A translation of Irish language poet Seán Ó Ríordáin's work, 30 years after his death, reveals his genius - and hints at the demons that haunted him, writes Mary Leland
'Behind the house is the land of youth," wrote the poet Seán Ó Ríordáin. We believed him, thinking of Oisín and Tír na nÓg, and we were wrong. Behind the house was the tigín, the little annex which was to become living-room, bedroom and study in an almost lifelong exile, built after Ó Ríordáin was stricken with tuberculosis at the age of 18. Born in 1916, he grew up in an era when TB was Ireland's leprosy, a communicable disease, feverish and fervent and treated by mandatory isolation. Or mistreated, as Ó Ríordáin believed, placing his faith in the miracle drug streptomycin which was denied him when it might have been most effective. "No streptomycin for me," quotes his biographer, Seán Ó Coileáin, "only Kyrie Eleison."
Ó Coileáin, emeritus professor of modern Irish at UCC, is more than Ó Ríordáin's biographer and one of his two literary executors (the other is film-maker Seán Ó Mórdha). He was a devoted friend who came late in the poet's life and one of the few who lasted to the end. In this year of the 30th anniversary of Ó Ríordáin's death he supports the New Island publication of Selected Poems of Seán Ó Ríordáin in Translationby poet Greg Delanty, the first comprehensive - or almost - English-language collection of Ó Ríordáin's work.
For copyright reasons the poems are not accompanied by their Irish originals; Ó Ríordáin left no will and his texts remained with his publishers Sairseal agus Dill until the closure of that company, but there was no full-scale translation of Ó Ríordáin during his lifetime. Although sales of the book were halted suddenly before its launch last week due to legal discussions between solicitors for Sairseal Ó Marcaigh, who hold the copyright, and the translator, Greg Delanty, this book would be an important widening of Ó Ríordáin's potential readership. Publisher Edwin Higel of New Island said that he was confident that an amicable solution to the issues would be found in the very near future.
"These are ghosts of the real poems," says Delanty, "the nearest you can go in another language, and I would prefer to be able to include the Irish even if only to make obvious what I have done, what licences I have taken."
A writer whose use of the Irish language was modern, almost anarchic - or so his detractors thought - and innovative, Ó Ríordáin "remade the language", Delanty believes. "He was having a great time with it. He could be difficult to translate, but that's not a reason for the world not to know about him." Delanty, a graduate of UCC and poet-in-residence at St Michael's College, Vermont, insists that the truth he seeks is that of a sensibility to the work, to its rhythms and song, although in translation this will be "a different music".
That music was charted in a definitive essay by the late Seán Ó Tuama, himself a friend and promoter of Ó Ríordáin for years, where he describes his fellow poet as creating a new frisson in Gaelic-Irish literature with the publication of Adhlacadh Mo Mháthar(The Burial of my Mother) in 1945. Writing in Repossessions (1995), Ó Tuama traces the influence of Hopkins, Eliot and even St John of the Cross, one of Ó Ríordáin's favourite authors, but distinguishes his colleague's "exuberant and inventive imagery" as his principal poetic quality, given a more Irish, more homely shape in what was to become the focus of much of his work from then on: "The struggle for stability - for some belief, or person, to give meaning to his life . . ."
For a while it seemed that Ó Ríordáin had found that person, the unnamed woman to whom he dedicates his first book, Eireaball Spideoige. But if the poem Saoirse was written, as Ó Coileáin explains, at a time when he thought he was about to marry, and is understood as expressing the freedom of public normality implied by common purposes and practices, it could also be interpreted (it seems to me to defy any other interpretation) as a prenuptial denunciation of the life Ó Ríordáin would embrace through marriage. Just as well, then, that she called it off. Yet how does one unpick the stitches of a poet's life, especially when its record is crafted in so fine and sharp a needlepoint as this one, and in a confined language? "Needle" should perhaps read scalpel; Ó Ríordáin was disparaged by his peers and suffered; he was to take his revenge in the occasionally fierce columns published in The Irish Timesover 10 years from 1967.
These had been introduced by news editor Donal Foley and are remembered by historian John A Murphy as politically woefully under-developed and blazing with self-righteous indignation. These and the diaries he kept for 30 years anatomise the apparently contained world of Irish-language literature, revealing it as a universe of prejudices, rivalries and qualifications - nothing new there! Both map and mine-detector are required for its navigation, and the intimate explosions, which Ó Tuama underestimated in his use of "frisson", cratering the dust around Ó Ríordáin's reputation, still have their reverberations and, perhaps, their victims.
He was born, one of three children, in the Cork Gaeltacht of Ballyvourney, where he moved between the Irish-speaking community of his paternal grandparents in which Gaelic was still the literary medium, and his own home where English was his mother's tongue. A few years after his father's death, the family moved to Inniscarra, a riverside village close to Cork city, where Ó Ríordáin finished his schooling at the North Monastery. This was his first exile, separated from the native folklore and inherent nationalism of a reverberant hinterland.
As he wrote in Fill Arís, the soul does not desert its home. It was years before he could replace either loss: the nationalism through his loyalty to Daniel Corkery's vision of an all-Irish and (although this perhaps with less conviction) all-Catholic Ireland, and his Irish identity, trapped in "this language half-mine" through his discovery of the Kerry Gaeltacht of Dún Chaoin. This was where he thought - rather improbably, according to Ó Tuama - that his real self could be realised:"But anyone who has felt the deep, though transitory, healing quality of a rural Gaeltacht district in summer will forgive him for overstating the case."
Delayed by illness, he went to work as a clerk for Cork Corporation. "I didn't have a BA degree," he used to explain, "I had a degree of TB" - and it was a qualification, according to Ó Coileáin, at which he worked very hard. He continued to live with his mother until her death and remained at Inniscarra until his own, his 28 years as a clerk for Cork Corporation constantly interrupted by hospitalisation and also by the occasional batter. He took early retirement in 1965 - officially for "fibrosis of the lungs" - but two years later he was appointed part-time lecturer at UCC where his duties were so minimal that at times he refused to cash what he considered undeserved cheques.
No one considers them undeserved now. Nuala Ní Dhomhnall, Liam Ó Muirthile, Michael Davitt, Gabriel Rosenstock, the group still called the Inntipoets after the magazine they founded at UCC, were among those he influenced and encouraged. His distrust of systems and authority appealed to younger writers, and it is interesting to see how many poets writing in the Irish language today have among their rites of recognition the Seán Ó Ríordáin Award for New Poems in Irish. Few diligent surveys of contemporary Irish literature ignore his work, and Greg Delanty's fervour for this undertaking includes his belief that, if it is accepted that Ó Ríordáin is the most important poet writing in Irish, then "it's ridiculous that no one knows his work if they don't have Irish."
There's something of the missionary, or the advocate, in this, with Delanty anxious to promote Ó Ríordáin's playfulness and sense of fun, "his affirmation of life!" Much of the work concerns an abiding struggle to define and acknowledge the duality of self, the persona searching for a place in, or even a route through, different and possibly irreconcilable worlds. But even so, there is sprightliness, mischief-making, despite the social distrust and the intellectual loneliness which sometimes congealed into a gaping abyss of despair.
That these insecurities were constant, implacable and often terrifying seems beyond debate. "Terror" is a word used both by Ó Tuama, who relishes at the same time Ó Ríordáin's darts of nonchalant humour, and by Ó Coileáin. Ó Tuama, authoritatively claiming that Ó Ríordáin "above all other writers of Irish had brought 'modern' literature in Irish into the mainstream 'modern' European tradition", saw that even his most memorable work recorded his deep sense of terror and isolation. Ó Coileáin, with Séamus Ó Coigligh and Séamus Murphy among the few friends Ó Ríordáin did not eventually discard, knew the writer intimately: the primary purpose of his creativity was, he says, "to express in language a terror which goes beyond writing; he desperately needed language, needed it, in a way, more than any other writer I knew."
He has read through the diaries which informed so much of his book Seán Ó Ríordáin: Beatha agus Saothar(1982), and which are now with UCD, but says he will not - could not - publish them. "The journey through them is incredibly painful. They are what he was, and it's a journey I will not make again."
Awarded an honorary D.Litt by the National University of Ireland in 1976, Seán Ó Ríordáin died on February 21st 1977, aged 60. John A Murphy, asked if he liked Ó Ríordáin, replies that he "liked meeting him". So did I, the few times it happened; I remember enjoying the slanting, low-brimmed glance from under his natty hat. That neatness and the infrequent forays to the Oyster Tavern were the public facade of an Irish poet who travelled so little that he was over 50 before he went to Dublin. Behind them was the misery of his illness, the dreaded night fevers endured alone since boyhood in his little gulag at Inniscarra, the dismal annex of which, remembers John A Murphy, he was so ashamed, ar chúl an tí.
• A conference on Seán Ó Ríordáin is to be held at UCD on Friday and Saturday. Cork County Council, UCC and Raidió na Gaeltachta are continuing a series of talks at County Hall, Cork tomorrow and Tuesday 23rd and in Ballyvourney on Tuesday 30th. The film Mise Seán Ó Ríordáin, featuring Louis de Paor and directed by Traolach Ó Buachalla was screened last month at the Documentary Film Festival in Dublin.
