IT is probably accurate to say that these two volumes constitute a life's work.
And a life's work is no small thing, least of all for the person's whose life it is.
Desmond O'Grady was born in Limerick in 1935. During the Fifties he left Ireland to teach and write in Paris, Rome and the US, where he took a doctorate at Harvard. He has earned his living teaching in Rome, Cairo and other places. He knew Pound in Italy and Beckett in Paris. In 1966 he organised the Spoleto International Poetry Festival and he was European editor of The Transatlantic Review.
From his schooldays in the Cistercian monastery college in Tipperary, encouraged by an enthusiastic schoolteacher, Desmond O'Grady determined to be a poet. Now, at 62, with these two volumes, he is putting himself, so to speak, on the line.
The books represent the two areas of writing that have engaged O'Grady for more than twenty years: his own original poetry and the translation of the poetry of others. The two areas are not separate; he has been attracted, by and large, only to those poets, working in other languages and other times, with whose work he has felt an affinity, usually of outlook - the poet who possesses a strong sense of self identity as a poet. For that reason the two volumes complement and even interpenetrate one another to an extraordinary degree.
There can be no question of O'Grady's linguistic talent. He manages metre and rhyme, simile and metaphor, with great accomplishment and inventiveness. And he has a familiarity with a huge range of poetry from different times and different cultures on which he constantly draws to enrich his work.
O'Grady's poems generally take a narrative form, basing themselves on biographical incident, and, in a sense, the whole of The Road Taken can be read as autobiography even when the poems employ such personae as "Reilly" and "the Dying Gaul". But the poems not only relate O'Grady's experiences; they also offer reflections on life, especially on love, friendship, the craft of verse, and exile. Here is the penultimate stanza of a long poem, "My Fields This Springtime", in which O'Grady, now happily returned to Ireland after this lengthy wanderings, sums up his lifelong devotion to poetry:
Now Back where I began to write here on my lone Pretanic height, as peasant prince, poet priest, at rest between both blessed and beast,
I must confess the costly price
I paid on the nail for poet ry's circus well worth making the hard life clownish out of the tragedy. Here's my Finis.
Trawling Tradition is a book of some six hundred pages and the range of traditions trawled in it is astonishing: Latin, Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Welsh, Irish, Italian, Spanish, etc. In so far as I can judge (really only from the Latin, Spanish and Irish), the translations are done in workman like manner. They have the musculature and agility of English with never a hint of slavish literalism. Out of such an abundance of work it is difficult to select anything representative, but here anyway is a short, delicate poem, "Daisies", by Corrado Govoni, which may give some idea of the dedicated skill and sensitivity with which O'Grady works on his originals.
Morning daisies besiege my room, like bright birds meander my mind.
The sun shaft's light through my shutters and between its rays a bird drops like an image.
Desmond O'Grady has toiled long and hard at the craft of verse, and in these two volumes he has produced a body of work that will doubtless please many readers both here and abroad. Together, these two substantial volumes confirm his colourful presence and distinguished stature on the Irish poetry scene.