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Geasa le Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, as Pharaoh’s Daughter. Gallery Press. 1990. This poem is from Pharaoh’s Daughter by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, 1990, Gallery Press (Editor Peter Fallon). With thanks to Gallery Press for permission to reproduce here. I have added poet Medbh McGuckian‘s translation at link The Bond, by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, translated by Medbh McGuckian. |
Tag: Medbh McGuckian
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If I use my forbidden hand
To raise a bridge across the river,
All the work of the builders
Has been blown up by sunrise.
A boat comes up the river by night
With a woman standing in it,
Twin candles lit in her eyes
And two oars in her hands.
She unsheathes a pack of cards,
‘Will you play forfeits?’ She says.
We play and she beats me hands down,
And she puts three banns upon me:
Not to have two meals in one house,
Not to pass two nights under one roof,
Not to sleep twice with the same man
Until I find her. When I ask her address,
‘If it were north I’d tell you south,
If it were east, west.’ She hooks
Off in a flash of lightning, leaving me
Stranded on the bank,
My eyes full of candles,
And the two dead oars.
This is a translation of Geasa, by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. The poem is from Pharaoh’s Daughter by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, 1990, Gallery Press (Ed. Peter Fallon). With thanks to Gallery Press for permission to reproduce here. - This translation of Geasa is by poet, Medbh McGuckian
- Geasa
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Medb McGuckian Shelmalier.
by Medb Mc Guckian.
“Looked after only by the four womb-walls,
if anything curved in the ruined city his last hour
it was his human hands, bituminous, while all laws
were aimed at him, returning to the metre of a star:
like a century about to be over, a river trying
to film itself, detaching its voice from itself,
he qualified the air of his own dying,
his brain in folds like the semi-open rose of grief.
His eyes recorded calm and keen this exercise,
deep-seated, promising-avenues, they keep their
…kingdom:
it is I who am only just left in flight, exiled
into an outline of time, I court his speech, not him.
This great estrangement has the destination of a
…rhyme.
The trees of his heart breathe regular, in my dream. “from, The Making of a Sonnet, a Norton Anthology. Eds ,Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland. Published 2008.
- Bio link for Medb McGuckian http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/McGuckian.html
- The Dream Language of Fergus here : http://poethead.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/the-dream-language-of-fergus-medbh-mc-guckian/
Chris Murray 