The bilingual routes of Paul Muldoon/Pól Ó Maoldúin

• Published in: Irish studies review Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 135 - 155
• Main Author: O'Connor, Laura
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 01.05.2011
• Subjects: Adolescents; Apprenticeships; Art MacCumhaigh; Eighteenth Century; Gaelic Ulster; Kerry Slides; Northern Ireland; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; Paul Muldoon; poetry; Schools; Seamus Dall MacCuarta; Sean O'Boyle; sonnet; To Ireland, I; trí rainn agus amhrán; Universities
• ISSN: 0967-0882; 1469-9303
• DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2011.565942

Under the signature of Pól Ó Maoldúin, Paul Muldoon has published poems in Irish, promulgated Gaelic literature and culture on radio, and emerged as the most prominent of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's eminent poet-translators. Drawing on the Emory University archive and an in-depth personal interview, this article examines Muldoon's juvenilia in Irish (reproduced here with permission) and affiliation to his eighteenth-century precursors, the Gaelic poets of the Fews. I compare his 1970 and 1998 translations of Seamus Dall MacCuarta's 'An Londubh Báite' ('The Drowned Blackbird'), in part to illustrate Gaelic prosody and to weigh the claim in interview that the form of 'trí rainn agus amhrán' shapes Muldoon's abiding interest in the sonnet. I argue that his bilingual poetic apprenticeship at St Patrick's Grammar School (1962-69) nurtured his morphological virtuosity, high regard for cryptic obliquity, improvisatory approach to received poetic forms, and a waywardness that is characterised, tellingly, as 'adolescent'.