grandparent or you know that there are certain people who aren't currently alive but that we think of very often and that are become nourishing presences in our lives and um i suppose rather than consciously trying to draw people's attention to eileen dove is more of a statement of the fact that look this is my ghost how's your goals get mad you know um so she yeah and what one of my goals um but yeah i know she feels like she's just there to me so to a certain extent i feel like it will be a foolish endeavor for me to try and decide to consciously bring her to people and when in fact all i'm doing is kind of saying like look this is this is who i see when i'm looking around yeah you know and and i suppose lock down left you more time with your ghost yeah i'm interested because having talked to a number of different authors everybody seems to be handling lockdown and the government crisis differently and that some people have been able to write more less they've had more time or less time and how have you found it have you been able to write have you been writing and and yeah how's your experience have it been yeah it's it's a strange one and it's a strange one for me because like like a lot of people you know look i have i have responsibilities at home that i have to attend to and um um like i have schooling for children to do now these days whereas before it was very kindly taken care of by their school um so i have less time in some ways but i'm also extremely fortunate to have a very supportive partner and um a lot of lockdown for me has been a matter of tinkering with um [Music] the the ways in which i had gotten used to making my work and trying to find other ways of getting that time which isn't unfamiliar to me because um i've always fitted my work around other people's needs um i never had the experience of um being a writer without having small children to attend to so it's not something that is strange to me but um i have been writing um a lot yeah i have been writing a lot um and i think this and i have been writing prose and poetry um and and i feel almost bad saying it because i know that it's really it's really difficult um to find the time to do it but as i say you know i've always tried to find a way to drive in in difficult writing circumstances so i suppose i'm kind of used to finding weird moments here and there like this isn't as strange for me as for someone who was used to having eight hour days and then in a home office or something you know i'm used to kind of like well it's five minutes now before whatever we're reading the book it's remarkable that you you found anytime because it's certainly a busy home life it is it is and i'm very i'm very lucky to have such a busy life and and so many um positive things um and so much to do i wouldn't be idle though yeah so i plenty to keep me going um but you know i have been i have been writing during lockdown um and i think that i'm very um lucky as well because i was at the early stages of just beginning to do research and and thinking into a new pro subject not a book but pro subject um before all this started to happen and that for me is kind of an area where you're so excited that you can kind of keep galloping through it even if things are hard because your energy is high on it and you're interested to find out what you're going to figure out next so i was very lucky at the point say in a project that i was at um already and and yeah that has continued definitely yeah the irish language it's obviously a big theme throughout your work i mean your first couple of books were written you translated some of your own poetry from from irish to english and although you don't need to be able to read irish to to read and enjoy this book it's nonetheless a team running through it how important is it for you and for your work yeah i mean gosh the irish language is just an ordinary part of my life you know i feel very lucky in the way i came to it that irish was never a language at home when i was growing up but that my parents sent me to whale school a great grade school in ennis and county clare and and like the other girls going around the country it was just presented as a normal fact you know it was just um it's which is immersion education so it's literally like you bring a four or five year old into school on their first day and the teacher talks only irish them and children are sponges so they just pick it up so that was my from day one my experience of the irish language was just that it was ordinary you know and so it's an ordinary part of my life still when i speak it um yes when i take a step back and think about it yeah i'm i'm really proud that we have it and i feel very lucky that decisions that were made on my behalf now small mean that i can speak it and i wish everyone had that opportunity i really do um and in terms of in terms of this book um i i'm really glad that there is so much irish in it so um i suppose anytime there is an element of irish in it it's that it's into the text like it's interwoven so i mean like a person who didn't have irish could definitely read the entire text and understand it and at the end where the queen itself is featured with my translation that they're side by side which i think is a beautiful element of the book's design by trump press and i'm so glad with the way marshall set them side by side so the reader can look back and forth between the irish and the english and there's the sense of it being like an echo you know where your eye is looking back and forth and i really really love that about it that allows people to come to the text and to see the irish there and that art is represented there within it and in terms of irish in my life like i always think i always think of it like a styrobio you know like that's one version in irish for the word escalator and apparently the reason that it made its way into irish was in a very natural way with um some people who had our issue were in america and saw an escalator and were saying you know it's dire bill a living stairs a stairs which is alive and it just seems the perfect measure for irish for me you know like because you step onto an escalator and you're carried along you know you have this kind of oral boris of the mechanism of the escalator going around and around that some of it is this unseen depth but the steps come up and they carry you along on them and those steps for me feel like the words in irish and the language that i've inherited and the fact that i can come along and place myself on it and be carried along by words that you know my ancestors have been saying and feelings that they've been expressing going back centuries this feels like that feels like such a source of richness very ordinary richness but like deep richness in my life and i feel so lucky to have us and um and so delighted that it can be represented so beautifully in this book you know um [Music] and if if i didn't have it i don't think i would have been able to come to eileen though's life and to her work in the same way because i would have been accessing it through the other translations that i was coming to and that i wouldn't have been able to attend to her voice as closely as i as i did like this what i've often thought about what i've often thought about with eileen dove is the sense of one woman speaking a poem into the afternoon in which she happens to be standing and another woman 300 years later turning her ear to it and hearing her voice there's something so powerful in that for me you know and i feel very very lucky that when i hear her voice that i can hear it and understand it you know um and we're so fortunate that irish has survived and is so alive as it is now because it feels alive to me like i know it's imperative and i know that there are certain dangers but it feels like a living thing to me it's alive in my body it's life on my children's bodies it's alive and everyone who talks irish to any of us um and i just think it's a beautiful thing and we're very lucky to have it absolutely here here and we're very lucky to have your book as well i mean it's really a triumph congratulations on it uh and and we're delighted to have you here and i wonder just before we go if you wouldn't mind reading a little exercise yeah sure it's been a pleasure thanks for watching okay um so as i was saying earlier one element of this book was that i really wanted to invite the reader along with me and to open up my process and just how flawed it is and how ordinary it is you know like i mean it's not coming to this as um a person a very learned person of impeccable scholarship i'm very much coming to it as just an ordinary person who's learning the skills it'll take to listen to eileen dove and find out about her life um and learning those things as i go along and kind of like shambling my way through it and hoping that the reader will come alongside me so the piece that i'm going to read is just a short little piece and um it's at a point where before i started to translate the queen and before i started to try and find out more about alien dog's own life and one of the first things i was drawn to doing was seeking out the different translations that had already been made with queenness so what that involved for me was um trying to source a lot of books some of which were out of print and um reading very carefully the like this is such an artist now but the english that people had put on it you know like on beer levy car um and so this part that i'm gonna read takes place with um me trying to pursue some of those translations look it is a tuesday morning and a security guard in a creased blue uniform is unlocking a door and standing aside with a lighthearted bow because here i come with my hair scraped into a rough bun a milk stained blouse a baby in a sling a toddler and a buggy a nappy bag spewing books and what could only be described as a dangerous light in my eyes i know that i have a six minute window at best before the screeching begins so i am unclipping the buggy fast faster now and urging the toddler upstairs no stopping i peek into the sling where tiny eyelids swipe and sleep plant the toddler by my feet and eyes darting around in search of the librarian who once chastised me i shove a forbidden banana into his fist please i whisper please just sit still while mommy just just i talk a wrinkled list from the nappy bag my fingertips racing the spines just two minutes i think just two the sling squirms and the baby rips an extravagant blast into his nappy i smile how could i not and yank the last two books from the shelf i am bringing as i kiss the toddler's hair grinning as i hoist my load sideways step by slow step down the stairs with one gooey banana hand in mine and a very familiar smell rising from the sling this is how a woman in my situation comes to chase down every translation of island dove's words of which there are many necessitating many such library visits such as the number of individuals who have chosen to translate this poem that it seems almost like a rite of passage are a series of cover versions of some beloved old song many of the translations i find feeble dead texts that try but fail to find the thumping pulse of eileen dove's presence but some are memorably strong few come close enough to her voice to satiate me though and the accompanying pages of her broader circumstances are often so sparse that they leave me hungry not just hungry i am starving i long to know more of her life both before and after the moment of composition i want to know who she was where she came from and what happened next i want to know what became of her children and grandchildren i want to read details of her burial place so i can lay flowers on her grave i want to know her and to know her life and i am lazy so i want to find all these answers laid out easily before me preferably in a single library book the literature available to me however is mostly uninterested in answering such peripheral curiosities still i search because i am convinced that there must be a text in existence somewhere that shares my wonder and that's it thanks very much you

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Length: 37min 40sec (2260 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020