At the heart of things

Writing in Irish has never felt 'extraordinary' to Louis de Paor, but he does feel he has to justify publishing bilingual versions of his poems, he tells Catherine Foley.

Louis de Paor has flowing red locks, a pair of sparkling eyes and a pale-skinned, thoughtful face. His soft lilting accent is all Cork, where he was born in 1961, the eldest of nine boys. He is how some might imagine a poet to be - ethereal. And yet, as his poetry continues to win awards and international recognition, he remains calm and down-to-earth. Writing poetry in Irish has never felt "extraordinary", he says.

"From the time I was in primary school we were required to write poems . . . in various classes. It was compulsory to write poems, and particularly in Irish, for whatever reason. I thought there was nothing terribly extraordinary about it."

In secondary school, at Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh, he had the same experience: "It was always part and parcel of the education I received. Poetry was central to it."

De Paor is a four-times winner of the annual Seán O Ríordáin/Oireachtas Award, which is the premier prize in Ireland for a new collection of poems in Irish. In 2000, he was the first poet in Irish to be a recipient of the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award and his first bilingual collection, Aimsir Bhreicneach/Freckled Weather, was shortlisted for Australia's Victorian Premier's Award for Literary Translation. On publication recently of Ag Greadadh Bás sa Reilig/Clapping in the Cemetery, a bilingual collection of poems, he recalls his early steps as an Irish-language poet at UCC.

"I was very lucky when I was in Cork at the university in the late 1970s that there was quite an active workshop in the English language but also, more importantly, that there were people in my own year in college who were writing poetry," he says. "Colm Breathnach [fellow Cork-born poet] was in the same class as myself, and Seán Ó Tuama [poet and professor of Irish at the university] developed that further by taking us every Christmas to a workshop in the west Kerry Gaeltacht in Baile an Fhirtéirigh."

The guest poet at their workshop in 1978 was Michael Hartnett. The following year it was Michael Davitt, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill came the year after. He was first published in the pioneering poetry journal, Innti, which he later edited.

"There is a perception that Irish-language poets are very much marginalised," he says. "When I started writing, when I was 17 or 18 years old, meeting Hartnett and Davitt and Nuala, we had a very strong sense that we were at the centre of things, and that what was really significant in literature or in poetry in Ireland was happening all around us, and that we were close to the heart of things."

He points in particular to the poet, Michael Davitt, who died earlier this year, as being "hugely important for me because he was the first poet I encountered in Irish writing from within a place and a style of thinking and feeling that was immediately familiar to me. His cultural reference points and his geographical points were familiar to me, whether it was the middle of Cork city, or the Gaeltacht of Corcha Dhuibhne. He reconciled those things. Whether it was the singing of Joe Heaney or the songs of Bob Dylan, he was the person who connected those and made it possible for other people like me to follow through".

For a time in the 1980s, it seemed that modernism and tradition were "irreconcilable" and that he had to be "one or the other", he says. It took "a very long time before my imagination impressed it upon me that there isn't necessarily a direct opposition between the two. My own work and my imagination is more informed now by a respect for tradition, and that's a surprise".

Today, de Paor, as director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway, must set time aside to write, because "although the muses are entirely dependable in their visitations, if you are not there when they knock at the door they tend not to bother visiting in the future, they tend to take umbrage and not come back again".

There "really are only two" themes "worth considering", as "almost everything clusters around those two topics", he says, of "love and death". And yet, his work, has often taken him by surprise.

"In order to continue writing there has to be some element of being ambushed by your own imagination," he says. "And it's only when I step back from the work after quite some time that you look and you say that's what was happening there and that was gradually asserting itself . . . One of the things that surprised me in my own work is the engagement with tradition."

This is a strong sense of place throughout de Paor's work.

"I live now in an extraordinarily beautiful, wonderful landscape [in Galway], but it hasn't really expressed itself, impressed itself very much on my poetry yet," he says. "Which is kind of interesting, because I always had this romantic idea, when I started off, that it was all very well and easy for Seamus Heaney to write poems about bogs and wells and farms because they were innately more poetic places than the suburbs of a city. But that hasn't proved to be the case for myself because what you find out in the end is that wherever you are, in terms of the way your imagination works, has to be the centre of your world - and most poetry anchors itself in the local, wherever the local is."

The challenge for a writer in Irish, he believes, is "to adapt the language, to relocate the language, to where you happen to be, to the place you happen to be, if it is an urban or suburban place, because there's a perception that the language belongs elsewhere. I think that's something that almost every writer in Irish has to deal with".

As the debate about bilingual translation continues, de Paor feels the need to justify why he has made the English-language version of his work available in Ireland. A translation, he says, can "interrupt the dialogue that needs to take place between a poem and its initial primary audience, which is going to be within the language itself". The danger, he believes, is that "all too often, even competent, fluent native Irish speakers will read the English in preference to the Irish". However, as the poems in this collection are chosen from four Irish- language collections, which are all out of print, he is happy to have them published here for the first time with English translations.