A new Japanese translation of Brian Merriman’s earthy 18th-century poem Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court) will be presented to the Japanese Ambassador to Ireland, Chihiro Atsumi, by two of the Japanese scholars who produced the translation and critical edition today, Tuesday, March 3rd, at the Chester Beatty Library, hosted jointly by the library and Cumann Merriman.
Two of the 12-member Kyoto Society for Research of the Irish Language and Literature in Japan which recently published the translation and critical edition are in Ireland to mark the event – Prof Kuninao Nashimoto of Hosei University Tokyo and Prof Emerita Takako Haruki of Kobe Shoin Women’s University. Cumann Merriman and the Irish and Japanese departments in the University of Limerick will be holding events in Dublin and Limerick respectively to mark the event. Prof Nashimoto acted as project leader of the translation; he is a frequent visitor to Ireland, having studied for his PhD in Irish in NUIG and lectured in Japanese in UL.
The Japanese translation is the first translation directly from Irish to a language other than English in 100 years (Ludwig Stern published his German translation in Berlin in 1905). Notable previous translators of Merriman’s 1,026-line comic poem to English include Arland Ussher (1926), Frank O’Connor (1945), David Marcus (1953), Thomas Kinsella (1986), Seamus Heaney (1993) and Ciaran Carson (2005).
Cumann Merriman provided support and assistance to the Kyoto Society of scholars from2007-2014 and introduced the scholars to Dr Liam P Ó Murchú of the Department of Modern Irish in UCC, who published the definitive edition of Merriman’s poem in 1982 and assisted the scholars in their work.
