Look Back to Look Forward: Frank O' Connor's Complete Translations from the Irish

While Frank O’Connor was known primarily as one of Ireland’s finest short-story writers, he was also an accomplished translator. In the long line of Irish writers given to translating poems in Irish into poems written in English – a tradition stretching back at least as far as Jonathan Swift – he stands out above all the rest.

Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s, Frank O’Connor published 121 translations that give voice to the full range of this centuries-old tradition. Collected here in full for the first time, O’Connor’s work has been carried over into English. The collection includes the Irish-language sources for all 121 translations along with literal translations, enabling the reader to see what O’Connor started from.

Thanks to Frank O’Connor’s profound love of his country’s language and its rich, literary history – ‘a literature of which no Irishman need feel ashamed’ – these voices from Ireland’s past can still be heard.