Irish poetry has often inhabited a condition of ontological doubleness. Existing between two languages allows for both stereophonic and transgressive qualities not available on the monoglot plane. The poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, best known from bilingually presented volumes, has benefited hugely from this paradigm, as it enters into dialogue with a host of translators including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian and Paul Muldoon. Permeability and slipping across boundaries becomes an enabling aesthetic. The work of Celia de Fréine too engages with translation to destabilise hierarchical binaries, and challenge deep-rooted concepts of originals and translations in the reception of the Irish poem. The work of younger poets, such as Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, and Aifric Mac Aodha, builds on the achievements of these writers, while engaging with the rapidly changing linguistic environment (and poetic culture) of Ireland today.

Modern women poets writing in the Irish language occupy a unique place, historically, between the vibrancy of the Irish folk tradition and the frequently encountered sense that they are lonely workers in a dying language. Their place in the canon of modern Irish poetry thus differs subtly from that of writers in English, but their contribution to the tradition has nevertheless been central. In mid-century, Máire Mhac an tSaoi writes poems of startling modernity and outspokenness at a time of proverbial cultural conservatism, belying conventional identifications of the language with patriarchy and puritanism. The emergence of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Biddy Jenkinson in the 1980s marked another dramatic moment. In a satirical poem, Jenkinson inverts the conventions of the aisling and speaks from the position of the female apparition, or embodiment of the nation. In both Jenkinson’s and Ní Dhomhnaill’s work what was static comes unexpectedly to life, bristling with submerged, unruly energy. Their contemporary successors, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh and Aifric Mac Aodha, have ensured that women remain in the forefront of the contemporary tradition.

Women have paid a historically high price under the patriarchal Irish Catholic church. The wrongs of the church do not detract, however, from the rich vein of poems written by Irish women informed by Catholic spirituality. Traditionally, women have been scapegoats for the fallout from patriarchal theocracy, and any resistance has begun with acts of bodily reclamation. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill reaches into Celtic tradition for paradigms of female empowerment that overturn more recent misogynistic palimpsests, and Medbh McGuckian filters an anti-colonial poetics through an engagement with her radical and ecstatic strain of Catholic spirituality, re-envisioning the leaders of the 1798 rebellion as ‘feminine Christs’. Earlier women poets engaging with religious material have fallen into neglect – Katharine Tynan’s Catholicism is often cited in evidence against her – and large bodies of work now pass unnoticed, such as the heavily female contributions to the Jesuit-edited The Irish Monthly. Restoring their work to visibility, and that of more recent writers such as Eithne Strong and Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, helps us read the work of Ní Dhomhnaill and McGuckian in a more informed and spiritually literate context.

More than sixty years after its initial publication in Irish, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s epic novel Cré na Cille appeared in an English translation: two of them, in fact – each published within a year of the other and by the same publisher, Yale University Press. This chapter takes this unusual circumstance as a stimulus to investigate the wider literary landscape and to give a nuanced overview of pertinent issues and emerging trends in Irish-language literature. Special attention is given to the role of translation, both to and from Irish, in the publication, mediation, and reception of Irish-language literature. Although much is often made of the literary afterlives of Irish-language texts in English, the author contends that these issues are best examined and understood in a multilingual context.