The bi-lingual poet from County Limerick is profiled by John Scally

 

October 13th marks the 25th anniversary of the death of one of Ireland’s greatest poets Michael Hartnett (1941-1999).
A member of Aosdana and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award winner, he was best known for his ‘A Farewell To English’ (1975), a sequence of poems. After its publication, he pledged never to write again in the English language and returned to his native Newcastle West, Co Limerick.

However, he later moved back to live in Dublin, where he wrote bilingual collections including ‘A Necklace of Wrens’ (1987), ‘Poems to Younger Women’ (1988), and ‘The Killing of Dreams’ (1992).
In the later stage of his career he had been studying and translating the work of the three great Irish 17th-century poets – O Bruadair, Haicead and O Rathaille. The last major collection of his own work was ‘Selected and New Poems’ (1994).

Though he grew up in poverty — at times under the care of his Irish-speaking grandmother — Michael attended University College, Dublin for a year on a scholarship and was writing poetry by the early 1960s.

He wrote in both English and Irish and published translations from many languages. Like many others, he emigrated from rural Ireland to England in the 1960s. He returned to West Limerick in the mid-’70s and moved to Dublin about 10 years later.

He worked in a variety of jobs before taking up writing full-time. He was a former poetry editor of The Irish Times and co-editor of Arena. The Éigse Michael Hartnett, a poetry festival established in 2000, is held annually in Newcastle West, County Limerick, in his honour.

In my last conversation with Michael although it was clear that illness was taking a greater toll on his body, his fertile mind was as sharp as ever. He spoke to me with great passion about his interest in another great poet Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591).
Such was Michael’s interest in John that he translated all of his poems into Irish. Michael spoke to me about this passion.

“I am fascinated by Christianity and the figure of Christ. I constantly marvel at the fact that those who are followers of Christianity believe that even before we were born and long after we die, there is at work a provident, gracious God who has created us and loves us and wants us to share in God’s own life.

“This view shapes the Christian’s moral life by enabling them to live in faith, in hope and in love. Accordingly, Christianity issues us with an invitation into the heart of what it is to be human. I love the idea of the divinisation being most tellingly revealed by our humanisation.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own