17 - ‘No misprints in this work’: the poetic ‘translations’ of Medbh McGuckian and Frank Kuppner

Summary

Little would seem to unite Medbh McGuckian's dislocated lyricism with the mock epigrams and poetic parodies of Frank Kuppner. Yet, as well as being close contemporaries, both poets have occupied, in their respective Northern Ireland and Scotland, positions on the outer rim of the established poets of their generation; both combine formalism with avant-garde or experimental sensibilities, and both have perhaps experienced a falling-off of their readership in recent years. This, in turn, may be related to a certain unco-operative quality which the poets also share. Questions were raised about their audiences' patience long before either really put it to the test. James Simmons famously went so far as to suggest that McGuckian's poems were ‘a salutary joke by one who hates the excesses of reviewers or literary critics or bad poetry and knows she can elicit rave reviews by writing an alluring sort of nonsense’; Robert Crawford foresaw diminishing returns to Kuppner's tricks and repetitions, and suggested: ‘For some readers, Kuppner's work proves too obsessively repetitive, tries too hard to show off.’ In addition to examining these traits, this chapter will argue that Frank Kuppner and Medbh McGuckian also repeatedly present poetry as a kind of translation. I will sketch the different ways in which their ‘translations’ work, and suggest briefly what this insistence on literary mediation might be intended to keep at bay.