The Water Horse - Tapa blanda

Crossing easily the borders between the mythic and the everyday, writing familiarly of the gods of classical times or ancient Ireland and the household gods of our own age, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill reminds us that the power of myth lies in local and personal resurrections, such as the imaginary opening of her own great-grandmother’s tomb, but also, more sinisterly, as modern-day reenactments of Queen Medbh’s bloody cattle raids in sectarian reprisals. In Irish and English; translated by Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is one of the few women Irish poets who writes exclusively in Irish and has been a major influence in revitalizing the Irish language in modern poetry. Born in Lancastershire, England in 1952, Ní Dhomhnaill moved to Ireland at age five, growing up in the Irish-speaking areas of West Kerry and Tipperary. She studied Irish and English at University College in Cork, where she later taught these subjects. She currently resides in Dublin with her husband, Turkish geologist Dogan Leflef, and they previously lived abroad in Turkey and Holland for seven years. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has held the Burns Chair of Irish Studies at Boston College, the Humboldt Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, and the Naughton Fellow of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. She was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry from 2001?2004. She is the recipient of several other awards including the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the Seán Ó Ríordáin Award, which she won for all four of her Irish poetry collections. She has also written plays in Irish, and her work has been translated into French, German, Polish, Italian, Norwegian, Estonian, Japanese, and English.