Frank O’Connor’s Complete Translations: Scholarly collection shows translator’s genius

Alan Titley has called them “the very best translations of Irish poetry that we have”. The great Celtic scholar Daniel Binchy said of the translator: “Who could match him as a translator? No one has rendered Irish poetry of all periods – Old, Middle and Modern – with such perfect artistry.” Now, thanks to Lilliput Press and the editorial labours of Gregory A. Schirmer, Frank O’Connor’s superlative translations from Irish, spread over five volumes and countless periodical publications, have been brought together in one book.

O’Connor’s first translation appeared in George Russell’s The Irish Statesman in 1925, and his last collection of translations, The Little Monasteries, was published just three years before his death in 1966. His commitment to bringing the varied and startling riches of the Irish-language tradition to the attention of English-language readers in Ireland and elsewhere was unstinting.

Something of an Irish Ezra Pound, O’Connor was determined to invigorate and renew the language of translated poetry throughout his translation career. He wanted to rescue Irish literature in translation from the crippling archaisms of exalted diction – the “thee”, the “thou”, the “steed” and the “cometh” that buried the vitality of the writing in the mausoleum of Victorian propriety.

He was equally averse to the verbal incontinence of Celtic sentimentality and the honeyed rhetoric of the romantic. His attraction was to the spare and the unsentimental:

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Hear the murmur of the elmtree

Branches sighing,

And the clapping wings of startled

Blackbirds crying.

This stanza from a late medieval poem, Colum Cille, betrays O’Connor’s particular fascination for poetry written in Irish between the eighth and 12th centuries. Half of his 121 published translations are of poems from this period. He was unusual in that many other authors who had tried their hand at translation, from Samuel Ferguson to Austin Clarke, were well-established poets in their own right. His reputation lay in prose, not poetry, and this was, in a way, freeing. There is no sense of O’Connor competing with his sources, of needing to subject them to his own poetic persona. Indeed, he was meticulous in his attention to the Irish-language originals and made much use of the expertise of scholars such as Osborn Bergin and Daniel Binchy to arrive at as full an understanding as possible of his sources.

It was possible at the time to buy the original in the government’s own bookshop, but selling O’Connor’s translation was a legal offence. Put another way, smut was permissible in the first official language but not in the second

Translation, for O’Connor, was never an idle exercise in linguistic virtuosity. It was active, pointed cultural critique. He was deeply uncomfortable with the co-option of the Gaelic tradition into the puritanical piety of the post-Famine Catholic Church and was at pains to show how the poems themselves continually subverted any notion of docile orthodoxy. The speaker in the eighth or ninth-century poem, The Old Woman of Beare Regrets Lost Youth, is not a figure of pious repentance but a woman who bitterly regrets the lost sexual and material freedoms of her youth:

Luck has left me, I go late

To the dark house where they wait,

When the Son of God thinks fit

Let him call me home to it.

For my hands when they are seen

Are but bony wasted things,

Hands that would once grasp the hand

Clasp the royal neck of kings.

Sexually frank

When, in 1945, O’Connor published his English translation of Brian Merriman’s 18th-century sexually frank and socially acerbic satire Cúirt an Mheon-Oíche, the Censorship Board banned the translation outright, deciding that a book widely available in Irish should not be read in English. It was possible at the time to buy the original in the government’s own bookshop, but selling O’Connor’s translation was a legal offence. Put another way, smut was permissible in the first official language but not in the second.

O’Connor’s range in dealing with Irish-language poetry from different periods is astonishing. Moving from the clipped, gnomic lyrics of the early medieval age to the highly formalised compositions of the bardic period to the accentual richness and narrative complexity of the 18th century, O’Connor’s responsiveness to image and his sensitivity to sound are unrivalled. In Eoghan Ruadh Ó Súilleabháin’s Song Of Repentance, the repetitions, alliterations and baroque images perfectly capture the metrical playfulness of the Munster poet:

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.

One of the many virtues of this collected volume is that it grants access to the Irish originals of the poems, along with literal translations into English, so readers can judge for themselves the scale of O’Connor’s achievements. Gregory A. Schirmer provides an authoritative and informative introduction to the translations and is the most companionable of guides to the work of the Cork translator.

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O’Connor argued that the point of translating from the Irish-language tradition was “to look back to look forward”. By revealing how much there was to look back at, he also showed how much there is to look forward to, through continued engagement with the rich and vital tradition of writing in Irish.

Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin.