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One of the featured Irish poets of The Istanbul International Poetry Festival, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, shares her interactions with Turkish translators, Seamus Heaney and her plans for the festival with Maria Eliades Of the Irish contingent coming to this year's Poetry Festival, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill is the only one who writes in Irish, a language spoken mainly in Ireland but in limited areas. Dhomhnaill began writing in Irish at the age of sixteen after realizing that she was writing Irish poetry in English. Since then, all her poetry has been in Irish. Translations came later when she took trips to Scotland in a ScottishIrish poet exchange and in the eighties when she was “the flavor of the month” in poetry circles. Ni Dhomhnaill had already established a presence on the scene with the “Innti” group while at University College Cork. She and the other members of the group published a broadsheet, which later became a magazine under the direction of Michael Davitt. In the magazine's break, Ni Dhomhnaill moved to Turkey with her Turkish geologist husband, Do¤an Leflef and taught English at Middle East Technical University. The couple left in January of 1980 due to the intensity of conflict in which she says children who grew up on the same street began killing one another. On her return, she published her first collection, ‘An Dealg Droighin’. Ni Dhomhnaill has since been the Irish Chair at Boston College, Villanova University and Notre Dame and has won the O'Shaughnessy Award for
Poetry and the American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Her fourth collection, Fifty Minute Mermaid, came out in 2007. What will your focus be at the Poetry Academy and at the Conference? At the Conference, I definitely want to highlight a poem of mine called “Dubh,” which means “Black” in Irish. I wrote it during the weekend that the massacres were happening in Srebenica, when there was a news black out.- “içime do¤du” (I had this awful feeling that something dreadful was happening). Turkey is one of the few countries that helped Bosnia at the time. Now even in Serbia, because they want to get into the EU, they have denounced the horrific massacres that happened at that time. I want to highlight this poem because the poem does bring out the horror of the whole thing and it does therefore show the correctness of the Turkish stance at the time, as opposed to the European stance. Have you given readings in Turkey before? A good few years ago, some time in the nineties, a group of us went over to a group of translators who worked out on Heybeliada under the aegis of Cevat Çapan. A book of translations came out as a result. My poems came out as Denizk›z› Hastanede (The Mermaid in the Hospital). We spent a week out in Heybeliada. One of the translations of these poems is better in Turkish than in English because I was there with them. I had a poem that was Irish in the first verse and would say five different sentences, but I remember Çapan holding his pen in the air until we got to the end of the fifth sentence and then he started and came out with one long, agglutinative Turkish sentence. I
Break out the harps! The International Istanbul Poetry Festival will run from May 11th to May 15th and will feature the poetry of Ireland with talks and special concerts by Turkish groups. Poets from Turkey and abroad will give readings throughout Istanbul. The Irish guests of honor (Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Eilean Ni Chuileanain, Macdara Woods, Alan Jude Moore and Mary Shine Thompson) will read throughout the festival's run. Don't miss the festival's closing event, poetry on a ferry, which starts at Kabatafl Pier at 14.00. For more information, www.istanbulsiirfestivali.org .
66 Time Out Istanbul May 2010
Nuala Ni Dhomhnail
I want to highlight this poem because the poem does bring out the horror of the whole thing and it does therefore show the correctness of the Turkish stance at the time, as opposed to the European stance thought, this was so beautiful but I could never do that in Turkish. What has the audience reaction been like when you've read here? I read two years ago at fiiir‹stanbul and I read “As for the Quince” and “Denizk›z› Hastanede” and Cevat Çapan read the translations and it went down very well. Then last year I brought a group of Irish people to the festival because it was a dry run for me to see it work. It was a fiasco, and the Irish poets that were with me were very cross. So this year, I was aware from Culture Ireland, which is the body that pays for Irish art to go abroad, that we had no actual input in the 2010 City of Culture and I thought we had to do something about it. I looked up the festival and just off my own back I went on. It was New Year’s and I wrote a little note. I happened to be going down to Seamus Heaney's house…we started with tea and then we had beer and then champagne and then he was coming. On the strength of his coming I got in touch with the
festival and they said they would be delighted and that they would make Ireland a topic country and then I got a letter from Seamus saying he couldn't do it. I must say I was very disappointed. In the meantime I had gotten together the usual suspects, so we had room for one more poet and I invited a young poet, Alan Jude Moore, to make up the three poets and the one critic to showcase Modern Irish poetry. The trouble with Irish poetry is that everyone thinks it finished with Yeats and prose with Joyce and Beckett. Actually, that was an extraordinary cultural outburst that was at the beginning of the 20th century but likewise there is another extraordinary literary outburst at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. That hasn't been brought to the notions of the world yet. TOP FIVE MUST-ATTEND FESTIVAL EVENTS
1. 15 Saturday, 14.00. Poetry on the Ferry; Kabatafl Ferry Port; All poets 2. 14 Friday, 20.00. Poetry Reading & Yeni Türkü Concert; Galata Tower, Büyük Hendek Caddesi, Beyo#lu. 3. 12 Wednesday, 20.00; Poetry Performance; Muammer Karaca Theater, (0212) 252 44 56, Ç›kmaz› 3, Taksim; Director Atilla Birkiye presents Naz›m Hikmet's “Poems of 21-22 Hours for Piraye”. 4. 12 Wednesday, 14.00; Poetry Reading; Emirgan White Pavilion (0212) 277 09 69 , Emirgan Forest, Sar›yer. 5. 11 Tuesday, 20.00; Opening Ceremony, Poetry Reading and Zuhal Olcay Concert, Muhsin Ertu#rul Hall (0212) 455 39 19; Gümüfl Cadessi 3, fiiflli