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. His dual-language selection The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue was published in 2014, following his selected poems, Rogha Dánta (2012), voted one of the top ten collections in Irish since the turn of the millennium. This new dual-language selection is mainly drawn from two other collections, Cúpla Siamach an Ama/The Siamese Twins of Time and Grá fiar/Crooked Love, with translations made by Louis de Paor with Kevin Anderson and Biddy Jenkinson. It shows a paring back of language and a greater flexibility of form in his poetry, as well as a preoccupation with the passage of time and its implications for both familial and sexual love. His narrative skill and inventiveness come together in the sequence ‘Lá dá raibh/One day’, which follows a day in the life of an imaginary village in the west of Ireland where the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, collide. This was adapted for a dual-language radio feature with music by Dana Lyn broadcast on RTÉ Lyric FM and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2021, which can be heard while reading the sequence in either language by scanning QR codes printed in the book.
About the author
Kevin Anderson is a Brussels-educated Dublin horn player whose films (with director Murray Grigor) include Sean Connery’s Edinburgh, The Demarco Dimension, Nineveh on the Clyde, and Is Mise an Teanga. His theatre work includes: The Musical Beasts; Men, an Irish Musical; and The Wolf and Peter. He is a co-translator of Louis de Paor’s dual language selections The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2014) and Crooked Love / Grá fiar (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2022).
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