Conveying the ‘Kick’ of the Original: W. B. Yeats's Late-career Engagement with Frank O’Connor's Translations of Irish Language Poetry

Abstract

This essay explores the collaboration between W. B. Yeats and Frank O’Connor in the translation of Irish language poetry in the 1930s, examining the nature and extent of their partnership and its impact on Yeats’s work in that decade. The focus is on three Irish poems, two of which were composed by Aogán Ó Rathaille (c.1670–1726) – comparative analyses make it clear that O’Connor and Yeats shaped generally transparent translations and that their new poems mediated the ‘kick’ and ‘excitement’ of the original verse across the gulfs of time and language. Preoccupied by the loss of poetic audiences, Yeats was especially attracted to the relationship which he imagined to have existed between the Irish bards and their aristocratic patrons, and he took advantage of his editorship of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse to introduce the translated poems of this humiliated and suppressed tradition to a new and wider audience. His accomplished literary ballad ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ provides compelling evidence that Yeats’s encounter with these eloquent invocations of despair and loss creatively inspired him, not only stylistically but also thematically.