LOUIS DE PAOR:

Cork poet Louis de Paor tells Alan O’Riordan how he thinks some of the richness of our cultural heritage can get lost in translation

CAN a poem ever really be translated? RS Thomas likens poetic translation to kissing through a handkerchief, while for minority languages — such as Irish — there is the problem of translation subsuming the original, damaging the very linguistic diversity that a poem in Irish implicitly celebrates.

The Cork poet Louis de Paor covers this ground in the introduction to his latest volume, The Brindled Cat and The Nightingale’s Tongue, before positing his own solution: deferral. He writes that he prefers his poems to have a life in Irish before they are translated. “The more Irish language readers read in Irish, without the life support of English, the more they are attuned to the possibilities of the language,” he says.