Reviews

• The work of cultural recovery still goes on, and one of its milestones was the publication in 1981 of An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Foras na Gaeilge), edited and translated by Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella. This is a treasure-book of the poems and songs of the period, with its tragedy leavened by a wonderful variety of love songs, humorous pieces, epigrams, lullabies and prayers. The emphasis in the renderings is on fidelity, as it should be, but Kinsella is a poet throughout. One might in a fussy moment have wished for complete texts of “The Lament for Art O’Leary” and “The Midnight Court,” two of the great long showpieces of Irish verse, but that’s all the complaining I’m going to do. Here are riches, newly uncovered.

• Desideravo proprio un testo bilingue che mi consentisse di verificare la lingua originaria accanto all'inglese. Adoro la poesia e penso che sia impossibile la traduzione dall'originale ad altra lingua senza perdere molto della sua fragranza e bellezza. Grazie a questo testo posso cercare di immaginare il suono e le sfumature semantiche nascoste nel messaggio poetico. E' una raccolta antologica che copre tre secoli di storia della letteratura raccogliendo esempi significativi di vari stili poetici indici di una evoluzione interna del gusto e degli avvicendamenti storici e politici irlandesi ; contemporaneamente passa attraverso di essi la vicenda umana ed esistenziale di un popolo.

• A superb overview of the response of The Gaelic Irish to the corrosive oppression vested upon them by the English. In Irish with translations.

• This book has been reprinted since its original publication. The copy I bought from Amazon is one of the reprints, and it was done the right way. The current publisher is Foras na Gaeilge, which participated in the first-edition publication years earlier. So my copy dates from 2002 rather than the late 1900's. It truly appears to have been reproduced faithfully in every particular, nothing cheap or pirated about it. That this anthology, printing next to each other the Gaelic original poems with the English translations by the late Thomas Kinsella, answered a demand from many readers and buyers of books, is evident from the additional anthologies published between then and now, filling the same niches. I have now seen an anthology in which each poem is represented three times: once, in its original Gaelic; once, in a literal prosaic translation into English by its editor (who shall not be named here); and a third time in some English translation which has previously been published and recognized as poetry in its own right by those who never comprehended the original. There are other collections more or less similar to these. An Duanaire, solidly prepared and researched, and tastefully presented, will probably be with us for the long term.

• Condizioni pressoché perfette pur essendo usato. Molto soddisfatto

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