'Look Back to Look Forward'

Overview

Although Frank O’Connor is known primarily, and rightly, as one of the most accomplished short-story writers in English, he was also an accomplished translator. 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 – 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 the centuries-old tradition of poetry in Irish. Collected here for the first time, O’Connor’s translations show 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.

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; for O’Connor, the Irish-language tradition was 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.

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 said – that these voices, and so many others, can still be heard.

Author Biography

Frank O’Connor (1903–66) was an Irish writer of over 150 works, best known for his short stories and memoirs. The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award is named in his honor. Born and raised in Cork, in 1918 O’Connor joined the First Brigade of the Irish Republican Army and served in combat during the Irish War of Independence. He was befriended by George William Russell (Æ), Yeats, Lennox Robinson, F. R. Higgins and Augusta Gregory.

From 1937–39, he was the managing director of the Abbey Theatre. In 1950, he accepted invitations to teach in the United States, including at Stanford University, where many of his short stories had been published in The New Yorker and won great acclaim.

Gregory A. Schirmer is the author of books on Austin Clarke and William Trevor and of Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English. He edited After the Irish: An Anthology of Poetic Translation (Cork University Press, 2009). He is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Mississippi, and divides his time between Mississippi and West Cork.