04/08/2026
🎻 Lá a hAon: On a Paper Clip by Nick Laird 🎻
Read the poem and translation using the link in our bio, or find a copy of the pamphlet in the Seamus Heaney Centre.
Translator’s note by Cian Dunne:
The final two lines of this poem: ‘and just sufficient tension/to hold the poems together’, arriving in the opener of Up Late, prime us for the delicate considerations of the poems which are to follow. Starting out with a similar purpose, I seek to present the question of whether this translation, and those to follow over the course of the week, can transport and contain the weight of such inherent tensions. What can be gained in a given translation that may offset the realities of an inevitable loss?
This in mind, rather than choosing to translate the title’s ‘On’ in the straightforward sense of ‘about’, or ‘concerning,’ I choose ‘Faoi’ – also and more often used to mean ‘under.’ In this sense, I try to introduce the aforementioned question via the immediacy of the poem’s title: the sense of the paper clip’s, and the poem’s, potentially deceptive weight. Additionally, introducing the possibility for translation being found located a level beneath, or on the contrary, impressing its own weight upon the original poem, in some kind of roundabout way.
In terms of word choices, an ‘inflection’ suggested to me the linguistic varieties of such – voice modulation (athrú tuine) or a grammatical inflection (infhilleadh). As it was, I kept to a more stringently mathematical, geometrical sense (‘athchasadh’). Similarly, when it comes to the ‘sufficient tension’, I was tempted by the notion of a more encompassing distance or discrepancy (neamhréir) – whether between languages, modes, or practices. I might have committed to these possibilities, if I did not feel they would too far fray the carefully arranged seams as to be deemed unseemly. That they may prove míchuí (improper) instead of appropriate or ‘correct’/‘cuí’.
