In his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Peter Levi famously described it as `the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole eighteenth century’. Now, with Lament for Art O'Leary, a new version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s lament for her husband, a victim of Penal Laws and personal grudge, Vona Groarke joins a list of diverse writers who have translated all or part of it, from Frank O’Connor and Eilís Dillon to Thomas Kinsella and Paul Muldoon.
This version renews the passionate rage and desire of a pregnant widow for her flamboyant husband, shot down while riding his famed brown mare on 4 May 1773. Revisiting the Irish tradition of the funeral lament or ‘keen’, this poem’s vigour and sincerity speak beautifully both of its time and place, and to our own. The enlightening introduction elaborates the context of `the meeting point of a cultured imagination and a cultural inheritance’. Alison Brackenbury has written of being ‘seduced by the haunting, time-defying poems of Vona Groarke’ – qualities Vona Groarke, one of the outstanding poets of her generation, brings now to bear on this iconic poem.
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Vona Groarke’s Lament for Art O’Leary is her first major work of translation. She joins a number of other Irish writers who have published versions of the poem, including Thomas Kinsella and Brendan Kennelly. In her introduction Groarke acknowledges the difficulties involved in producing a new version of a work already so familiar to readers: her decision to draw on existing English versions, rather than depend on the original text in Irish, is not only an acknowledgment of the language that she is more comfortable working with, but also an implicit tribute to the richness and variety of these translations. It is fitting too, for a poem so clearly aware of its own traditional lineage, that the approach should encompass its many textual manifestations yet also accommodate the subtle, penetrative detail that is so much a part of Groarke’s own original work.
What is most striking about this version of the lament is the way it engages with both the poem’s public and private dimensions. The caoine is a public performance, a characteristic that facilitated the poem’s oral preservation before it was finally recorded in written form. Yet this lament is also a private utterance, a deeply personal expression of grief. The death of Art O’Leary took place in 1773, the culmination of a lengthy feud with Abraham Morris, High Sheriff of Macroom; the lament was the creation of his wife, Eibhlin Dhubh Nf Chonaill. Hers is not the only voice in the poem, however. Groarke follows Kinsella’s example in her prominent inclusion of the perspective of Art’s sister so that we hear two female voices, both grief-stricken yet contesting in their account of the man and his death. Art’s sister emphasises the absence of his wife – she records that Eibhlin was in bed during Art’s wake and contradicts the belief that his wife was the first to find his body after the killing: ‘no priest beside you, / but an old woman over you / with a filthy, ragged coat’. Though there is some uncertainty concerning the attribution of certain sections of the poem, Groarke chooses to offer more extensive passages in the voice of the sister than is the case in most other versions, and it is in these parts of the poem that the representation of family acquires its most resonant expression: ‘I dreamt that the moon-white walls of home / were withering around us, / that our childhood had dried up / and left us bewildered.’ The extent to which Groarke’s translation draws attention to the link between the fate of family and the fate of nation is suggestive of her contextualised reading of the poem and her continuing sensitivity to the wider significance of private histories.
Here the sister’s voice is the one that adheres most closely to the rhythm of the original Irish, as exemplified in the translations by Kinsella and by Angela Bourke. ln the famous opening lines Groarke departs from the incantatory quality of the Irish poem, with its repetitive line-endings, favouring instead a more meditative style:
‘I knew I would have you/if it meant/stepping out of my whole life, / carrying nothing with me.’ Though a more emphatic rhythm does reassert itself in the bitter personal energies of the poem, something of this mild allusive quality remains throughout, especially in the reworking of the originaJ’s most startling images:
Until that selfsame mare of yours
Came to me with her bridle awry,
withers smattered
with your heart’s damson,
and the polished saddle,
where I last saw you bolt upright,
lopsided and bereft.
As Bourke has noted, the caoine is a form designed to be remembered. In this version, Groarke does not rely only on the energy of the performedline but on the arrangement of its images. The pace of the poem is slowed in this version and the weighting of its memories is more calculated, inkeeping with what Groarke herself has called the ‘deliberate and artful’ nature of the poem. She closes this remarkable translation with a familiar image from the original poem, yet not its final one. It is an image that not only sums up the grief of the poem’s first author, but of the powerful yet enigmatic quality of the earlier text: the image of the heart as a chest with the lock rusted shut.
— Lucy Collins, Irish University Review
Book Information
Year Published: 2008
Details: 40pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 85235 444 2
Cover: ‘Ochre Horse’ by Stephen Lawlor courtesy of the artist
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