The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue: Selected Poems

Louis de Paor is one of Ireland’s leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language poetry renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. He has worked closely on English translations of his poetry, with his co-translators fully engaging with the original poem in Irish. Keenly aware of the more destructive aspects of translation, he and his trio of translators, Kevin Anderson, Biddy Jenkinson and Mary O’Donoghue, have eschewed the modern fashion for so-called ＂versions＂, producing English translations which are as close as possible to the original Irish poems without sacrificing their tone, energy, clarity and lightness of touch. His selected poems in Irish was recently voted one of the top ten collections in Irish since the turn of the millennium. Irish-English dual language edition.

Louis de Paor was born in 1961 in Cork, and educated at Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh. He is one of Ireland’s leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language literary renaissance of the 1980s and 90s, editing the influential Irish-language journal Innti for a time. He spent time as a lecturer in Irish at University College Cork and Thomond College, Limerick, before moving to Australia in 1987, where he worked in local and ethnic radio in Melbourne and taught evening classes in Irish language and literature at Melbourne University and the Melbourne Council for Adult Education. He was Visiting Professor of Celtic Studies at Sydney University in 1993 and Visiting Fellow in 1992. He returned to Ireland in 1996 and worked as proof editor of the Irish language newspaper Foinse before being appointed Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway in 2000. He was Jefferson Smurfit Distinguished Fellow at the University of St Louis-Missouri in 2002 and received the Charles Fanning medal from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 2009. His most recent bilingual editions of his own poetry are Ag greadadh bas sa reilig / Clapping in the cemetery (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2005), agus rud eile de / and another thing (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2010), and The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2014), with Crooked Love / Grá fiar forthcoming in 2022. De Paor has collaborated with the Cork singer John Spillane under the name Gaelic Hit Factory, with uilleann piper Ronan Browne and Brooklyn based composer Dana Lyn. He has also published an anthology of 20th-century poetry in Irish, Coiscéim na haoise seo (1991), co-edited with Seán Ó Tuama; a bilingual edition of the selected poems of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, An paróiste míorúilteach / The miraculous parish (2011); and a critical edition of the selected poems of Liam S. Gógan, Míorúilt an chleite chaoin (2012). His bilingual anthology Leabhar na hAthghabhála / Poems of Repossession was published by Bloodaxe Books with Cló Iar-Chonnacht in 2016, continuing the line of Irish-language poetry where Thomas Kinsella’s earlier anthology An Duanaire, 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981) left off.