James Clarence Mangan's Oriental Translations and the Question of Origins

Abstract

HE WORK of the nineteenth-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849) has mainly been read in two ways. The first concerns his relationship with the Young Ireland movement, whose seminal formulations in the 1840s largely founded Irish nationalism. Mangan, who wrote much reputedly nationalist verse for nationalist journals in these years, has often been regarded as the one poetic genius of the movement, infused with the spirit of the nation and representing in his life the figure of a suffering Ireland. The actual implications for Young Ireland's ethically demanding ideology of the wayward and emotionally wretched life of this alcoholic and probably opium-addicted writer, and of his refusal ever to express full commitment to the nationalist cause, are generally obscured in accounts which see Mangan in this light. The second view is sustained by Mangan's having written between the epoch of British high Romanticism and the emergence of a distinct literary movement in Ireland with Yeats and, later, Joyce. As a Catholic writer who never left Ireland, and indeed scarcely ever left Dublin, Mangan is envisaged as the forerunner of a native Anglo-Irish tradition. Consequently, his writing has been read in terms of its failure to meet the standards of either of the poles between which it is located, as a falling-off from the Romanticism it seeks to continue, or as a misfired attempt to forge an Irish idiom. Clearly, both views can overlap. In either case, however, attention is rarely given to the specific nature of Mangan's writing in the context supplied by the historical conjuncture in which he wrote.1