The Fifty Minute Mermaid

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

This extravaganza of marvellous tales conjures a biography of mermaids and, in patterns of sometimes startling sounds and images, traces the fate of their race. It follows the paths and portals to another world, Land-Under-Wave, the realm of myth, imagination and the psyche. It is a book in touch and tune with the wellsprings of poetry.

Neither ‘believing nor disbelieving’, sometimes insouciant and always wideranging, The Fifty Minute Mermaid is a book of accumulating force and subtle consonance. Paul Muldoon’s generous surrender to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems supports José Saramago’s adage that the author with his or her language creates a national literature. World literature is created by translators.

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Classics, Irish Literature

163 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2007

About the author

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (born 1952) is an Irish poet.

Born in Lancashire, England in 1952, of Irish parents, she moved to Ireland at the age of 5, and was brought up in Corca Dhuibhne and in Nenagh, County Tipperary. Her uncle was Monsignor Pádraig Ó Fiannachta of An Daingean, the leading authority alive on Munster Irish. She studied English and Irish at UCC in 1969 and became part of the 'Innti' school of poets. In 1973, she married Turkish geologist Dogan Leflef and lived abroad in Turkey and Holland for seven years. Her mother brought her up to speak English, though she was Irish herself. Her father and his side of the family spoke very fluent Irish and used it every day, but her mother thought it would make life easier for Nuala if she spoke English instead.

One year after her return to County Kerry in 1980, she published her first collection of poetry in Irish, An Dealg Droighin (1981), and became a member of Aosdána. Ní Dhomhnaill has published extensively and her works include poetry collections, children’s plays, screenplays, anthologies, articles, reviews and essays. Her other works include Féar Suaithinseach (1984); Feis (1991), and Cead Aighnis (2000). Ní Dhomhnaill's poems appear in English translation in the dual-language editions Rogha Dánta/Selected Poems (1986, 1988, 1990); The Astrakhan Cloak (1992), Pharaoh's Daughter (1990), The Water Horse (2002), and The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007). Selected Essays appeared in 2005.

Dedicated to the Irish language she writes poetry exclusively in Irish and is quoted as saying ‘Irish is a language of beauty, historical significance, ancient roots and an immense propensity for poetic expression through its everyday use’. Ní Dhomhnaill also speaks English, Turkish, French, German and Dutch fluently.

An article on- and interview with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill by Éamonn Ó Dónaill can be read (in Irish only) here: http://beo.ie/alt-nuala-ni-dhomhnaill...

Reviews

[Dr. des. Siobhán · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful and weird collection of stories about Irish meremaids, their lives, politics etc. The Irish is very very beautiful and the translation is very well done. If you have a little Irish, I recommend that you look at the best parts of a poem / story in the Irish. It makes the experience even better.

4 Stars

[Molly Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book of poetry I have read in ages. Ní Dhomhnaill writes from the conceit of a tribe of mermaids who evolve and adapt to living on land, and the trauma that that entails. Every poem was beautiful and full of deep imagery and hidden corners in both the Irish and the English that I'd like to investigate. And as a book, it holds together so well. I thought the inclusion of Part one was strange (the few poems that are not mermaid poems) - I think she should have cut those out and saved them for her next book for unity. I borrowed this from a library but I'm going to buy my own copy now.

[Modi · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the tension of the original Irish and the English translations side by side, this collection of poems points to the fraught nature of the Irish language. It also mourns the loss inherent to translation, while suggesting another language's creative transformation. Ní Dhomhnaill compares the violence and rawness of the postcolonial condition to a loss of innocence, to mermaids coping with the loss of community and water, to the disturbing estrangement of post-Holocaust trauma. Reflective, beautiful and always thoughtful.

[Áine · Rating 3 out of 5]

My main issues with this collection were the translations. Unfortunately, I feel like the translator altered the essence of the poems and the writing style for the worse. I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I had better Irish and could rely solely on the originals, as even with my mediocre language skills I could appreciate that the original poems had a lot more to offer and the translations unfortunately lost a lot of the beauty and the inherent style of the poems.

At times the original poem would have simplistic language, that the translator would overcomplicate, or worse he would add in elements that were not in the original poem. For example, in the poem ‘Cuimhne an Uisce,’ the original says “her daughter” (a hiníon), which the translator decided to translate as “the mermaid’s daughter,” even though the original poem does not once mention the mermaid. I can appreciate that things by nature are lost in translation, however I feel in this case the poems have been overtaken by the translator’s personal artistic vision.

Despite these issues, there were several really beautiful poems in the collection that have made their way into my favourites, definitely a collection I will return to in the future when I pick back up the language and can hopefully disregard the translations completely.

[Amber Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dhomhnaill's object of study seems to be both the mermaid as myth and the mermaid as matter. This paradoxical stance makes mermaids both elusive and present to the speaker and--by extension--the reader. We don't know what is real but we find signs of the mermaids without water everywhere.

The best part of the collection is the way Dhomhnaill summons nostalgia; I found myself missing a sea I have never known and an ontology I've never experienced.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Nuala's writing (or Paul Muldoon's translation of Nuala's writing) . It's whimsical, poignant, magical and real at the same time. There are very few books that I have read in school and have felt that that environment elevated the reading, but I am so glad I read this in a school setting. This book is a book to read and the talk about it with other people.

[Christin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am still feeling my way through this collection. Muldoon's translations are very much about him, and for what they gain in luster, panache, and verve, they sometimes lose in fidelity to the original Irish. The idea of the Irish people as mermaids who have moved onto dry land and experienced the foundational trauma of losing water, losing their roots and connection to the past (whether that means the Irish language, the Great Hunger, the horror of colonial occupation and oppression, or all of the above) is an interesting one, but the Ni Dhomhnaill's poems are murky and nebulous and too many of them deal with this trauma by projecting (in the Freudian sense)/implying a clouded, cathected national psyche that needs to be explored further and mapped more directly.