Introducing Irish Poetry            -  A statement of Intent

 

Why do I read Poetry?

I believe that poetry puts you in touch with another human being's thoughts across cultures, geography and across time. Reading some of my favourite poets, I feel like I am having the most intimate conversation possible with another individual. Every poet gives you an insight into what it means to be human. The more poets you read the broader that spectrum of humanity gets. I think you can get to know the mind of a true poet better than you can the people who you live with on a daily basis.

How did I choose the poems  I will share with you today?

I have to be honest, the first priority was they had to be short. We don't have a lot of time to cover centuries of poetry, so brevity is paramount.
This is sad because there are so many wonderful long poems I would like to have presented you with. But I set a limit of a page, or a page and a half. This considerably reduced the poems I could read you and ruled out the great masterful sagas that best illustrate the Irish obsession with history and mythology. Ireland has its own equivalent tales like the Icelandic Sagas, but they run on for page after page. If you like the taster you get today, then I advise you to explore the tales of the legendary warrior Fionn Mac Cumhaill.

 

What is there about Irish poetry that makes it Irish?

 

As I hope to demonstrate, I think there are certain themes that appear in Irish Poetry that reflect what many Irish people would accept have been and still are national obsessions.  One I have already mentioned is history and mythology. There is an Irish saying that states: "History is alive and well and living in Ireland". Others include humour (the Irish have a good reputation as humorists) Religion (the bulk of medieval Irish poetry is focussed on this theme and after the Reformation, much religious poetry divides into Catholic and Protestant themes). Another theme is "Rural Life". Until relatively recently, most Irish people did not live in cities, but rather in rural settings on small farms or in small villages. Then there is the theme of  "Magic" - many Irish poems have surreal or dreamlike incidents in them. Yet another is "The End Times" many poems, not just the few here, deal with a dystopian vision of the future or a warning about where current political trends might lead.

Finally, the most Irish element, is of course the Irish language, which is underrepresented here, but which is still alive, though spoken as a native language by very few Irish people today compared with the use of English. Though there are signs of a revival, as the growing number of adult classes in the language and the recent hit film "Kneecap" demonstrate.

What language were these poems written in?

The earliest surviving poems were written either in Irish (Gaelige) or else in Latin, the language of the monks who wrote them down, or even, in many cases, composed them. Of course, as the old saying goes: "Poetry is what is lost in translation" -  and the language that all of these poems were published in (and in which I read them) is English. I have also translated them into my non-native Catalan. I did this by putting emphasis on the message of each poem, rather than the "poetical" aspects of the language. So, undoubtedly, that involved a further loss of their poetic essence. However, I am more interested in your sharing my feeling of being in contact with people from other eras and seeing that although their lives were very different, we still share the same humanity.