Chapter 15 - Biddy Jenkinson

Summary

Although a major Irish-language poet, Biddy Jenkinson is perhaps best known for forbidding the translation of her work into English, calling her decision ‘a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland’. Yet the picture that emerges from her work is anything but that of a Gaelic puritan. Jenkinson’s world is not one of loss and lamentation for a vanished past, but of vibrant immersion in mythopoeia of sex, myth, and monstrosity. In her work on County Wicklow, where she has long been resident, she excavates colonial history, exploring the points of connection between the colonial Pale and its wild Gaelic Other. In her work on the cannibal hag figure Mis, she vividly recuperates feminine monstrosity as a poetic force to be reckoned with. The linguistic energy of Jenkinson’s work combined with the obscurity it inhabits, as difficult and scholarly work (though often very funny too), makes her an exemplary representative of the submerged Gaelic bardic tradition.