Look Back to Look Forward E-Book

Frank O'Connor

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

While Frank O'Connor was known primarily as one of Ireland's finest short-story writers, he was also an accomplished translator. In the long line of Irish writers given to translating poems in Irish into poems written in English – a tradition stretching back at least as far as Jonathan Swift – he stands out above all the rest. Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s, O'Connor published 121 translations that give voice to the full range of this centuries-old tradition. Collected here in full for the first time, O'Connor's work shows an uncanny aptitude for carrying over into English verse many of the riches to be found in the originals – the ancient voice of the Hag of Beare lamenting her decline into old age; the voices of the early monks describing the Irish landscape, Irish weather, their religious faith, and, in at least one instance, their cat; the voice of Hugh O'Rourke's wife torn between loyalty to her husband and a rising desire for her seducer. All these voices haunted O'Connor throughout his career, whatever else he was doing. The collection includes the Irish-language sources for all 121 translations along with literal translations, enabling the reader to see what O'Connor started from. O'Connor's translations sprang from a compulsive desire to breathe life into Ireland's past, to 'Look Back to Look Forward,' as he once put it; for him the Irish-language tradition was not for scholars and archives alone, but formed a living body of work vitally relevant to an Ireland that seemed puzzlingly indifferent to it. Thanks to O'Connor's profound love of his country's language and its rich, literary subsoil – 'a literature of which no Irishman need feel ashamed', he once said – these voices from Ireland's past can still be heard. Strikingly modern in tone, they conjoin flesh and spirit, the sacred and the secular, in a way that speaks to humankind.

Leseprobe

‘LOOK BACK TO LOOK FORWARD’

Charcoal sketch of Frank O’Connor by George Russell (Æ), 1930 Copyright of the Frank O’Connor estate

‘LOOK BACK TO LOOK FORWARD’

FRANK O’CONNOR’S COMPLETE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE IRISH

EDITED BY

GREGORY A. SCHIRMER

THE LILLIPUT PRESS Dublin

For Jane

First published 2023 by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

62–63 Sitric Road

Dublin 7, Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Text copyright © The Estate of Frank O’Connor and Gregory A. Schirmer 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior permission of the publisher.

A Cip record for this publication is available from The British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978 1 84351 836 5

eISBN 978 1 84351 880 8

The Lilliput Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council /An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Set in 11.5pt on 15.5pt Adobe Jenson Pro by Marsha Swan and Niall McCormack.

Printed in Poland by Drukarnia Skleniarz.

Contents

Introduction

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

TEXTS OF O’CONNOR’S TRANSLATIONS

Note on texts of O’Connor’s translations

The Wild Bird’s Nest: Poems from the Irish (1932)

The Old Woman of Beare Regrets Lost Youth

Lullaby of Adventurous Love

The Starkness of Earth

Poet and Priest

Autumn (Seathrún Céitinn)

A Learned Mistress

Love and Hate

Prayer for the Speedy End of Three Great Misfortunes

In Praise of an Indefatigable Liar

The Student

The Churls (Dáibhí Ó Bruadair)

Reverie at Dawn (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille)

A Grey Eye Weeping (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille)

A Sleepless Night (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille)

Last Lines (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille)

Kilcash

The Lament for Art O’Leary (Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill)

Three Old Brothers and Other Poems (1936)

The Praise of Fiunn

Prayer at Dawn (Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha)

Lords and Commons: Translations from the Irish (1938)

The Song of the Heads

Oisin

Carroll’s Sword

Storm at Sea

May

The Hermit’s Song

Three Cows

John Johnston (Tadhg Ruadh Ó Conchobhair)

Hugh Maguire (Eochaidh Ó hEódhusa)

Death

I Shall Not Die

Clancarty (Domhnaill Mac Carthaigh)

To a Boy

Childless (Giollabrighde Albanach Mac Conmidhe)

Mistresses

Christmas Night (Aodh Mac Aingil)

Lament for the Woodlands

Sarsfield

How Well for the Birds

The Orphan

County Mayo (Antoine Raiftearaí)

The Journeyman

Song of Repentance (Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin)

Stray Verses: Love like heat and cold

Stray Verses: A young man at his father’s fire

Stray Verses: ’Tis unknown

Stray Verses: Conor the king

Stray Verses: ’Tis my bitter grief the day doesn’t last a year

Stray Verses: The bird that shouts from the willow

Stray Verses: A little bird

The Fountain of Magic (1939)

The Downfall of Heathendom

Winter

Autumn

A Jealous Man

She Is My Dear

Fathers and Children

The Lament for Yellow-Haired Donogh

The Midnight Court: A Rhythmical Bacchanalia from the Irish of Bryan Merryman (1945)

Leinster, Munster and Connaught (1950)

The Scholar and the Cat

The Viking Terror

To the Blacksmith with a Spade (Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin)

I am Raftery the poet (Antoine Raiftearaí)

An Anthology of Irish Literature (1954)

The Drowning of Conaing

Kings, Lords, and Commons: Irish Poems from the Seventh Century to the Nineteenth Century (1959)

The Hermitage

A Prayer for Recollection

The Priest Rediscovers His Psalm-Book (Máel-Ísu ua Brolchain)

The Open Door

A Word of Warning

Scholars

The Sweetness of Nature

Winter

The Sea

Generosity

The King of Connacht

The End of Clonmacnoise

Murrough[pviii] Defeats the Danes, 994

Liadain

Kiss

The Goldsmith’s Wife

No Names

All Gold

Exile

Retirement

A Man of Experience (Laoiseach Mac an Bhaird)

The Vanished Night (Niall Mór Mac Muireadhaigh)

To the Lady with a Book

To Thomas Costello at the Wars

Brightness of Brightness (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille)

Hope

Slievenamon

Donal Ogue

Lad of the Curly Locks

Mary Hynes (Antoine Raiftearaí)

Endpiece

The Little Monasteries: Translations from Irish Poetry Mainly of the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries (1963)

The Seasons

In the Country

The Old Poet

The Thirsty Poet

The Ex-Poet

The Angry Poet

Ordeal by Cohabitation

Advice to Lovers (Scandlán Mór)

The Dead Lover

On the Death of His Wife (Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh)

Women (Riocard de Búrc)

A History of Love

I Am Stretched on Your Grave

The Nun of Beare

Colum Cille

Tears

Eve

Praise

The Last Victory

A Short History of Irish Literature: A Backward Look (1967)

Let me, while in Colum’s care

When he was only five years old

There is one

The Last Raid (1381) (Gerald Fitzgerald)

Who’s out there in the night

Note on Irish-language sources and literal translations

Irish-language sources and literal translations

Appendix: Translations in journals not republished

The Madman

The Stars Are Astand

The Last Call Up

The Widower’s Bed (a.d. 1392) (Gerald Fitzgerald)

Bibliography

Index of O’Connor’s translations by first line

Index of O’Connor’s translations by title

Index of Irish-language sources by first line

Index of Irish-language sources by title

Index of Irish-language sources by author

Introduction

In the long line of Irish writers given to translating poems written in Irish into poems written in English – a tradition stretching back at least as far as Jonathan Swift and including such notable figures as Charlotte Brooke, James Clarence Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, Douglas Hyde, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Hartnett, and Seamus Heaney – the one who stands out above them all is Frank O’Connor. Between the mid–1920s and the mid–1960s, O’Connor published 121 translations that give voice to the full range of the centuries-old tradition of poetry in Irish, and do so with an uncanny aptitude for carrying over into English verse many of the riches to be found there – the intricate poetic forms, the compelling voices and characters, the precisely expressed affinity for the natural world, the candid and unsentimental representation of love and sexuality, and a full exploration of what it means to be Irish.1 O’Connor’s translations spring from a nearly compulsive desire to breathe life into Ireland’s past, to ‘look back to look forward,’ as he once put it; 2 for O’Connor, the Irish-language tradition was, potentially anyway, not moribund, and not a matter for scholars and archives alone, but a living body of work that was of serious, even urgent, relevance to an Ireland that seemed increasingly and puzzlingly indifferent to it.

Although O’Connor is known primarily, and rightly, as one of the most accomplished short-story writers in English, translation from the Irish occupied a central place in his imaginative life throughout his career. He published his first translation in George Russell’s The Irish Statesman in 1925, when he was twenty-one, and his last collection of translations, The Little Monasteries, appeared in 1963, just three years before his death. In all, there are five translation collections as well as translations published in journals and newspapers and others included in the various books about Ireland that he wrote, edited, or contributed to. O’Connor’s versions of three major poems in the Irish-language tradition – ‘Caillech Bérri’ (‘The Hag of Beare’), written in the eighth or ninth century; Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s eighteenth-century elegy ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ (‘Lament for Art O’Leary’), and Brian Merriman’s earthy, irreverent satire Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court), also written in the eighteenth century – would insure his place as a consummate figure in the history of poetic translation from the Irish even if he’d translated nothing else.

O’Connor was particularly partial to the poetry written in Old and Middle Irish between the eighth century and the twelfth. Of the 121 poetic translations he published, sixty come from this period, and his versions of monastic religious poems, as well as lyrics about landscape and weather, laments over the disappearance of Ireland’s pagan culture under pressure from Christianity and refreshingly uninhibited love poems echo with remarkable sensitivity the direct, spare, vigorous voices that characterize much of this early poetry, as well as the complex prosody that makes those voices sing.

O’Connor was equally at home in the classical Irish period, stretching from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and including much of the poetry associated with the bardic schools. Although O’Connor found some of this poetry overly concerned with formal matters, the age was rich in dramatic monologues, and these played to O’Connor’s gift, so evident in his short stories, for creating multi-faceted characters and absorbing dramatic situations through narrative voice and dialogue. Some of O’Connor’s most convincing translations, especially those having to do with love and sexual desire, are versions of poems written in this period.

O’Connor had little time for the most substantial poet writing in Irish in the seventeenth century, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair – he once said Ó Bruadair was ‘as cantankerous a specimen of the traditionalist as ever handled a pen’3 – but he was far more sympathetic to the work of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, the other major poet who, writing in Ó Bruadair’s wake, bore witness to the destruction of Gaelic culture in the seventeenth century. O’Connor translated five of Ó Rathaille’s poems – more than of any other author – and those five translations were good enough, according to the contemporary poet Michael Hartnett, to make O’Connor ‘the voice of Ó Rathaille for my generation’.4

The same distrust of hierarchy, including a Gaelic one, that drove O’Connor away from Ó Bruadair led him to embrace Irish-language poetry rooted in the folk tradition. O’Connor once said a poem written by an ordinary soldier about the popular Jacobite leader Patrick Sarsfield marked the emergence of the modern Irish-language poem because it was written in ‘the voice of the plain people of Ireland, left without leaders or masters’.5 That voice, which can be heard in many of O’Connor’s short stories, sounds with conviction and authenticity in translations such as ‘Sarsfield’, ‘The Lament for Yellow-haired Donough’, ‘Donal Ogue’, and in O’Connor’s versions of several poems by Antoine Raiftearaí (Antony Raftery).

That Raiftearaí, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, is the most recent poet on the list of those O’Connor translated says much about O’Connor’s motives for translating poetry written in Irish. O’Connor had no interest in translating Irish-language poets who were his contemporaries, although figures like Máirtín Ó Direán and Seán Ó Ríordáin had established themselves as highly accomplished poets by the time O’Connor was working on his translations. For O’Connor, translating from the Irish was about recovering the past, not about building bridges between contemporary writing in Irish and contemporary writing in English.

He never tired of preaching to me and to others like me, [the Irish-language scholar Daniel Binchy remembers] that it was the duty of our generation, the last generation to have had the chance of learning the language from monoglot native speakers, to collect all the traditional material – poems, sagas, laws, homilies and the rest – and to transmit it to posterity, properly edited and translated’.6

And the more his contemporaries seemed indifferent to the language itself – in an essay published in 1934, O’Connor describes Irish as ‘a beautiful language eminently suited to the purposes of literature, but no one seems to have the least desire to use it except those with nothing to say’7 – the more he was determined that they should be given some notion of the glories to be found in it.8

There are more specific reasons for O’Connor’s faith in the principle‘look back to look forward’. O’Connor saw Ireland in the decades following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 as having betrayed the revolutionary vision of his generation. In his memoir An Only Child, he says the revolutionaries – and O’Connor fought on the anti-Treaty side during the Civil War – failed to see that ‘what we were bringing about was a new Establishment of Church and State in which imagination would play no part, and young men and women would emigrate to the ends of the earth, not because the country was poor, but because it was mediocre’.9 That mediocrity fed, he believed, on an ignorance of the true nature of Ireland’s cultural past. For O’Connor, attempts by political, cultural, and religious leaders – unin-formed at best, disgraceful at worst – to bring the Irish-language tradition into some kind of easy congruence with the oppressive, puritanical values of the modern Irish Catholic Church as a way of constructing a distinctive Irish identity, could best be exposed for the folly that it was through an under-standing of what the native tradition was actually like, an understanding that sensitive, informed translation could best provide.

O’Connor’s commitment to translation from the Irish was also inspired by aesthetic concerns. Despite his friendship with W.B. Yeats and George Russell, O’Connor was extremely sceptical about the ways in which the Irish literary revival, especially in its early years, tended to read the tradition of writing in Irish through the lens of romanticism, and English romanticism at that. O’Connor’s tireless campaign to make available in English the poetry written in Irish across more than ten centuries was intended, in part at least, to discredit any tendency to paint that generally unromantic body of work with the purple shades of the Celtic Twilight. At least one of O’Connor’s early readers got the point; in reviewing The Wild Bird’s Nest (1932), Sean O’Faolain said of his fellow-Corkman’s translations, ‘nothing could be more remote from the attraction of [Yeats’s] “The Wanderings of Oisin”,’ adding, ‘Here is no charm of mellifluous names or delicate mythology … This poet of the latest generation has been drawn mainly by the humanity of his forbears.’10

If there are reasons enough to explain why O’Connor gave so much of his time to translation, the question as to how he did it, how he managed to make himself into Ireland’s premier poetic translator from the Irish, is far harder to answer. Growing up poor on the north side of Cork City with a mother who had no Irish and an often-absent father who was in the Munster Fusiliers and an enthusiast of all things British, Michael O’Donovan (Frank O’Connor was a nom de plume) was arguably as far removed from the life of a native speaker brought up in the Gaeltacht as it was possible to be. He acquired Irish in an irregular, not to say haphazard, way. On his first day at St Patrick’s Boys Primary School, when he was ten years old, his substi-tute teacher, Daniel Corkery, wrote on the blackboard some words in Irish, a language, O’Connor says,‘we had never even heard of ’.11 When he went home, he discovered that his mother knew nothing of it, but that his grandmother on his father’s side, who was living with the family at the time, was in fact a native speaker. From that point on, O’Connor set out to learn the language in any way he could, with Corkery encouraging and inspiring him.

O’Connor later came to see Corkery as too narrow in his literary opinions – Corkery recognized as genuinely Irish only that literature written in Irish– and a bit too unbending in his nationalist convictions. But through his formative years, O’Connor worshipped his mentor, imitating the way he spoke, even the way he walked. ‘I was not particularly attracted to women or girls,’ he says in An Only Child, ‘but in the absence of a father who answered my needs, I developed fierce passions for middle-aged men, and Corkery was my first and greatest love.’12 On Corkery’s advice, O’Connor enrolled in classes in Irish at the Gaelic League Hall in Cork, and later attended lectures there.

Although O’Connor left school at the age of thirteen, he didn’t give up on his efforts to learn Irish. Even as a young boy, he thought of himself more as a would-be translator than as a writer:

All I could believe in was words, and I clung to them frantically. I would read some word like ‘unsophisticated’ and at once I would want to know what the Irish equivalent was. In those days I didn’t even ask to be a writer; a much simpler form of transmutation would have satisfied me. All I wanted was to translate, to feel the unfamiliar become familiar, the familiar take on all the mystery of some dark foreign face I had just glimpsed on the quays.13

O’Connor’s ambitions and self-confidence knew no bounds in his adolescent years. He published in the Sunday Independent a translation into Irish of a sixteenth-century poem by the French poet Joacaim Du Bellay, a work O’Connor later described as ‘unique in literature, because it is a translation from one language the author didn’t know into another he didn’t know – or knew most imperfectly’.14 On the very day he was sacked from his job as a ‘junior tracer’ at the Great Southern and Western Railway at Glanmire Station (now Kent Station), where he was contemptuously referred to as‘The Native’, he read his first paper at the Gaelic League Hall – written in Irish – on the German poet Goethe.15

In the spring of 1920, when he was sixteen, O’Connor won a scholarship to a Gaelic League summer school in Dublin for training schoolteachers in Irish. O’Connor’s Irish was largely by ear, and when he arrived at the school, he realized the extent to which his lack of formal education put him at a disadvantage: ‘All the other students had had a good general education, some a university education. I talked Irish copiously, but nobody had explained to me the difference between a masculine and feminine noun, or a nominative or dative case.’16 He did manage to receive a certificate from the summer school qualifying him, in theory anyway, to teach Irish. But it wasn’t until his time in Gormanstown Internment Camp, where he was imprisoned for his part in the Civil War, that O’Connor taught himself to be more-or-less fluent in modern Irish, and to master its grammar in the process. By the time he was released from Gormanstown, at the end of 1923, he was teaching other prisoners Irish, and when he returned to Cork, he taught Irish to schoolteachers, now required to have it to work in the Free State.

O’Connor’s passion for the Irish language and its literature might have come to very little were it not for the circles he found himself in when, having decided that Cork was too provincial for a writer of his ambitions, he gave up his post as Cork City’s first librarian, and moved to Dublin in 1928 to take a job in the Pembroke District Library. If it was Corkery, back in Cork, who had set O’Connor off on the path to poetic translation, in Dublin it was George Russell who made the introductions, and who included the aspiring young Corkman in his wide circle of acquaintances.

The most important person for O’Connor in that circle was the Cork-born Irish-language scholar Osborn Bergin, a regular visitor to Russell’s Sunday-night ‘at-homes’. O’Connor once said that in the area of Celtic studies, Bergin ‘knew more than anybody in the world’.17 Be that as it may, it’s hard to see how, without Bergin’s help, O’Connor could have acquired the extensive knowledge of the Irish-language tradition upon which his work as a translator depends, not to mention access to many texts tucked away in specialist journals. Bergin was the most exacting of scholars, and although O’Connor preferred the relatively less literal translations of the German Kuno Meyer – ‘even in his choice of words Meyer tries to tell you “what it is all about”’18 – Bergin’s penchant for precision undoubtedly inspired O’Connor’s belief in the responsibility of a poetic translator to be as respectful as possible of his sources.

Through Bergin O’Connor came to know Daniel Binchy, who was Bergin’s pupil. O’Connor and Binchy became close friends, drawn together in part by their shared love for early Irish-language poetry. O’Connor often went to Binchy for help with linguistic problems, and Binchy taught O’Connor Old and Middle Irish.

He worked tirelessly at Old and Middle Irish [Binchy recalls] so much so in fact that professional scholars like myself were shamed by his wholly disinterested pursuit of the subject we were paid to study. His own copies of the texts were black with notes and cross-references; how on earth did he manage to cram so much research into the intervals between his own writing?’19

Russell introduced O’Connor to other scholars whose expertise he availed himself of – the Englishman Robin Flower; Thomas F. O’Rahilly, who published two influential collections of Irish-language verse O’Connor drew on frequently for his translations; and Richard Best, probably best-known now as one of the librarians in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. As Tom Garvin has argued, most Old and Middle Irish scholarship in the decades following the establishment of the Free State had the effect, and often the intention, of countering attempts by nationalistic political and cultural leaders to rewrite the Irish past into an inspiring, heroic narrative, ‘a romantic fantasy vision of Celtic Ireland’,20 and O’Connor’s associations with some of the leading scholars of the day no doubt fed his scepticism about efforts to romanticize the Irish-language tradition.

The person O’Connor met through Russell who had nearly as much influence on his career as a translator as did his scholarly associates was Yeats. For one thing, Yeats made possible the publication, by Cuala Press, of O’Connor’s first two collections of translations, The Wild Bird’s Nest in 1932 and Lords and Commons in 1938, along with a special edition, including drawings by Yeats’s brother Jack, of O’Connor’s ‘A Lament for Art Leary’ in 1940. Yeats also included seven of O’Connor’s translations from the Irish in his influential anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, published in 1939.21

The relationship went far beyond that, however. Yeats and O’Connor didn’t exactly collaborate on O’Connor’s translations – Yeats famously had no Irish – but Yeats rarely hesitated to make suggestions for improving them as poems in English. In a BBC radio program broadcast in 1947, O’Connor recalls one specific instance of how the two writers, so different in background and literary sensibility, worked together:

Yeats did not mind your making suggestions about his work, but he objected to your interfering in your own. He stuck on one line [in O’Connor’s translation of a poem by Aodhagán Ó Rathaille] for a long time – ‘Has made me travel to seek you, Valentine Brown’… I said,‘That’s a bad line. It’s redundant. You can say “Has made me travel to you” or “Has made me seek you” but you can’t say “Travel to seek you”. Why not “Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown”?’ ‘No beggars! No beggars!’ he roared and went on composing as if I weren’t there.22

Yeats apparently won out that time; in O’Connor’s translation, published under the title ‘A Grey Eye Weeping’ in The Wild Bird’s Nest, the disputed line, which is a refrain, reads: ‘Has made me travel to seek you, Valentine Brown’. And although O’Connor once said he paid little attention to Yeats’s recommendations in the final drafts of his translations,23 a comparison done by Richard Ellmann shows that of sixty-two lines in O’Connor’s translations that Yeats wanted to revise, forty were published as Yeats wished them to be.24

In any case, the unlikely partnership between the self-consciously Anglo-Irish poet and the unpolished former anti-Treatyite from the backstreets of Cork ran two ways. Yeats was not at all above taking a line from an O’Connor translation, revising it and slipping into a poem of his own. Perhaps the best-known of these ‘thefts’ is a line from ‘Last Lines’, O’Connor’s translation of a poem by Ó Rathaille: ‘My fathers followed theirs before Christ was crucified.’ One night when O’Connor was dining with Yeats and his wife George, the great man said, ‘O’Connor, I’ve stolen another poem from you.’ When O’Connor asked if he’d ‘made a good job of it’, Yeats replied, tilting back his head, ‘I made a beautiful job of it.’25 The line appears in Yeats’s ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ as ‘His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified’.

It’s possible that Yeats was so enthusiastic about O’Connor’s translations, especially those from the earliest periods of the Irish-language tradition, because they so effectively captured the spare, unsentimental style of the poems in Irish, a style Yeats was searching for in his own work at the time. Occasionally, Yeats’s interest in this poetry, which he came to know primarily through O’Connor’s translations, bordered on the hysterical. In a BBC radio talk entitled ‘Adventures in Translation’, O’Connor recalls another night at Yeats’s house when he quoted from an English-language version of a fourteenth-century Irish-language poem: ‘I am of Ireland and the holy land of Ireland’. Yeats, O’Connor said, ‘instantly turned into a gibbering maniac. “What’s that?” he cried. “Who wrote that?” “A fourteenth-century poet,” I replied, and he rushed madly for pencil and paper. “Write – write – write!” he gasped’.26 This is no doubt the moment that Yeats’s ‘I Am of Ireland’, with its refrain ‘I am of Ireland,/And the Holy Land of Ireland’, was conceived.

*

Daniel Binchy, O’Connor’s friend and collaborator, once said O’Connor’s approach to translating was‘primarily intuitive, and his intuition was at times so overwhelming as to leave a professional scholar gasping with amazement’.27 Binchy has left a revealing account of that intuition at work:

There was the fascination of watching him wrestle with a problem which had baffled the professionals, and after a number of wildly false starts, produce the right solution.‘No poet would ever have said a thing like that. It must be ––’ and he would propose something quite off the beam. ‘Impossible, Michael, the grammar is all wrong.’ ‘Well, what about this?’ And so on until, suddenly, the lightning struck and you said to yourself half-credulously, ‘He’s done it again.’28

There is, however, as Binchy well knew, far more than intuition at work in O’Connor’s poetic translations from the Irish. The lightning Binchy remembers could strike only because O’Connor knew so well, knew in his bones, the tradition he was translating from. Unlike most of the writers in the long line of poetic translators from the Irish, O’Connor was not a well-established poet in English deciding to try his hand at translation. O’Connor’s passion was for the Irish-language tradition itself, a tradition that he had, at great cost, come to master, if not in the scholarly ways of professionals like Binchy and Bergin.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that O’Connor’s translations are so intent on honouring their sources. In ‘Adventures in Translation’, O’Connor says ‘the problem for the translator is how to give the reader the feeling “he was there”.’29 Easier said than done, of course, as a translation is always, inevitably, ‘here’, embedded in the historical moment of the translator, and in his or her language, culture and values. Still, for O’Connor, making his reader experience the ‘there’ of the original is the whole point of translation, and one that requires the translator to avoid veering too far from the linguistic, prosodic and cultural orbit of the poem he’s translating. This does not at all mean O’Connor aspires to some kind of slavish fidelity to his sources. His translations often depart from the imagery and literal meaning of the texts in Irish, but they do so almost always to achieve dramatic effects intended to intensify, without betraying, the reader’s experience of being ‘there’.

The first translation in O’Connor’s first collection of translations from the Irish – ‘The Old Woman of Beare Regrets Lost Youth’ in The Wild Bird’s Nest – demonstrates that the qualities that distinguish O’Connor’s work as a poetic translator were present from the start. The original is the eighth-or ninth-century ‘Caillech Bérri’, spoken by the Hag of Beare, a mythological female divinity associated with the Beare peninsula in Counties. Cork and Kerry. Having outlived her friends and lovers, the old woman is spending her last days among nuns, and her voice – spare, direct, never sentimental – modulates between a lament for her present state and often sensuous memories of her lost youth. The poem opens by comparing the hag’s decline to a tide that ebbs but won’t return:

Athbe damsae cen bés mara,

senta fomdera cróan:

tuirsi oca cé dogneó,

sona dotaet a loán.

Is mí Caillech Bérre búoi,

nomeilinn léne mbithnúi:

indiú tatham dom shéme,

ní melim cith athléne.

(Ebb-tide for me as for the sea,

old age makes me yellow:

although I grieve thereat

joyfully it approaches its food.

I am Buí, the Hag of Beare,

I used to wear an ever-new smock:

today I am so thin

I would not wear out even a cast-off smock.)

O’Connor’s translation reverses the order of the two stanzas, for dramatic effect, and relies heavily on one-syllable words as a way of representing in English the directness of the old woman’s voice. At the same time, the translation follows closely the rhythms of the original’s seven-syllable line, a staple of Irish-language poetry between the eighth and seventeenth centuries:

I, the old woman of Beare,

Once a shining shift would wear,

Now and since my beauty’s fall

I have scarce a shift at all.

I am ebbing like the seas,

Ebbtide is all my grief;

Plump no more I sigh for these,

Bones bare beyond belief.

That final image is not in the original, but it certainly captures the old woman’s situation while remaining perfectly true to her voice and character. The last line also foregrounds the use of internal alliteration that is an integral part of the prosody of syllabic verse in Old Irish.

It’s likely that O’Connor was drawn to ‘Caillech Bérri’ in part because the hag’s candid sexual memories offer strong evidence that the Irish-language tradition, going all the way back to the eighth or ninth century, has nothing to do with the puritanical views advanced by the twentieth-century Irish Catholic Church. But early Irish poems like ‘Caillech Bérri’ also provided O’Connor a powerful antidote to what he saw as various misrepresentations of the Irish-language tradition, from James Macpherson’s immensely popular but wildly inaccurate eighteenth-century versions of the legends surrounding the figure of Oisín to the Irish literary revival’s inclination to infuse Ireland’s literary past with its own, often romantic, aesthetic convictions. In the preface to his collection of translations published in 1939, The Fountain of Magic, O’Connor argues that the earliest Irish poems are not ‘crippled by reflection’ but rather ‘eager for sensation rather than for thought’.30

O’Connor’s translations from this period almost always follow their originals in allowing sensation to stand on its own. A fine example is O’Connor’s version of a four-line poem written in the ninth century expressing gratitude for a night of foul weather, as it may keep the Vikings away, at least for the one night:

Is acher ingáith innocht

fufuasna fairggae findfholt

ni ágor réimm mora minn

dondláechraid lainn ua lothlind

(Fierce is the wind tonight

it agitates the sea’s white hair

I do not fear the coursing of a smooth sea

by the fierce heroes from Norway.)

O’Connor’s translation respects the way in which the fear of the Vikings is presented objectively, in part through the description of the violent weather that may discourage the invaders, but only for the moment, and in part through the image of the Vikings’ ‘réimm mora minn’ (‘coursing of a smooth sea’) in better weather:

Since tonight the wind is high,

The sea’s white mane a fury,

I need not fear the hordes of hell

Coursing the Irish Channel.

‘Coursing the Irish Channel’ for ‘réimm mora minn’, while not literally accurate, heightens the objectified fear in the original by bringing the threat of invasion specifically near to the shores of Ireland. O’Connor at the same time is characteristically aware of the formal qualities of his source; the links between ‘high’/‘fury’ and ‘hell’/ ‘Channel’ echo the pattern of terminal assonance in the original (‘innocht’/’findfholt’ and‘minn’/‘lothlind’), while‘hordes of hell’ remembers the use of alliteration found in every line of the original.31

What O’Connor gains by such informed attention to his sources can be measured by comparing his translation of one of the best-known of the earliest poems in Irish,‘Messe ocus Pangur Bán’ (‘I myself and White Pangur’) with that of the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon. O’Connor has called this ninth-century poem ‘the last word in humanist elegance and urbanity’,32 and Muldoon’s version, like much of his own poetry, is sophisticated in tone and playful in form, as evidenced in its opening stanzas:

Myself and Pangur, my white cat,

have much the same calling, in that

much as Pangur goes after mice

I go hunting for the precise

word. He and I are much the same

in that I’m gladly “lost to fame”

when on the Georgics, say, I’m bent

while he seems perfectly content

with his lot. Life in the cloister

can’t possibly lose its luster

so long as there’s some crucial point

with which we might by leaps and bounds

yet grapple, into which yet sink

our teeth. The bold Pangur will think

through mouse snagging much as I muse

on something naggingly abstruse.33

O’Connor’s translation captures the urbane tone of the original while also following closely the prosody and stanzaic structure of the original:

Each of us pursues his trade,

I and Pangur, my comrade;

His whole fancy on the hunt

And mine for learning ardent.

More than fame I love to be

Among my books, and study;

Pangur does not grudge me it,

Content with his own merit.

When – a heavenly time! – we are

In our small room together,

Each of us has his own sport

And asks no greater comfort.

While he sets his round sharp eye

On the wall of my study,

I turn mine, though lost its edge,

On the great wall of knowledge.

In a note to his translation, O’Connor says he has ‘hinted at the rhyme-scheme of the Irish’,34 in which mono-syllabic words at the end of the first and third lines in each quatrain echo the unstressed syllables of di-syllabic words at the end of the second and fourth lines. The original begins:

Messe ocus Pangur Bán

cechtar nathar fria saindan

bith a menmasam fri seilgg

mu menma céin im sainchairdd.

The links between ‘Bán’/’saindan’ and ‘seilgg’/saincheirdd’ find acoustic equivalents in O’Connor’s ‘trade’/‘comrade’ and ‘hunt’/‘ardent’, an imitative pattern that O’Connor maintains throughout his translation. O’Connor’s version also replicates the seven-syllable line of the original, something Muldoon ignores, and is aware as well of the way in which the original balances, in nearly every stanza, the experience of the scholar and that of the cat, an equilibrium Muldoon upsets by his use of run-overs.

In the end, Muldoon’s version, as remarkable as it is, calls attention to itself as a translation done by Muldoon at the end of the twentieth century, whereas O’Connor’s version manages to negotiate, seemingly effortlessly, between the ‘there’ of the original and the ‘here’ of the translation, between Old Irish and twentieth-century English, between Irish-language prosody and the forms of modern poetry, between the monk’s voice and world and the voice and world of O’Connor.

In 1925, when O’Connor was beginning to publish translations in The Irish Statesman, the scholar Thomas F. O’Rahilly, whom O’Connor would later come to know in Dublin, brought out a collection of love poems written in Irish between 1350 and 1750. Entitled Dánta Grádha (Love Poems), O’Rahilly’s anthology appealed to O’Connor both because many of the poems in it took the form of dramatic monologues, and because many of them dealt with sexuality in uninhibited ways.

O’Connor translated fifteen poems from O’Rahilly’s collection, a number of which are among his most accomplished, including the nicely nuanced ‘To Tomas Costello at the Wars’. This translation is based on a late-seventeenth-century poem spoken by a woman who finds herself being pursued by a well-known figure in the folklore of the west of Ireland, one Tomas Costello, while her husband is away at war.35 The dramatic situation of the poem’s speaker clearly inspired O’Connor; in A Short History of Irish Literature, he says it ‘analyses the mind of a married woman in love as delicately as Stendhal might have done it’.36

The playwright Lord Longford also translated this poem, and although his version is more than adequate, comparing it with O’Connor’s is all to O’Connor’s advantage. At one point, O’Rourke’s wife describes various guises in which Costello woos her, including this one:

Mar mhnaoi tháidhe i dtuighin fir

minic tig sé dár soighin

le briocht druadh, le diamhair ndán,

dom iarraidh uam ar éaládh.

(Like a woman of fornication in the cloak of a man often he comes to attack us

with spell of druid, with darkness of verse, beseeching me to elope.)

O’Connor takes some liberties with this, but only to foreground the wife’s smouldering sexuality:

Or as if I were a whore he comes,

A young blood curious of my flame,

With sensual magic and dark rhymes

To woo and mock me in my shame.

Longford, on the other hand, leaves out altogether the‘mnaoi tháidhe’, keeping the sexual temperature well below what it should be. Moreover, his diction runs to the conventionally poetic, and his rhythms are all too iambic to do justice to those of the original, written in syllabic rather than accentual metre:

Or privately in man’s attire

He cometh often to conspire

With secret spell and rhyme obscure

My flight and ruin to assure.37

In translating the eighteenth-century poetry of Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, O’Connor took on, early in his career, the considerable challenge of finding ways to carry over into English verse the amhrán (song) metres that in the seventeenth century began to replace the older syllabic forms in Irish-language poetry. O’Connor’s sensitivity to the music of the amhrán, an accentual verse-form built upon complex patterns of internal as well as terminal assonance, is certainly evident in his five translations from Ó Rathaille, but it’s at its most impressive in his versions of two poems by the eighteenth-century Munster poet Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin: ‘Song of Repentence’ and ‘To the Blacksmith with a Spade’. Ó Súilleabháin was something of a folk hero in his day, revered in some quarters as much for his philandering and wildness as for his mastery of the amhrán, and his attraction for O’Connor undoubtedly had something to do with the spirit of rebellion, including a vigorous disregard for restrictive sexual attitudes that shaped Ó Súilleabháin’s life as well as his art.

Ó Súilleabháin’s technical wizardry is often nothing short of astonishing. His poem‘Sin Agaibh Mo Theastas’ (‘For You My Testimony’), the source for O’Connor’s ‘Song of Repentance’, is written in six eight-line stanzas in each of which lines constructed around an internal assonantal pattern of a/a/a/é in odd-numbered lines alternate with lines constructed around a pattern of a/é/a/ó. At the same time, the lines are bound together by terminal assonance falling on di-syllabic words in the odd-numbered lines and on mono-syllabic words in the even-numbered lines:

Sin agaibh mo theastas ar beathaidh gach réice,

Ciodh fada mé ag géilleadh le seachmall dá nós,

Go bastalach, bealuighthe, ag bladar le béithibh

Na gcarn-fholt réidh, is dá mealladh lem phóg.

(For you my testimony on the life of every rake,

Although I am a long time yielding to such waywardness,

Gaily, greasily flattering the women

Of the masses of smooth hair, and enticing them with my kiss.)

O’Connor is well up to the task of bringing over into English verse at least some of Ó Súilleabháin’s ultimately inimitable music:

What can I say of a play-boy’s behaviour

Have I not courted all over the place

Bragging and boasting and coaxing the maidens

And strengthening their love by the strength of my kiss.

O’Connor imitates Ó Súilleabháin by linking the odd-numbered lines with terminal assonance occurring on multi-syllabic words – ‘behaviour’ and ‘maidens’– while joining the even-numbered lines with a terminal half-rhyme on words of one syllable – ‘place’ and ‘kiss’. There’s also plenty of internal assonance in O’Connor’s stanza, although he wisely avoids trying to follow precisely the pattern of the original. Finally, he uses the irregular four-stress line upon which the flowing rhythms of Ó Súilleabháin’s poem is constructed. All this amounts to far more than ‘mere’ prosodic technicalities; O’Connor’s fine ear for Ó Súilleabháin’s music produces in this translation one of those extraordinary moments in which a translation seems almost to live simultaneously in two different poetic, linguistic and metrical traditions.

‘Song of Repentance’ also cheerfully engages the spirit of liberation, of the flesh as well as of the imagination, that drives Ó Súilleabháin’s work. On the surface, ‘Sin Agaibh Mo Theastas’ professes regret for a life squandered on drinking and sex, but the lift and music of the poetry frequently work to release the poem from the weight of its own argument:

Níor b’annamh mé tamall ’san tabhairne traochta,

Idir scatadh geal-bhéithe is carbhais óil,

Teagasc na n-aithreach n-aitheantach naomhtha,

Ní thagadh im bhréithribh acht magadh ’gus móid.

(Not seldom was I a while in the exhausting tavern,

Between a company of bright women and a drunken carouse,

The teaching of the learned, saintly penitents

Would not come in my words, but instead mockery and oaths.)

O’Connor’s translation works in precisely the same way, allowing the poetry – its rhythms, its imagery, its sound patterns – to overwhelm the professed rejection of the speaker’s rakish past:

My time of a time has been time sadly wasted

On thimblemen, tipplers and gay girls a score

I have sat by a candle and rhymed myself naked

With jeers that I made and great oaths that I swore.

That third line has no point of reference anywhere in the original, but who could say that its striking, not to say bizarre, imagery is not true to the provocative, unconventional spirit of Ó Súilleabháin the poet and Ó Súilleabháin the man?

Seven years after ‘Song of Repentance’ appeared in Lords and Commons, O’Connor published his translation of a poem that takes Ó Súilleabháin’s paeans to inhibition to a more sustained and – from the point of view of many religious and political authorities – more dangerous level, Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court). This no-holds-barred celebration of sexual and imaginative freedom offered O’Connor, among other things, a platform for his critique of the influence the Catholic Church had over modern Irish life. O’Connor once said of Merriman, in unreservedly admiring terms: ‘here he was in the eighteenth century writing, in an Irish village in the back of beyond, things that very few men would dream of writing in Dublin of the twentieth… To say the man was 150 years ahead of his time would be mere optimism.’38 Official Irish society repaid O’Connor for his act of rebellion in translating Merriman – thereby making his argument against the undue influence of the Church for him – by banning his translation under the terms of the Censorship Act of 1929, although Arland Ussher’s version, published in 1926, and the original itself, were left untouched; indeed, the original was for sale in the government’s own bookshop.

Merriman’s lengthy narrative poem, written late in the eighteenth century, takes the form of a dream-vision in which a court is convened to entertain complaints of sexual frustration from the young women of Ireland. The court structure, with its emphasis on dialogue, came readily to hand for O’Connor, who by 1945 had distinguished himself as a widely admired writer of short stories. In contrast to the attention O’Connor gives the formal qualities of much of the Irish-language poetry he translated, his version of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche takes only occasional notice of Merriman’s often breath-taking handling of the standard caoineadh metre.39 Rather, it’s the voices of the speakers at court, chiefly those of a young woman detailing her unsatisfied longing for a husband, and of an old man who speaks virulently and chauvinistically against her, that drive O’Connor’s translation. In a review of Ussher’s translation of Merriman’s poem, O’Connor identified as one of the salient qualities of the original its ability to give voice to the ‘speech of the people’,40 and his translation comes most alive as poetry when the characters speak. Moreover, for O’Connor, giving voice to the ‘speech of the people’ had strong political and cultural implications in an Ireland in which freedom of expression was, in his view, seriously compromised by Church and State, most notably in the Censorship Act, the force of which he himself had felt more than once.

One of the most compelling voices in the Irish-language tradition is that of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill (Eileen O’Connell), the author of ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ (‘Lament for Art O’Leary’),41 and O’Connor’s version of Ní Chonaill’s eighteenth-century elegy is one of the most compelling of his translations. O’Connell’s husband, Art O’Leary, was a captain in the Hungarian Hussars who’d returned to Ireland at the age of twenty or twenty-one, and was killed in 1773 at Carriganimmy, Co. Cork, by a soldier guarding the high sheriff of the county. There’s more than a whiff of rebellion about the poem, directed against the English presence in Ireland, but for O’Connor its appeal lay less in its politics than in its dramatic situation, and especially in Ní Chonaill’s voice. In the preface to The Fountain of Magic, O’Connor says the poem is ‘first and foremost a ritual over the dead, with its dramatised characters, its story-telling, its chorus of cloaked weepers’.42

The emotional force of ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ depends in part on its dirge-like rhythms, built on short lines linked by terminal assonance and ending on unstressed syllables – a cadence O’Connor’s translation imitates quite closely. But O’Connor is equally if not more sensitive to the way in which the poem tends to generate its feelings of loss and grief by means of a tension between deeply distressing scenes and the objective, un-hysterical voice that recounts them. When her husband’s horse returns home without its rider, its saddle covered in blood, Ní Chonaill describes the scene as follows:

A’s níor chreideas riamh dod’ mharbh,

Gur tháinig chugham do chapall,

’S a srianta léi go talamh,

A’s fuil do chroidhe ar a leacain

Siar go t’iallaid ghreanta

I n-a mbítheá id’ shuidhe ’s id’ sheasamh.

(And I never believed in your death,

Until your horse came to me,

And her reins to the ground,

And the blood of your heart on her cheek

[Going] back as far as your beautiful saddle

In which you used to sit and stand.)

As does the original, O’Connor’s version allows the details of the scene to speak for themselves:

My love and my darling

That I never thought dead

Till your horse came to me

With bridle trailing,

All blood from forehead

To polished saddle

Where you should be,

Sitting or standing.

‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ has been translated into English verse a number of times, but a recent version, published by Vona Groarke in 2008, offers a particularly instructive contrast to O’Connor’s translation. In her introduction, Groarke says most earlier versions ‘fail to capture completely the extremes of Eileen’s rage and desire’, whereas in her translation, she’s willing, she says, to sacrifice ‘accuracy for passion’.43 But in working to give Ní Chonaill’s ‘rage and desire’ a marked, and markedly subjective, presence, Groarke risks losing sight of the way in which the original relies on a self-possessed narrative voice, overtly more objective than passionate, to engender Ní Chonaill’s feelings. Groarke’s version of the passage about Art’s horse returning home without its rider is rendered in a relatively subjective diction not to be found in the original, or in O’Connor’s translation:

My Art,

I wouldn’t give the time of day

to rumour of your death

until that selfsame mare of yours

came to me with her bridle awry,

her withers smattered

with your heart’s damson,

and the polished saddle,

where I last saw you bolt upright,

lopsided and bereft.44

Moreover, just as Paul Muldoon’s translation of ‘Messe ocus Pangur Bán’ is self-consciously a postmodern poem by Muldoon, so Groarke’s version of ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’ calls attention to itself as a poem informed by contemporary attitudes toward, among other things, the expression of female sexual desire. When Ní Chonaill says no woman who knew Art would voluntarily miss his wake and funeral, there are, to be sure, sexual implications:

Ní’l éin-bhean i n-Éirinn

Do shínfeadh a taobh leis,

Do bhéarfadh trí laogh dhó,

Ná raghadh le craobhchaibh

I ndiaidh Airt uí Laoghaire.

(There isn’t a single woman in Ireland

Who would stretch her side by him,

Who would bear him three calves,

Who would not go mad

After Art O’Leary.)

Groarke translates these lines into a highly erotic passage largely of her own invention:

As if any woman who had kissed your thighs,

or run her thumb between your ribs,

whose womb was honeyed

three times by your seed,

Could hold back on a night like this.45

O’Connor translates, as always, out of an informed faith in the relevance of the Irish-language tradition as it stands:

There is no woman in Ireland

That had slept beside him

And borne him three children

But would go wild

After Art O’Leary.

*

O’Connor’s career as a writer, like his life, was anything but steady and well-ordered. He was, by all accounts, including his own, extremely impulsive, and vacillated between bouts of severe melancholy and idleness – for days on end he wouldn’t write a word, but would lie in bed smoking and staring at the ceiling – and working at a furious, white-hot pace. Having no advantages from birth, and no formal education worth mentioning, he taught himself how to do everything, and that everything amounted to a great deal: he made himself into one of the masters of the short story in English, he wrote two novels and two volumes of memoirs, he wrote numerous essays and reviews on all manner of topics, he wrote poetry, he wrote plays, he directed plays, he ran the Abbey Theatre for two years, he gave scores of radio broad-casts on a wide range of issues, he wrote a biography of Michael Collins, he wrote what were essentially Irish guidebooks based on his considerable knowledge of Ireland’s ancient buildings and monuments acquired by long bicycle trips around the countryside, he compiled anthologies, he wrote a critical study of the short story and one of the novel, he wrote a book on Shakespeare, he taught at Harvard, Northwestern and Stanford, he wrote a history of Irish literature from its earliest days to the present.

Meanwhile, his personal life was, God knows, anything but conducive to writing; at one point, just after the second world war, he was living in a house on Strand Road in Dublin with his wife and their two children, his mistress and the child he had by her, and his widowed mother.46 And he was, on good days anyway, working.

Through all this, one thing was constant: O’Connor’s passion for translating Irish-language poetry. Those voices sounding across the barrier between Irish and English – the ancient voice of the Hag of Beare lamenting her decline into old age; the voices of the early monks describing the Irish landscape, Irish weather, their religious faith, and, in at least one instance, their cat; the voices of the ninth-century lovers Liadain and Cuirithir (O’Connor named a daughter after Liadain); the voice of Hugh O’Rourke’s wife torn between loyalty to her husband and a rising desire for her seducer; the voice of Brian Merriman’s sexually frustrated young woman testifying at the midnight court; and the heart-breakingly controlled voice of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill eulogizing her murdered soldier-husband – all these voices haunted O’Connor throughout his career, whatever else he was doing.

It started that first day at St Patrick’s Boys Primary School in Cork when Daniel Corkery wrote words in Irish on the blackboard, and it was still going on at the end; in his last months O’Connor was working with David Greene on an anthology of Irish-language poetry published posthumously as The Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry. It is in large part because of O’Connor’s profound, unmitigated love of the Irish language and its rich, centuries-old tradition of literature – ‘a literature of which no Irishman need feel ashamed’, he once said47 – that these voices, and so many others, can still be heard.

1. Alan Titley has called O’Connor’s translations ‘the very best translations of Irish poetry that we have’ (‘The Interpretation of Tradition,’ in Frank O’Connor: New Perspectives, eds. Robert Evans and Richard C. Harp [West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1998]; rpt. in Frank O’Connor: Critical Essays, ed. Hilary Lennon [Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007], p. 219). The scholar Daniel Binchy, who worked closely with O’Connor on his translations, has said: ‘Who could match him as a translator? No one has rendered Irish poetry of all periods – Old, Middle and Modern – with such perfect artistry’ (‘The Scholar-Gipsy,’ in Michael/ Frank: Studies on Frank O’Connor, ed. Maurice Sheehy [New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969], p. 19). And Brendan Kennelly, who included twenty-two of O’Connor’s translations in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse, says that although Ireland has been fortunate in its translators, ‘I have elected to allow early Ireland to speak through O’Connor’s mouth. And what a singing, eloquent mouth it is!’ (London: Penguin, 1970, 1981), p. 27.

2. This is the epigraph to A Short History of Irish Literature: A Backward Look (London: Macmillan 1967).

3. ‘The Gaelic Tradition in Literature (Part II),’ Ireland To-day, Vol. I. No. 2 ( July 1936), p. 35.

4. O Rathaille: Translations from the Irish (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Books, 1998), p. 12.

5. Headnote to O’Connor’s translation ‘Patrick Sarsfield, Lord Lucan’, in Kings, Lords, and Commons: Irish Poems from the Seventh Century to the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1959), p. 95.

6. ‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ Michael/Frank, ed. Sheehy, p. 18.

7. [Michael O’Donovan], ‘Two Languages,’ The Bookman, Vol. 86 (August 1934), p. 240.

8. David Greene,‘Poet of the People,’ in Michael/Frank, p. 138, has made this point.

9. An Only Child (London: Macmillan; New York: Knopf, 1961), p. 18.

10. The Commonweal, 28 December 1932, p. 251.

11. Leinster, Munster and Connaught (London: Robert Hale, nd [1950]), p. 172.

12. An Only Child, p. 15.

13. An Only Child, p. 170.

14. An Only Child, pp. 150–1.

15. James Matthews, Voices: A Life of Frank O’Connor (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), p. 22.

16. An Only Child, p. 198.

17. My Father’s Son (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 197.

18. My Father’s Son, p. 108.

19. ‘Scholar-Gypsy,’ in Michael/Frank, p. 19.

20. The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual (Sallins, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016), p. 94.

21. The translations, all from The Wild Bird’s Nest, are: ‘The Old Woman of Beare Regrets Lost Youth’, ‘Autumn’, ‘A Learned Mistress’, ‘Prayer for the Speedy End of Three Great Misfortunes’, ‘The Student’, ‘A Grey Eye Weeping’, and ‘Kilcash’.

22. ‘W. B. Yeats: Reminiscence by a Friend,’ The Listener, 15 May 1947, pp. 9–10. (BBC radio broadcast, 4 May 1947).

23. Preface to Kings, Lords, and Commons, p. v.

24. The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 194–200.

25. Matthews, Voices, p. 98.

26. ‘Adventures in Translation,’ The Listener, 25 January 1962, p. 175, (BBC radio broadcast, 17 June 1962).

27. ‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ in Michael/Frank, p. 18.

28. ‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ p. 19.

29. The Listener, 25 January 1962, p. 175.

30. The Fountain of Magic (London: Macmillan, 1939), pp. 7, 9.

31. The original also contains a cross-rhyme between lines two and four: – ‘findholt’ and ‘lothlind’. This kind of intricate assonantal patterning, characteristic of early Irish poetry, is nearly impossible to render in English verse, as O’Connor’s translation wisely recognizes.

32. Short History of Irish Literature, p. 52.

33. Hay (1998); rpt. in After the Irish: An Anthology of Poetic Translation, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 2009), p. 423.

34. Kings, Lords, and Commons, p. 14.

35. Kings, Lords, and Commons, p. 84. It’s also possible, as O’Connor has argued, and as the title of his translation suggests, that it was Costello who was off fighting, and that ‘his omnipresence was to be attributed to her imagination’.

36. Short History, p. 99.

37. More Poems from the Irish (1945); rpt. in After the Irish, ed. Schirmer, p. 265.

38. Leinster, Munster and Connaught, pp. 230, 232.

39. The accentual caoineadh metre consists of stanzas of four lines and four stressed syllables in each line. The last accented vowel-sound is the same for all four lines, and internal assonance occurs on the second and third stressed syllables.

40. The Irish Statesman, 9 October 1926, p. 114.

41. See Diane Wong, ‘Literature and the Oral Tradition’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, Vol. I, editors Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 657–62, for a discussion of arguments against attributing the poem to Eibhlín Ní Chonaill.

42. Fountain of Magic, p. vii.

43. Lament for Art O’Leary (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2008), p. 12.

44. Lament for Art O’Leary, p. 23.

45. Lament for Art O’Leary, p. 26.

46. Matthew, Voices, p. 220.

47. Preface to Kings, Lords, and Commons, p. xiii.

Abbreviations

WORKS BY O’CONNOR

BI A Book of Ireland. Ed. Frank O’Connor. London and Glasgow: Collins, 1959.

FM The Fountain of Magic. London: Macmillan, 1939.

GT A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry A.D. 600 to 1200. Eds David Greene and Frank O’Connor. London: Macmillan, 1967.

IL An Anthology of Irish Literature. Ed. David H. Greene. New York: Modern Library, 1954.

KLC Kings, Lords, and Commons: Irish Poems from the Seventh Century to the Nineteenth Century. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1959.

LC Lords and Commons: Translations from the Irish. Dublin: Cuala Press, 1938.

LM The Little Monasteries: Translations from Irish Poetry Mainly of the Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963.

LMC Leinster, Munster and Connaught. London: Robert Hale, n.d. (1950).

SHIL A Short History of Irish Literature: A Backward Look. London: Macmillan, 1967.

TOB Three Old Brothers and Other Poems. London: Thomas Nelson, 1936.

WBN The Wild Bird’s Nest: Poems from the Irish. Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932.

SOURCES OF ORIGINAL TEXTS

BALI Bruchstücke der Älteren Lyrik Irlands. Ed. Kuno Meyer. Berlin, 1919.

DÁNGRÁ Dánta Grádha: An Anthology of Irish Love Poetry (a.d. 1350– 1750). Ed. Tomás Ó Rathile (Thomas F. O’Rahilly). Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1925.

DG Duanaire Gaeilge. 3 vols. Ed. Róis Ní Ógáin. Baile Átha Cliath: Cómhlucht Oideacais na hÉireann, 1921, 1924, 1930.

IT Irische Texte. Ed. W. Stokes and E. Windisch. Leipzig: 1880–1909.

MD Measgra Dánta: Miscellaneous Irish Poems. 2 vols. Ed. Tomás Ó Rathile (Thomas F. O’Rahilly). Dublin and Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1927.

MURPHY Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Century. Ed. Gerard Murphy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.

Ó-C Óir-Chiste: Duanaire Liricí d’on Aos Foghluma. Ed. Séamus Ó hAodha. Baile Átha Cliath: Cómhlucht Oideachais na hÉireann, 1922.

Acknowledgments

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