Wake Forest University Press

Irish Poetry

Nuala Ni Dhomhnail - Pharaoh's Daughter

In Irish, with translations by thirteen of Ireland's leading poets

"[T]he branching-out, or shape-shifting, from Gaelic myth or folk-song to some less romantic or quirkier emblem of the present, is a constant resource of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's poetry; and it's one of the ways she has rescued the Irish language from its association with Gaelic League pieties or the pedantries of the past." Times Literary Supplement

The Language Issue

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh's daughter.

translated by Paul Muldoon
 

$10.95
1993   160 pages
paperback
In Irish; translated by thirteen Irish poets
ISBN 978-0-916390-53-2