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Introductory Note
The events that led to Art O'Leary's death are briefly as follows. Art had been in the Austrian Huzzars. On his return to Ireland he found the situation of Catholics there particularly galling after his overseas experience. He entered into conflict with Abraham Morris, High-Sheriff of Cork, and this conflict came to a head when Morris insisted on his right as a Protestant to buy Art's brown mare for a nominal price (this was one of many laws under which Irish Catholics laboured). Art refused. Morris persisted. In European manner, Art challenged Morris to a duel, which was also against the law, and Morris ordered him to be arrested. Art went into hiding but he was betrayed by a man called O'Riordan. Two of Morris's guards shot Art dead on the Inch of Carriganimmy, roughly six miles northwest of Macroom. Seán Ó Tuama is of the opinion that sections I to IX were composed at Corraig in June; X to XVI on the night afterwards (the night of the wake at Rath Laoich) at which Art's sister and Eileen competed, with a brief intervention by Art's father; XXXI to XXVI were written after the wake. Art was buried first in Cill na Martar and later reburied in Cill Chré. Ó Tuama thinks that XXXV and XXXVI were composed then and that 'the school' is to be understood as Cill Chré Abbey. In his Inaugural Lecture in 1984 as Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, the English poet Peter Levy praised The Lament of Art O'Leary as 'the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole of the eighteenth century.' The two principal verse translations of the Lament are Eilís Dillon's and Thomas Kinsella's. Dillon's is a full translation while Kinsella's omits some sections. These translations have own qualities and the only comment I wish to make here is that I have endeavoured to do something different. Whether I have succeeded or not, others will decide. While I am not qualified to discuss the provenance or attribution of the original, I would like to make a couple of comments on my own present effort. The main thing I wish to remark is my adherence to the use of repetition which is a singular feature of the original. Such repetition is intrinsic to the lament genre just as repetition is intrinsic to a great deal of church liturgy: It ritualises the expression of emotion and thus orders it against the threat of chaos and inchoate outpouring. To eliminate such repetition for the sake of 'easier' and more conventional reading would seem to me to be a serious error, as if suggesting that the repetition was due to some rhetorical deficiency on the part of the original. My second comment is perhaps more serious. In its use of images and circumstantial detail, the original is unapologetically and specifically concrete and locally rooted. The poem makes no effort to universalise the grief it expresses. This, in my judgement, is not a limitation but a major source of its emotive strength and the touchstone of its authenticity. That its power should transcend its circumstantial localism has much to do with the strength of the form as it evolved in its transmission over many generations. It seems to me that there are at least three pitfalls to be avoided in any translation of the Lament: (1) not to cast the poem into Hiberno-English of the Gregory/Synge sort; (2) not to use a colourless standard English; (3) not to tidy up the poem into an easily readable, conventional English, by eliminating repetitions or unusual turns of phrase. No easy task, one must admit. How successful or otherwise I have been is the business of the reader. That the translation contains awkward and unusual turns-of-phrase or syntax I am in no doubt, but my hope is that these will be perceived as a matter of fidelity to the original and not through any deficiency on my part. The version offered here is based on a literal draft made for me by my good friend and colleague, Séamus Ó Cróinín. The poet Trevor Joyce generously allowed me to use whole lines and phrases from a draft version he himself made of the Lament some years ago. Michael Smith |