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Well, to be honest there was an interesting start to this particular project because ...
a couple of years ago, I had an idea ...
I was interested in spiritual poetry, in that tradition.
And I was teaching a course on spiritual poetry here and ...
I was very interested in the material and ...
the problem I had at the time was that there was no central textbook I could recommend to the students.
And I went to Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín in Cois Life and I mentioned to her that I had this idea ...
that maybe we could put this project together;
a collection of Irish spiritual poems.
And she was very interested in the idea straight away and, to make a long story short ...
that book came out in 2005.
Lón Anama was its title of it and they did a great job of it in terms of design and everything.
And about a year after that, I got a call from Caoilfhionn to say that she had another idea,
about the same type of collection but it would be love poems ...
from the entire Irish language tradition.
So that's how this particular project started and I set to work then ...
and the book came about eventually.
There's so much material available and, of course, amongst the themes of life it's one of the biggest.
Everybody's dealing with love in one way or another ...
whether it's love between a woman and a man, or people of the same gender or a mother and son or parent and child, you understand what I mean.
I had no doubt that the book would have a draw and that there would be demand for it,
when I heard the idea from Caoilfhionn, just like there was demand for Lón Anama when it came out.
People have a constant interest in religion and in spiritual matters and in love matters too.
It's such a central aspect of life, basically.
When the final poems were going into the book, when I was choosing the poems and the ones I liked the best ...
I have to say, almost every one of them ...
because I had a few hundred poems at the start and there's about 75 or 80 in the book ...
I love them all because I think I made the best choice, in my personal opinion.
But I have to say, one of the ones I like the best is from that corpus of love poems ...
you know those sort of formal love poems from the fifteenth to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.
There's one of those which I really like ...
I'll find it now ... "Gluais, a litir, ná léig sgís".
The man is separated from his woman. They're not together.
He writes a letter to her and ...
he's very jealous of the letter, that it will be in the woman's company,
while he'll be away from her.
And there's that physical passion and sensuousness to the poem.
But there's humour in the poem too, it's light-hearted ...
and I always like it because I think it gets to the heart of it ...
especially when two people are madly in love with each other and the passion is high ...
that it shows in a very polished way that love relationship between two people.
That's one of the first that comes to mind when you mention my favourite poem.
But there's another range in the book, there are poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in the book ...
there are poems by Cathal Ó Searcaigh which always make a big impression on me because of the lyricism of the language.
And then there are poem which/ you might say, are crazy ...
by Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, a young poet from Belfast ...
who's a bit anarchistic in his poetry.
They're the sort of choices I'd mention to you now.
We felt at the beginning that it was important that there would be translations ...
because, basically, there are a lot of people who have Irish and who are interested in poetry and they read poetry and they read this type of work.
Our plan was to expose a wider readership to the gems of the Irish language.
And, therefore, we had no choice but to make the Irish version and the English translation available.
And we have a long tradition in Irish literature of doing such a thing.
When I did Lón Anama, I did most of the translations and ...
that was a lot of work and effort, especially as you went back ...
to earlier Irish, to an earlier tradition because Old Irish is quite difficult to deal with.
The greatest challenge, I think, is to stay faithful to the message of the original poem ...
and to the wishes of the poet according to how he or she wrote the poem originally.
And it's not always easy to identify the original meaning of the poet correctly ...
and to put that across in the translation. You do your best but, at the end of the day,
in a way, it's a new poem, because it's a poem in another language.
But you're trying to do justice not just to the original poem, but to the original poet, to the poet who wrote the poem.
Of course, there are other aspects to it: the style, the language used.
For example, one of the biggest difficulties with translation, in my opinion, is if there is a word play of a certain type or ...
a type of cleverness to the language in the poem in Irish,
it's not always easy to express that in English.
And, for example, the poems I translated myself in this book, because I did some of them myself ...
the approach I took was to stick rigidly to the original and to provide a translation which was quite close to it because I'm not a poet myself ...
and I think that, in some way, you need to be a poet yourself, or be a translator with experience and with understanding ...
to provide a poetic version of the original poem.
And I wasn't always confident in myself in that regard.
But, this time, I felt that it would be much better ...
to have a range of people translating things to English.
And, as it happened, there were already English translations in various magazines of many of the poems which I chose ...
and I thought I should use those translations.
So, the approach which I had was that I would make contact with the poet and say "I want to use the Irish version of your poem ...
and I see there's a translation by Gabriel Rosenstock or Thomas Kinsella available.
Would you be happy if I used that version,? Or here's an English version which I've done myself, or ...
the third choice, you could provide an English version if you like."
Does modern poetry or modern literature have the same richness?
That's a question which has a great breadth, I have to say.
It depends, as the philosopher says, on your understanding of the word richness, I think.
There are people who criticise modern literature for the language not being as rich as it was in the past.
To be honest, I don't agree with that opinion.
Richness involves more than language, there's style; there's material, there's the handling of material ...
there's the handling of language.
Writers and literary people in the Irish language in the 20th century ... it's very clear that there's still a great richness to Irish language literature.
And if you look at the new generation of writers and poets who are emerging ...
they have a totally different kind of richness. They're handling the material in a new era ...
and each era changes and I don't think that any era or any group has a monopoly on material, or on language or on literature from era to era.
Things change, the product which comes out of the creative process changes.
So, I'm not worried about the standard of poetry, say.
People say, for example, that there's a lot of modern poetry being written at the moment and that some of it is maybe not as good as the rest of it ...
but that was always true. If you go back to the beginning of the literary revival ...
there are people now, critics, who would say that that isn't poetry at all, that it's bland language rather than poetry.
That variety was there. But I don't think I have any doubt about the richness of modern Irish language literature.