A ghost in the throat - Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A poetic and unusual encounter of autofiction and essay with excerpts of poetry

Doireann Ní Ghríofa (1981) is an acclaimed Irish bilingual poet who has already written several poet collections in both Irish (Gaeilge) and English. She debuted in prose with A ghost in the throat, published in 2020 with Tramp Press, which was praised highly in Ireland and internationally, and has won several prizes of which the An Post Irish Book of the Year award. 

In this poetic and unusual encounter of autofiction and essay with excerpts of poetry, a young mother and writer, Ní Ghríofa herself, has narrowly avoided a tragedy at the birth of her fourth child. Taken up by her many to do lists, she struggles with her repetitive daily routine. But then she re-discovers an epic Irish poem which she fell in love with during her schoolyears: the Lament for Art O’Leary or the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire and written by the 18^th century Irish noblewoman and poet, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, in which Eibhlín, also known as Nelly, mourns her husband, who she discovered in his own blood, murdered, from which she drank herself a few handfuls.

The story-telling young mother and writer is taken back to the past and gets obsessed by tracking down the life of Eibhlín Dubh, and doing a better job than all other literary investigators who tried this before her. She turns all archives around to find buried information and visits the places she knows where Eibhlín would have lived. She also re-translates the epic and orally inherited poem from folkloric origin in English as she wasn’t satisfied either with the English translations she had to deal with. She recognizes herself in this poet, and sees the parallels with her own life.

“This is a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn. Join in.”

All chapters besides the prologue start with a sentence from the Irish poem, both in Irish and English, and the entirety of the 5 parts and 36 verses is included at the end. It is an interesting asset although Irish is completely unrecognizable both in writing and in sound for most of us. The prologue sets the scene in which the book is written. The further chapters are very rhythmical and poetic, whether it’s about her routinely day-to day-life as about her investigation subject. Nevertheless, it takes a while to get accustomed to the story and the very calm speed of it. It is not as captivating from the beginning onwards.

The biggest part of the story is a beautifully written inner dialogue how the writer combines her house-work and chores with her research and writing. She writes her chores down on to do lists, which she deletes one after the other and tries to stick to them in an obsessive and kind of frustrating way. “If each day is a cluttered page, then I spend my hours scrubbing its letters. In this, my work is a deletion of a presence.”

At the same time, she tries to assemble a life from the fragments she finds about Eibhlín Dubh, which aren’t nearly enough as certainly in those times, female writers were not important enough to write about. It is a bit of a mystery that lingers on quietly, not as exciting as a detective story, but in fact with a slight touch of it.

As a poet herself, Ní Ghríofa shares her views on her 18^th century counterpart and her work, and finds the right words for it, like I couldn’t myself:  "My favourite element hovers beyond the text, in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas, where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried onwards to breathe elsewhere.”

The lives of both women are intertwined. Present and past are connected, Ní Ghríofa has flashbacks to her own youth, as well as day dreams about Eibhlín Dubh’s life, in which she tries to fill in a personal life based on historical facts. The mixture of history and personal life works wonderfully well.

In a passionate and honest way, Ní Ghríofa brings out a female voice and praises the role of women in history who have got forgotten as well as the joy and the sense of fulfilment that motherhood can give. This versus the urge for intellectual challenges and the self-esteem which can suffer at the same time. Her investigation into one of Irelands’ most important female poets makes her find herself again. 

Titel: A ghost in the throat
Auteur: Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Vertaler: Caroline Meijer 

Uitgevers: Tramp Press (2020), Van Oorschot (2021)

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