Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s poems for two cultures – or one?

Gan Focal/Frugal Speech

poems by Gabriel Fitzmaurice, illustrated with paintings by Brenda Fitzmaurice (Arlen House, €15.00/£13.50)

Gabriel Fitzmaurice published his first book of poetry back in 1981, and he then combined his own writing with translations of other poets from the Irish. Eventually he was challenged to write himself in Irish.

He published a bilingual collection of children’s poems in 2010. This new bilingual edition for adults combines some 20 poems in English with his own Irish translations.

This is an interesting idea. But I wonder can the verses that a poet produces as translations of his own poems really be translations? Surely they are new poems on the same theme by the same poet. They cannot be the same class of things as translations of another poet’s poems.

In a personal afterword he discusses his relationship since childhood with the language. He was born in 1952 in Moyvane, where he still lives and where he taught school for his career. The last native Irish speaker in Moyvane died in the village back in 1927. So he says he lived between Irish and English since the age of four and another local language in between echoes of which can be heard in George Fitzmaurice and John B. Keane. He later studied other languages at St Michael’s in Listowel , as well as a full chorus of classical languages – “the same education that John Milton had in his time”, which is a striking thought.

This inter-linguistic rearing must now in some places be gaining yet more languages — will we soon have Irish/Polish, Irish/Igbo, Irish/Ukrainian poets?

But as I say, these are his poems, and they will make his readers alert to the interactions between the two languages he loves.

“I love and have a kindred feeling with the Irish language. I love to be in the Gaeltacht talking to my friends, particularly in CorcaDhuibhne. Irish is with me night and night. I often dream in Irish while I am sleeping. I speak Irish only to my friends. Because, to steal a phrase from the song, Irish is the loving language.”