Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

The first words got polluted

Like the river water in the morning

Flowing with the dirt

Of blurbs and the front pages.^87

As the Irish poet transforms Romanian into English, the translation
undermines notions of linguistic, racial or cultural purity since as with
the English corruption of Irish, the ëfirst words got pollutedí.
The heterogeneous origin challenges a ëmetaphysics of presenceí
which, in racial terms, overthrows the assumed unity of colonial
representation with its definition of self/other. Heterogeneity also
undermines territorial arguments such as ëI was here before youí,
noticing that identity and racial origins are entangled rather than
straightforward: there is no longer a simple origin. At a biographical
level, Heaneyís maternal ancestor, a Protestant who converted to
Catholicism, becomes an example of the heterogeneous origin. As
Corcoran notices in relation to the poem ëThe Other Sideí, ëthe
ìmotherís sideî was, once, ìthe other sideî too.í^88 The dispersed
origin has impact for deep-rooted colonial and nationalist historical
narratives. Linguistic translation between cultures offers a theory of
destabilization and critiques itself as a programme of non-originary
translation as it is committed to the perpetual project of translation.^89
Thomas Docherty notices how Heaneyís poetry sees things apart
from consensus-based notions of truth. Moving from the postmodern
to post-colonial endeavours,^90 Docherty describes Heaneyís poetic
vision as foregrounding a politics of oppression and seeing between or
beyond the lines to a space where there ëlies political hope for those
interested in emancipation from consensus-based notions of truth,
from ideologyí.^91 Corkeryís notion of the Irish community or Irish
consciousness is abandoned, along with ideals of collective dem-
onstration and the ability or desirability of ëthe peopleí to enforce
political change. Instead, allegiance to the ëconsensusí of an imagined

87 Heaney, ëFirst Wordsí, The Spirit Level, p.38.
88 Corcoran, p.152.
89 Cf. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and
the Colonial Context (California: University Press, 1992), p.44.
90 Cf. Chapter on ëPostmodernism and the Post-Colonialí, Postmodernism: A
Reader, ed., Thomas Docherty (London: Harvester, 1993).
91 Docherty, Alterities (Oxford: University Press, 1996), pp.34ñ5.