New year, new semester

I just want you to know that you're lucky you even got a 'blog entry today. My internet, always slow, is particularly molasses-in-January pokey today, and I got so frustrated waiting for the 'blog page to load that I almost abandoned it.


Anyway, I am back in Galway, and actually have been for about a week now. The break was lovely-- it was wonderful to see my family and friends-- but it's nice to be back, back to my "real life" of school and reading and Ireland. I was tired, frustrated, and travel-weary after the 12 hours it took me to get from Grand Rapids to Dublin, but as soon as I walked off the plane, I was surrounded by an unquestionable sense of Irishness that felt like a sigh of relief. I really do love this country, and just looking out the window or smelling the air brings an enormous sense of comfort.

This first week back has been largely taken up by the normal "first day of classes" type things-- introductions, short lectures, and syllabi, though thankfully the teachers here don't care to spend much time on the latter and are content to simply hand them out. The most exciting thing that happened was undoubtedly a visit from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill ([nu:lə ni ga:nəl] or "NOO-la NEE GAH-nal") is Ireland's, and therefore the World's, Foremost Irish-Language Poet. She is, simply, a Big Deal when it comes to poetry in Ireland. I actually had the opportunity to meet her once before: on my study abroad in Dublin, she came and talked to our class about the history of Irish. That time, however, I don't think any of our class had had her importance and near-celebrity status impressed on us, and while she read a little of her poetry most of the emphasis wasn't on her. This time, she came to do a private reading for the Irish Studies Centre. Louis De Paor, our fearless leader, arranged it-- I think they might have gone to college together, at University College Cork, back in the '60's. That's what my very tiny knowledge of Irish gathered from Louis' introduction, anyway. Nuala was wonderful. She is very funny and had absolutely no ego about her writing, referring to it as something she had to do, in order to keep sane and express ideas that nag at her. As she put it, she gets a bee in her bonnet about something and it won't go away until she writes about it to her satisfaction.

She read her poetry to us, telling us the stories behind each one. She would read the translation first, frequently stopping to compliment the wonderful way the translator (often Paul Muldoon) had put something-- when asked why she didn't translate her own work, as she is completely bilingual, she replied "I'm not a poet in English!" We are working on some of her work in my Irish class right now, and so I (along with most of my class) brought my copy of her book Spionáin Is Róiseanna ("Gooseberries and Roses") to be signed. When she opened it, it fell open to one of the pages I'd been translating, with glosses written on the lines above the words and translations in the margins. "Oh, that's just my clumsy attempt at translation," I said, embarrassed and worried that she'd actually try to read my gibberish. "No, I love it!" she exclaimed. "Writing in books is wonderful."