Rody Gorman’s multilingual version of Buile Shuibhne, SWEENEY, AN INTERTONGUING, in English, Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic with lingua gadelica, phonemic pieces and round-trip translations, will be published by Francis Boutle Publishers in April 2023.
An utterly extraordinary work … The variety, energy and invention is dazzling – Robert Macfarlane
An extraordinary and wonderful piece of writing … an extraordinary bridge between two languages … a pièce de résistance – Sara Maitland
Hugely ambitious … magnificent subversion … A very important contribution to the English language … a milestone and a work of exceptional originality based on the Gaelic tradition – Meg Bateman
A complete masterpiece – John Glenday
An extraodinary thing – Philip Gross
A massive undertaking of both scholarship and poetry … Gorman’s humour, divagations, love of language (becoming almost stream of consciousness in a subversion of Joyce) cannot fail to enthuse and excite any reader … This may well be Gorman’s masterpiece – HI-Arts Assessor
Rody Gorman’s Suibhne: An Intertonguing is hugely ambitious, and utterly sui generis. It combines nods to all the previous versions of the myth of Sweeney with an idiosyncratic encyclopaedia of contemporary references in a compulsive frenzy of languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Englishes and Sweeneyese jostle against each other, rubbing each other’s barks up entirely the wrong trees. There are moments of high comedy, and of poignant loss; but always, just as you think you have the measure of the book, the poems – and Sweeney himself – flit off, onto another branch, another language, in another airtheightdirection. This is a masterly sequence of poems – Peter MacKay
