It is a sad fact about Irish-language poetry that Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's work receives much more attention when published bilingually than when in Irish alone. Volumes such as Pharoah's Daughter and The Astrakhan Cloak have made her undoubtedly the most widely read, living Irish-language poet. The Water Horse is another such collaborative volume, combining poems from Cead Aighnis and Feis and with translations by two of Ni Dhomhnaill's foremost contemporaries, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Medbh McGuckian.
The first poem in the book, `Bean an Leasa mar Shiobobshiu loir'/`The Fairy Hitch-Hiker', is characteristic Ni Dhomhnaill in its conjunction of the mythic and the contemporary. Other mythic motifs include Daphne and Apollo, Persephone, the Children of Lir and the eponymous water horse. There is a tremendous amount of violence in these poems too, as in `Eithne Uathach'/`Eithne the Hun', which describes the killing of Sean Savage, Mairead Farrell and Dan McCann, bluntly rendered by McGuckian as `the mess they've just made /of those three in Gibraltar'.
In this case the politics are present in Ni Dhomhnaill's original, but McGuckian's translating is frequently more creative, introducing political referents where none exists in the Irish, as when in `An Slad'/ `Slaughter', `Bean an Leasa' metamorphoses into an `iron lady.' Her translation of `Feach anseo, tusa, faigh as!' as `You can bugger off, dickhead!' may also strike purists as eccentric.
Ni Chulleanain's delicate and accurate translations, free of incongruity, are perhaps as close as a non-Irish speaking reader can get to Ni Dhomhnaill's idiom. They show an instinctive understanding of Ni Dhomhnaill's methods in such powerful poems as `An tEach Uisce' and `Muintir m'Athar', which are among the volume's highlights. This happy merging of styles is a model of what translation should be. Ni Dhomhnaill's work has been remarkably well served once again.