Gerardo Gambolini, poet and translator, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1955. He has translated Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland, and is currently working on both a selection of short stories by John McGahern and an anthology of Irish poets.


Tell us something about the background to your visit to Ireland.

I met Peter Sirr in Argentina during his visit here in 1999, when he participated in a series of literary activities organized by the local Irish community in the city of Rosario. As a part of these activities, Jorge Fondebrider and I were giving a sort of informative course on Irish modern poetry, as we had just published an anthology of Irish poetry in the 20th century, published by the Terra Publishing Centre.

When in 2004 the Irish ambassador at that time, Kenneth Thompson, told us about the ILE bursary programme for translators, we applied and proposed to translate a selection of poems by Peter, because we feel that he is a prominent and technically gifted poet of a very diverse and talented generation. In my personal experience, my stay in Dublin and the possibility of asking the poet himself to clear up the queries on his work (a possibility that I barefacedly made use of, and that I am still taking advantage of through the e-mail!!), was really enriching. There’s always a nuance or a point you cannot expect to grasp without the writer’s own explanation. There’s always a detail you cannot even expect to notice without the voice and the gesture of the poet.

What were your impressions of Dublin?

In a way, I feel my visit to Dublin meant not only to work on this particular translation, but on a more comprehensive sort of translation of my own previous ideas and expectations about Ireland. It was an absorbing game of confirmation, questioning and surprise. Like a longtime delayed puzzle, after a strange fidelity to a culture different from the one of my own, I finally started to put together at least a few pieces, relating faces to names I knew only through books, recognizing streets, buildings, bridges, or places suddenly freed from literature. Or more connected with it than ever.

There was just enough time to get an overview of the literary scene in Dublin, but I was certainly impressed by the solid education shown by everybody in all the conversations I witnessed or was involved in. In this respect, I find the Irish writer has an amazing level of reflection on his writing and its historical coordinates, which is not such a common fact in some other latitudes. As an objection, perhaps it could be said that there’s the risk of a collateral damage in an inward-looking attitude that, in a sense, well could be both nurturing and frivolous at the same time. I suppose the Ireland which justifiedly seduces the foreign reader and the Ireland from which Joyce and Beckett escaped keep on coexisting.