Doireann Ní Ghríofa wrote a very clever ode to literature ★★★★★

“This is a feminine text.” With those words opens A ghost in the throat by the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Her prose debut was acclaimed and won several awards, including the Irish Book Awards’ Book of the Year title.

The exuberant reactions are completely justified. Ní Ghríofa writes in an unprecedentedly sparkling, refreshing and poetic way about two women’s lives: her own and that of the 18th-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Her own life consists of endless lists. As a mother of four small children, she is pumping, vacuuming, washing, shopping, cooking and cleaning up all day long. However mind-numbing those activities may be, she aptly compares them to writing: ‘I make my work invisible while cleaning. When every day is a full page, I spend my hours scrubbing letters.’

To escape the endless rows of caregiving, she is working on a translation of one of the most famous poems in Irish literature: a mourning by the 18th-century housewife and poet Ní Chonaill. In it she sings about the death of her husband, who served as a soldier with the Hungarian hussars. After a personal conflict with the protestant authority figure Morris, he is outlawed and murdered. Ní Chonaill mourns her beloved companion and spews her bile on the murderer: ‘Morris, you bastard, may all misery descend upon you! / May bad blood pour out of your heart and out of your liver.”

White spots in the past

Ní Ghríofa becomes captivated by the life of her 18th-century ancestor: why was she forgotten when her literary legacy was so important? There is more at stake than just a historical fascination: the quest is also a way of reflecting on the history of female writing, the blanks in the past, the voices that have been brushed out of official historiography.

Ní Ghríofa’s own writing skills are also given new meaning: by immersing herself in the work and life of an 18th-century poet, she can create a life for herself, a universe beyond the endless brushing and tidying up.

As a bonus, at the end of the book, the reader is given the English translation of the mourning to which Ní Ghríofa devoted her spare time (and which was written in the original Irish language, Gaelic). In the Dutch edition, this is preceded by the translation by Caroline Meijer, who also translated the book as a whole. She deserves a great compliment: that the language of Ní Ghríofa speaks so gracefully to the Dutch reader is also to Meijer’s credit. The procession of invisibles from official literary history also includes all those translators who make other people’s voices sound in new languages.

A feminine text

At the end of her quest, Ní Ghríofa decides to invent a new vocabulary to avoid banal words like ‘sheets’, ‘mopping’ and ‘pumping’. Suddenly she knows which opening sentence she wants to start her book with: ‘This is a feminine text.’ And so we are back to the opening words of this work and its description of the household, a never-ending repetition exercise, which consists of folding clothes, washing, ironing, cooking and feeding. Although her feminine text dates from the 21st century, amazingly little has changed in all those centuries.

Yet Ní Ghríofa creates a creative space to escape from that endless, rhythmic pattern of household chores. She does this not only by bringing the voice of an 18th-century poet to life, but also with her own feminine text. By writing so poetically about prosaic subjects, she opposes the social conventions in which women writing have been silenced for centuries. Ní Ghríofa composed a very clever ode to literature and female writing, past and present.