'Tattoo:Tatú' - Questions & Answers

I recently put a review of the poetry collection 'Tattoo:Tatú' by Nuala Ní Chonchúir on the blog. The poet very kindly agreed to answer some questions I had about her writing.

You describe the Irish and English forms of the poems published in both languages as versions. Is there any one of the poems which you feel that both versions are equally strong or even better in the target language?
I think some worked better in their TL versions than others. I’m fond of ‘Tatú’, the title poem, in both languages. And I like the way the last two lines of ‘Ó’, have an internal rhyme and assonance that the English version only has in the last two words. That sort of happy accident is pleasing.
I think parts of some poems sound better in Irish, purely for the beauty of the language. And parts of some please me more in English because they say precisely what I was trying to say.

As a reader I am curious as to the original language of the bilingual poems even though I know that the idea is not to treat them as entities in themselves. At a guess I think that ‘Ó’ was written originally in Irish and ‘Body Haiku’ was written in English. Did you expect you readers to want to decipher the original?
I think the idea is to treat them as entities in themselves. I’d hope that someone who doesn’t read Irish would not feel they are losing out by not understanding the Irish, and vice versa. (Though there can hardly be anyone who has Irish who does not also have English…) Several of the poems have existed for years, and were individually published, in their original language version, because I hadn’t yet written their target language version.
‘Ó’ was actually written in English first, as was ‘Body Haiku’. So you were half right!
I don’t really think about readers, so I don’t mind how they come at the work. My publisher Arlen House came up with the idea (a partially bilingual collection) and I went along with it quite happily.

You chose to publish Irish and English versions of some of the poems. Did you experiment with taking this a stage further and actually writing hybrid bilingual poems? I ask this because your foreword was written with the assumption that the reader understood both languages.
It was the publisher who chose the format of the collection and who asked me to make the foreword in Irish and English. I liked their suggestions; it seemed an interesting way to do a book. I’m not a big fan of overly straightforward writings.
The poems were written as they emerged and not with a collection in mind, so I wasn’t writing them for the book.
I haven’t written macaronic (dual language) poems in any big way, though I have experimented with it. I will unapologetically throw in the odd word in Irish or French and I will not gloss it. I cannot stand poems that have asterixes and footnotes. Readers should be able to cope with one or two words in a different language, which they can easily deduce from the context, or they can go to the dictionary. As I say, I’m not much in the business of thinking about readers as I write; I write for the love of it.
I guess a glossary at the back of a book can be useful; personally I usually only find the glossary when I have finished reading a book.

I very much enjoyed the “Body Haiku” poems. Did the poem come about because you wanted to explore the haiku form or did it come to you naturally in this way?
I practice brevity when I write: I’m a cutter not an adder, so I enjoy working in short forms: haiku, short lyrics and – in fiction – sometimes flash fiction. I think I started ‘Body Haiku’ as a lyric and noticed it was really very, very short and concise, so I tried it out as a haiku until I was happy with it. A haiku with two verses, mind you. It was written for my fiancé; much of this book sprung from being in love with him.

Many of your poems refer to people whom the reader may not know anything about. Is there a reason that you did not provide footnotes or references?
See the answer to the third question above!! I think you can give a concise epigraph when needed but, for myself, I find footnoting on poems really irritating. It is rarely needed. As readers we need to be willing to do a little of the work. I also think it’s possible to enjoy a poem without understanding or knowing everything.

Was the poem “Quarry Men, Dublin 1868” referring to a specific incident in a Dublin quarry? I searched on the Internet but I couldn’t find anything.
My sister Nessa wrote a scholarly local history of our hometown – Palmerstown, County Dublin – before she died. My parents got the book published. The poem refers to an incident in her history book that took place in a quarry behind our house, where we played as kids. I thought it was such a sad but typical act of destruction – workmen breaking open a small tomb and smashing up the bones. The poem is also a metaphor for the continued destruction of our national heritage by various louts, most notably the Irish government. The road through Tara – seat of kings – being a particularly jaw-dropping example of this.

The poetry in memory of your sister is very moving. Do you find it difficult to release such personal writing into the public domain?
The poems honour Nessa, so I’m glad they are out there. ‘Nessa as Frida’ is, I hope, a lighthearted look at her funeral that she would have approved of. She was a visual artist too, so it wasn’t just that she looked like Frida Kahlo – they were in the same profession.
It was difficult to read the poems aloud at readings soon after Nessa died, as losing her was still so raw. I still miss her daily, six years later, and depending on how strong that missing is, it can still be hard to read the poems. So, sometimes I avoid doing them at readings.

Your sexual poetry is very enjoyable because it is explicit but not pornographic; it is a celebration of sexuality. Is this the domain in which you find the most inspiration as a poet? I ask this because your collection is very broad ranging but this domain really springs out.
I think that for a woman reader it can great to find poems about sex that are not from a man’s point of view. I love Eavan Boland’s orgasm poem ‘Solitary’, and Máighréad Medhbh’s playful and seriously sexy writing. Some male poets, like Patrick Cotter, write in a way where it’s clear that they value women. Gone are the days, I hope, of woman as symbol or vessel in poetry.
I was newly in love with Finbar, to whom the book is dedicated, when I started to write those poems and I deliberately chose many of the love poems for the bilingual section of the book, because the publisher wanted that part to appear first. I also started and ended the English-only section of the book with poems about him, to give a nice feeling of unity to the collection.
I’m not sure if love and the sexual domain are where I find the most inspiration; a lot of my work is informed by visual art, and women’s place in history and in society today. But the body and love are certainly to the forefront as part of that.
The Cork poet Billy Ramsell says that all love poems are really about the poet. I think he may have a point!

Finally, I know that you have published many short stories so I wondered how being a poet interacts with being a short story writer. Do you go out of your way to write poems over a period of time or do they come naturally as part of the process of writing in other forms?
The whole writing process is fluid. It changes over time. One year I may write little but fiction, the next I might write poems exclusively for months. These changes aren’t always welcome but I have had to learn to go with them.
Short fiction is my true passion. It excites me like no other writing. It’s what I’d like to be writing all the time and I read it endlessly. I have two collections published, also with Arlen House, and I am working on more stories.
I do like the idea of sitting down specifically to write a collection of poetry but, to me, it seems like a forced way of approaching writing.
I sit at my desk every day when my children are at school and I write, blog, do reviews and edit my work. I don’t choose what to write, something – a line or an image or a voice – just pops into my head and I go with it, to see if it’s going to happen, or where it will lead me. That’s the joy of writing – not knowing where you might end up.