Praeteritio: (Non-) Possession and the Translational Impulse in Ni Chuilleanain's Work‪.‬

In what ways can Ni Chuilleanain's translations be read as her work? As examples such as Pope's translation of Homer, Pound's translations from Latin and Chinese, and Heaney's version of Beowulf testify, there is a long tradition of considering poets' translations as an integral part of their poetic production. However, what these random examples also point to is that this assignation is rendered more uncomplicated when the texts that are translated are considered to be classics, sufficiently removed in time not to be deemed to belong exclusively to an author, even if the author is known and named, but are rather viewed as belonging to a culture. As such, they are thought to be readily available for continual re-appropriation. The collections that are considered here do not fall into this category, rather they are translations of living poets--Michele Ranchetti, Ileana Malancioiu, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill--and they will be found under these names rather than under Ni Chuilleanain's. (1) In short, Ni Chuilleanain's role here has been the fundamental task of a translator: to bring these poets to, in this case, an English-speaking audience. (2) There is an inevitable degree of violence involved in considering these very different poets from the perspective of their common translator. Locating these texts in terms of Ni Chuilleanain's oeuvre involves disrupting the assumed hierarchy between author and translator in a way that renders these poems sites of contested authority. The upheaval involved in this move cannot be reduced to an act of substitution, with the translator simply assuming the role of the author. Instead, more radically, this critical approach puts all claims of authorial self-possession under question. Indeed, the three collections considered here emerge from matrices of literary relationships and collaborations that bring to light the complex dynamic of possession and non-possession that is involved in the act of translation. Ni Chuilleanain's translation of Michele Ranchetti was prepared with her brother Cormac O Cuilleanain, and this English version sits on the right-hand page beside Gabriel Rosenstock's Irish translation, with Ranchetti's text occupying the left-hand page of this elegantly-produced volume. This trilingual effort is reflected in its title: Verbale * Minutes * Tuairisc. The Malancioiu collection, After the Raising of Lazarus, was published along with twelve other volumes of translations by Cork poets of poets from the recent 'accession countries' to the EU, as part of the Munster Literature Centre's contribution to Cork's tenure as European Capital of Culture in 2005. Ni Chuilleanain participated in a similar venture in 1996, translating Denisa Comanescu as part of a project in which a group of Irish and Romanian poets produced versions of each other's work. (3) However, having found that experience frustrating, she decided to learn Romanian in order to prepare these translations of Malancioiu, (4) and as Peter Sirr notes, this was the only book in the Cork series that was not translated from a literal crib. (5) In her 'Acknowledgements' Ni Chuilleanain notes her debt to Raluca Radulescu who taught her Romanian, assisted her with the translations, and wrote an 'Introduction' to the collection. Moreover, the assistance provided by her brother and her husband with the final drafts of these poems is also acknowledged. (6) Finally, her contribution to the 1999 collection The Water Horse participates in a three-way conversation between Ni Dhomhnaill and her two translators, Ni Chuilleanain and Medbh McGuckian, who translate individual poems independently.