Best-Loved Poems From the Irish

From the canonical to the contemporary, this dual language anthology showcases the best of Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s translations from Irish. Described as ‘one of our leading translators of Irish poetry into English’ by Seamus Cashman, his translations are ‘indispensable’ (Bernard O’Donoghue), as they perfectly capture the metre and musicality of formal, classical poems, bringing them across, sound and sense, into English. He is equally skilled at translating free verse. From Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Aogán Ó Rathaille in the seventeenth century, through modernists Máirtín Ó Direáin and Seán Ó Ríordáin, to the contemporary Áine Ní Ghlinn and Cathal Ó Searcaigh, this selection collects some of the best and most memorable poems in the Irish language, ranging from the displacement and dispossession of the Irish in centuries past to genocide in Gaza today. It contains the great love songs and poems, poems of emigration, poems of people and place, a paean to the quenching of thirst, a prayer and An Phurgóid/The Purge, Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide’s long meditation on poets and poetry today. It is essential reading, not only for lovers of poetry but for anyone interested in the Irish tradition.