TRANSLATION AND THE EVERYDAY: DUAL TEMPORALITIES IN DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA’S A GHOST IN THE THROAT

Abstract

Translation and the Everyday: Dual Temporalities in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020) is a genre-defying memoir that follows the author’s quest to recover the lost traces of an eighteenth-century Irish poet, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, while re/translating her caoineadh – the keen composed for her murdered husband. This work of historical recovery unfolds within the quotidian rhythms of the narrator’s everyday life, structured by domestic routines and maternal labour. This article is an attempt to reread the dual temporality of Ní Ghríofa’s work with a particular focus on translation in its relation to the everyday as a site of mediation. As an act unfolding within the maternal everyday temporality, translation in A Ghost in the Throat transforms this subjective time into an accumulative, archival temporality marked by return, revision, and interpretive labour. It is shown that this layered temporality is articulated through a network of symbolic correspondences between female corporeality and textual production, as well as between the domestic space of the everyday and the textual space of historically coded writing. In doing so, the article aims to demonstrate how Ní Ghríofa deploys translation as an organizing principle in her work, situating it as an intersubjective practice that mediates between past and present, private and public, and material and textual forms of transmission.

Article history: Received 01 May 2026; Revised 15 June 2026; Accepted 28 June 2026; Available online 30 September 2026; Available print 30 September 2026.