Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors’ Notes

As a child in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, Moya Cannon grew up in both of Ireland’s languages, with Irish preceding English. It is, of course, a blessing to learn the nuance of differing languages early, to discover that words are seldom fungible. Reading her ruminative essay on the nature of translation, we sense that the pleasure of differentiation still animates Cannon’s ongoing love affair with the world’s literature. As a schoolgirl, and later as a college student and a poet, works from other languages have always come to Cannon as irresistible gifts; taking a cue from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Task of the Translator,” she reflects that translating is, at bottom, a healing act, and for the reader, an encounter with an alienated aspect of one’s self. The University of St. Thomas presented the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry to Moya Cannon in 2001. Her collections are Oar (1990), The Parchment Boat (1997), and Carrying the Songs (2007).

Patrick Kavanagh famously cultivated a range of public personae and campaigns, the most audacious of which stemmed from a conviction that he ought be recognized as Ireland’s national poet. It was in pursuing that dream, argues Dr. Matthew Brown, that Kavanagh undertook the grand gesture of a 1954 libel suit against an old-guard newspaper, the Leader. In the witness stand, however, the poet came across as by turns naive, cunning, and implausible. When the jury decided against him, Kavanagh was a broken man. Here, Brown teases out dimensions to the celebrated trial that go beyond the parade of personalities in the courtroom—among them, the intricacies of midcentury Irish periodical culture; the inhibiting effect of Irish libel law; and the transformative effect of the decision on Kavanagh’s later poetry, amounting to a version of the “fortunate fall.” Matthew Brown’s articles have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Irish Studies Review, Radical Teacher, and the Irish Review.

A sometime resident of Galway and a frequent presenter at Irish Studies conferences throughout the United States, Donna L. Potts’s first collection of poetry is Waking Dreams, due soon from Salmon Books. Her title is well chosen; three of the seven poems in our “Filíocht Nua—New Poetry” feature open with a dream, while others hinge on strange events and images pregnant with potential meaning: the flying dishes of St. Colman’s legend, “a dark pool I want to wade into,” and a box of knives buried in the yard. And yet, Potts’s poems do not leave us mystified. Rather, they close with clarity, as in the final line of “Burren,” which ends crisply with the sight of “bright, unambiguous zinnias.” Dr. Potts has previously published studies of Patrick McCabe and of Nuala Ní Domhnaill in New Hibernia Review. The University of Missouri Press will publish her next book, Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, in 2012.

Roddy Doyle’s “Last Roundup” trilogy has extended the life and times of the fictional character Henry Smart, a picaresque figure who wanders through most of the major events of modern Irish history. In The Dead Republic (2010), Doyle posits a collaboration between Smart and filmmaker John Ford in the making of 1952’s The Quiet Man, which according to the novel was meant to be based on Smart’s own life. For Dr. Sinéad Moynihan, this improbable premise opens a window not only on Doyle’s “postrevisionist” sense of history, but also on his thinking about the nature of story itself. In its shuffling and reshuffling of versions of a single narrative, The Dead Republic invites us to rethink our ideas about the reliability of both sources and adaptations. Sinéad Moynihan is the author of numerous articles on contemporary Irish writing. Her book “Other People’s Diasporas”: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture will appear from Syracuse University Press later this year.

In Ireland, memory and myth often seep into one another, and Patrick Sarfield—a durable hero of the seventeenth-century Williamite wars—provides a vivid case in point. As Dr. John Gibney observes, historians enjoy only a...