The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, academic and musician on life in Belfast during the Troubles, his love of the Irish language and moving to the USOne of the interesting and great things about being a human being is that we adapt and we can get used to almost anything. That is also one of the most terrifying things about it. I lived in.
My mother was well educated; she’d gone to teacher training in Belfast. But my dad, a market gardener, was a guy who could barely write his own name. He had gone out as a 12- or 13-year-old to be hired as a servant boy at a hiring fair; it was a kind of peasant life working with horses. They worked well together as a couple. The only time I ever really saw them getting upset with each other was when they tried to wallpaper a ceiling.
The first poems of mine that appeared in print were in Irish. At that point, my Irish was quite good, in many ways better than my English. That’s no longer the case so I occasionally go back to the Gaeltacht to do a refresher course. I’m very interested in literature in Irish. I still try out a bit of translation from old Irish and I still translate other poets, or try to.