Remakrs at Éigse Michael Hartnett
26th April 2012
A Chairde,
I am very pleased to be here at the opening of the Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary and Arts Festival for 2012. I would like to thank the County Arts Officer and coordinator of this event, Joan McKernan, for her kind invitation to speak to you today. I know that Joan and her team have nurtured and grown this important literary event over the past 12 years. This is not my first time attending, I was happy to come here and perform with Sean Keane some years ago.
[Tá áthas an domhain orm bheith anseo ag oscailt Éigse Féile Liteartha agus Ealaíon Michael Hartnett 2012. Ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil le hOifigeach na
n-Ealaíon sa Chontae agus comhordaitheoir na hócáide seo, Joan McKernan, as an gcuireadh a thug sí dom labhairt libh inniu. Tuigim go maith gur chuir Joan agus a foireann go mór le fás agus forbairt na hócáide liteartha tábhachtach seo le 12 bliain anuas. Ní hé seo mo chéad uair anseo. Bhí áthas orm teacht anseo agus cur i láthair a dhéanamh le Sean Keane roinnt blianta ó shin.]
It has been said that the highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.
If this is true, then the poet that Michael Hartnett became was just reward for a life lived with passion, and humanity.
Sadly, with his premature death in 1999, Michael’s unfolding as a poet reached its term. But in the years since, our understanding of the man has only grown. And our appreciation for the talent that marked him as different, has only deepened.
He was born in Newcastle West. In those early years, in the Limerick of the nineteen-forties and fifties, he would listen to his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, a native Irish speaker, talking to her friends in Irish. D’fhág sé seo rian láidir ar Mhícheál agus spreag sé é chun líofacht a bhaint amach sa teanga. Anois tá a fhios againn go raibh tionchar an-mhór ag an nGaeilge ar an obair a rinne sé ar feadh a shaoil.
As with so many of Michael’s generation, leaving school meant leaving Ireland. But even as he arrived in London’s Kilburn, poetry held him fast. He wrote as he worked; he wrote and lived his life. In 1966 he married, and two years later his first collection, Anatomy of a Cliché was published.
He was also a highly competent Irish language translator and his translations include poems from seventeenth-century poets Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Pádraigín Haicéad and early eighteenth-century poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaile. It was said of Michael that he was ‘the greatest translator of Irish language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.’1
[Ba aistritheoir Gaeilge den scoth é freisin agus i measc a chuid aistriúchán tá dánta ó fhilí na 17ú hAois Dáibhí Ó Bruadair agus Pádraigín Haicéad mar aon le file ó thús an 18ú hAois Aodhagán Ó Rathaile. Dúradh gurbh é Micheál “ an t-aistritheoir ab fhearr ar fhilíocht Gaeilge sa dara leath den 20ú hAois.”]
The nineteen-seventies brought the declaration that would mark his place in the popular mind: his farewell to English. Even now, a decade and more since his death, it determines his legacy. Or perhaps it’s better to say: it determines how that legacy is received.
As most are aware, the years that followed were not easy. Often, they were marked with loss, and darkened with fracture, and remorse. But they also saw his eventual return to writing in English. And with that return came the sense of a poet growing in the maturity and power of his craft. He was a confident poet and believed in the significance of poetry. He once asked, ‘muna bhfuil gá le filíocht cén fáth go bhfuil filí ann?’ (If there’s no need for poetry, why do poets exist?’)2 Creative expression in communities has always found a way to surface and enables people to engage with ideas which reveal something new and insightful about us, our culture and world.
However, Michael was no sentimentalist. He did not valorise the streets of the city, or the small fields of his youth. He knew too well that human nature has its own ecology, one resistant to rural and urban charm alike:
every whitewashed tourist’d village
holds a heart that cannot speak out,
lives a life of angered murmurs.
(The Person: Nox Agonistes)
There is no doubt that his peers held him in the highest regard. For Seamus Heaney, his was ‘one of the truest, most tested and most beloved voices in twentieth-century Irish poetry’.
And elsewhere, Seamus Heaney has made another, equally important observation.“Michael Hartnett's inspirations affected Irish poetry the way a power surge affects the grid: things quickened and shone when he published. Yet in spite of that, his achievement was unnoticed. Slight of build and disinclined to flaunt himself on the literary scene, he was always more focused on his creative journey than on career moves.”3You might say that, for Michael, status was a secondary consideration. His primary concern was rather the integrity of his poetic journey. For as he well knew, his was ‘a craft which demands respect’.
It takes a stubborn, brave resilience not just to make this choice, but to remain true to it. By their very nature, creative journeys tend towards forbidding departures, and uncomfortable destinations.
For a poet like Michael Hartnett, living on the pivot point of two languages, and two traditions, his creative journey demanded a deep - and deeply honest - engagement with the linguistic and cultural tensions that lie buried within the Irish psyche.
It was a journey that entailed risk to his reputation, both socially and as an artist. Fellow Munster poet Michael Coady has pointed out:
‘A Farewell to English initiated controversy as well as admiration. The rhetorical mode was part of the Gaelic tradition, though the title poem risked self-indulgent dramatics in angry reaction to the troubled and hysterical political atmosphere then current. It was as though Michael Hartnett was in reality pumping up the pressure to convince himself, even though his decision meant the voluntary laying aside of a large part of his own linguistic gift.’4
As Declan Kiberd understands it, however, really 'what fascinated Hartnett was the very act of translation, of carrying something over from one code to another. His true reality was not that of a man securely established in Irish or English, but that of a nomad forever crossing between the two.'
There’s a great measure of truth to this. And if Anthony Burgess was right to say that translation is not a matter of words only, but of making intelligible a whole culture, then the enormity of the task Michael Hartnett had set himself becomes clear.
He returned to writing in English after the breakdown of his marriage, and his move from Limerick to Dublin. His collection Inchicore Haiku, was published in 1985. As he put it: ‘My English dam bursts/and out stroll all my bastards./Irish shakes its head’
It was two years after this damburst that fellow poet Dennis O'Driscoll had the chance to interview him. He asked Michael whether Irish or English was his default language. His response was fascinating: "I've got over the notion of having intellectual schizophrenia about it. There was a period, especially in the beginning, when one line would come out in English and the next in Irish. 'The Retreat of Ita Cagney,' for example, almost broke my heart and indeed my mind to write, because both languages became so intermeshed. One is not a translation of the other. They are two versions of the same poem; but what the original language is I don't know."5
In a sense, it’s this final line that illuminates most clearly the poet’s creative journey. In all times and places, people have succumbed to intellectual polarities. Time and again, they have recklessly fashioned makeshift absolutes out of conditional circumstances. Time and again, they have chosen a sham purity over real integrity. Time and again, they have settled for uniformity over unity. And time and again, they have found themselves the poorer for it.
As an artist, then, it seems Michael Hartnett’s triumph was to reach beyond the loud contests and rivalries of circumstance, and find within himself the ground of unvoiced meaning common to all men: One is not a translation of the other. They are two versions of the same poem; but what the original language is I don’t know.
Éigse Michael Hartnett commemorates this achievement. In 2000, the festival first set down roots in the local community, and each year since has delivered both Irish and international poets, such as Eva Bourke, Paul Durcan, Fanny Howe, David Whyte, Paddy Bushe, James Harpur. Actors and musicians also feature regularly on the programme, reading or interpreting Hartnett's work, whose resonance and form simply invites performance.
Éigse Michael Hartnett, Limerick County Council and the Arts Council deserve equal recognition for The Michael Hartnett Poetry Award, which was established by all three collectively to mark Michael Hartnett's contribution to literature in English and Irish. The award of €6,500, made on the basis of a third, or subsequent book of poetry, is given in alternate years to books of poetry in the Irish and English language. What is unique about the Michael Hartnett Annual Poetry Award is how it targets poets at mid-career in their writing life with the specific aims of encouraging and supporting their writing endeavour.
Up to and including 2011, with poet Peter Sirr as last year's recipient, thirteen poets have been awarded the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award in its twelve year existence. Amongst these recipients have been Vona Grourke, Áine Uí Fhoghlú, and James Harpur. I feel this award is the testament to his life’s work that Michael would be most pleased with.
Last year, his son Niall spoke eloquently of how, what his father achieved in the past, we all know; but that what he is going to achieve in the future, we are still learning.
I agree. I would only add that that is not all we are learning; for what Irish poets will achieve in the future is - thanks to the legacy of Niall’s father - something else we are still learning.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.
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*General Reference Source: John McDonagh and Stephen Newman , Remembering Michael Hartnett by Eamon Maher, Irish University Review, Autumn-Winter 2006
The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it – John Ruskin
1 Declan Kiberd: The Double Vision of Michael Hartnett from Rembering Michael Hartnett, John McDonagh & Stephen Newman Eds, Four Courts Press, 2006.
2 Gabriel Fitzmaurice; Introduction, Irish Poetry Now.Wolfhound Press, 1993.
3 Seamus Heaney; Introduction, Remembering Michael Hartnett.
4 Michael Coady; www.eigsemichaelhartnett.ie
5 Thomas O’Grady, Review, Notes from His Contemporaries: A Tribute to Michael Hartnett; http://www.bostonirish.com/arts/appraising-michael-hartnett