What happens to poetry when it unmoors from place? Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh explores Conamara agus Tíortha Eile Rogha Dánta 2015-2025 (Leabhar Breac), the new collection by Diarmuid Johnson
by Seaghan Mac an tSionnaigh
Diarmuid Johnson is an author, musician and translator. He has a British birth certificate, a French driving licence, a Belgian identity card, and an Irish passport—he grew up in Galway.
His latest book, Conamara agus Tíortha Eile Rogha Dánta 2015-2025 (Connemara and Other Countries Selected Poems 2015-2025) launched at the Irish Embassy in Belgium as part of Éigse na Bruiséile, a festival which celebrates the Irish language community of Belgium, past and present. There, the author reflected on the connections between verse, language, and place—or dinnseanchas, as the evening’s discourse would have it.
Johnson has spoken on RTÉ’s An Cúinne Dána of what must happen once an anthology has entered publication and then cooled down: the poems should be released from the page, words hurled up in the air as though casting a handful of seeds to the wind.1
The same programme offered a special audio recorded in collaboration with musicians, as a kind of urgent demonstration of the aural possibilities that emerge when poetry intersects with place. ‘Na Beanna Beola’ is an atmospheric soundscape which would probably prove as appropriate an accompaniment to a Friday evening book launch in an embassy as to the dwindling debauchery of Brussel’s Sunset Club in the later hours of Saturday morning.
Johnson’s poetry, then, speaks both to traditional concepts such as dinnseanchas and to present-day political realities
‘Na Beanna Beola’ happens to be the opening poem of the collection, and the title of Johnson’s own English translation ‘The Twelve Pins’, poem number two in the book, shares its name with an Irish pub near Finsbury Park in London. One day I sat there under the sun and read the poem aloud as a modest act of performative fieldwork. Connemara immigrants were all around me. It occurred to me that their presence in that part of London was related to the kind of rural depopulation whose fallout is that the Twelve Bens of their homeland is now “briatharmhúchta” and “bard-tostach”; or “silent” and “unsung” as Johnson himself translates those words.
The poem does not remind us directly that the Beanna Beola area of Connemara forms part of the Gaeltacht, but it does tell us that the area is “bánaithe” – a word evocative of “Bánú na Gaeltachta”, a phrase that in recent times has lent a name to a group of activists aiming to offset the total bánú of Gaeltacht areas. Johnson’s poetry, then, speaks both to traditional concepts such as dinnseanchas and to present-day political realities. This is no mere “soul landscape” à la John O’Donoghue in Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, though there are parallels.
The aforementioned bánú has not gone unheard in Brussels. The Kerry’s Eye reported on 17 April that Breanndán Ó Beaglaoich was received by MEPs when he travelled to the city “to lobby to make it easier for native Irish speakers to get planning permission to build a home in the Gaeltacht” because, as Ó Beaglaoich is quoted as saying, “[forcing] people into towns and villages is effectively killing the Irish language”.
In this context, Johnson seems deliberately careful to people his poetic landscape with charismatic humans: Eoin Ó Beaglaoich, Feargal Ó Béarra (God rest him), Terry Ros a’ Mhíl, Tommy Peoples, the enigmatic Romanian woman – the list is long and this review is short. But when community is lost, landscape is left with little choice but to throw shade and speak for itself. That invitation to “listen to the land speak”, as another fella said, is explored in subsequent poems in the collection.
But when community is lost, landscape is left with little choice but to throw shade and speak for itself
Making the land speak is partly achieved by Joyce-like portmanteau words. In ‘Na Beanna Beola’ we had “briatharmhúchta” which might also be rendered “verbquenched” and in ‘An Sáile in Inis Ní’ compound neologisms give expression to a range of tidal emotion whose briny moods are described in terms of ‘fuarsháile’, ‘feallsáile’, and ‘fraochsháile’, etc.
This kind of alliterative, onomatopoeic, and pathetic-fallacy-laden wordplay further puts me in mind of Joyce and his personification of thunder on page three of Finnegan’s Wake: ‘bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk’. In the poem ‘An Sáile in Inis Ní’, idiolectic indulgence has given rise to a micro-lexicon for seawater semantics. Such refreshing precision both recalls and challenges oft-cited, often-dubious claims such as there being lots of words for snow in Circumpolar Indigenous languages, or in the Irish context, similar claims made of the proverbial thirty-two words for field.
Rain has its moment in the sun too, and interestingly, not through reference to the capital of Ireland but in a description of the Belgian capital city. In the poem ‘Mós Fluch’, Brussels is caricatured through rainfall, described variously as “maothbhog”, “muin-tais”, and “morc-bhraonach”. The science on this checks out: Brussels receives around 850mm of rain each year on average, whereas Dublin gets roughly 700mm.
In the poem ‘Mós Fluch’, Brussels is caricatured through rainfall, described variously as “maothbhog”, “muin-tais”, and “morc-bhraonach”
‘Mós Fliuch’ remains untranslated, but Johnson has penned other poems about Brussels in French, including a series about a fictional poet called Alphonse de Gutenberg who might otherwise have wandered into a short story. There are also poems translated into French from the author’s original Irish in an earlier collection, Rún na mBradán (2016). One of those translations is titled ‘Hier j’ai vendu mon bateau’—a phrase I can’t help but liken to the blues classic made famous by Robert Johnson (not Diarmuid Johnson): ‘I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom’.
Conamara agus Tíortha Eile 2015-2025 also includes original poems in English, Breton, German, and Welsh, as well as translations from Latgalian, Latvian, Slovenian and Romanian. The author labours a little to impress upon us his gift for language, and formidable as it is, more interesting to me is the deep question of what happens to poetic production or to literary translation when it becomes unmoored from (or remoored to) place or community. These are live issues, oft-appropriated, and in our present moment we need more people like Johnson on the case.
1“is éard atá le déanamh ansin nuair atá an leabhar foilsithe agus fuaraithe beagáinín na dánta a chur ina mbeatha arís, na dánta a bhaint den leathanach agus na focla a chaitheamh suas san aer mar a chaithfeá glac síolta le gaoith”
