“... eye’ fixed on ‘the bright days of her youth’, the seanbhean devotes herself in Ciaran Carson’s 1990 translation to ‘lamenting all the halcyon monotony of that pluperfect time’. Ní Dhomhnaill’s quarrel with this figure is not just that in the past men were hanged and ‘mowed down / In their hundreds’ when they answered her imperious ...”