Loose Leaves/Sadbh: The 20th-century Portuguese poet of Irish descent, Alexandre O'Neill (caricature below), will be celebrated in Dublin next month with an evening in his honour at Poetry Ireland's headquarters. O'Neill (1924-1986) was related to the O'Neills of Clanaboy in Co Antrim.
At the event, academic Pat O'Connell, who has written books on the Irish colleges in Lisbon and Alcalá de Henares, outside Madrid, will speak about the O'Neills in Portugal. O'Connell also plans to write books on the other Irish colleges in Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Madrid and Salamanca. Alexandre O'Neill was, says O'Connell, an O'Neill on his maternal side and used the name as his pen name.
"His family was a branch of the main O'Neill clan of Tyrone," she explains. "Members of his branch of the family left for Portugal in the mid-18th century because of the Penal Laws and the difficulties for Catholics like them."
Other speakers will include the Portuguese ambassador, Fernando d'Oliveira Neves; the director of the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, Clara Ferreira Alves; and the poet and scholar, David Butler, who will read some of his translations of O'Neill's poems.
"He lived through the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal and that is the background to a lot of his poetry, so much of it is fuelled by anger," he says. Some of this emanated from O'Neill's love of a French girl, Nora Mitrani. When she left Portugal (she later committed suicide) the regime refused him a passport to follow her, a predicament that forms the background to one of his most famous poems, 'Um Adeus Português' (A Portuguese Farewell'):
You could not remain a prisoner with me
Of the tiny pain that every one of us
Carries gently by the hand
That tiny pain à la portuguèse
That is so tame it is almost vegetal
Another lighter side was O'Neill's proficiency with puns. "He worked in advertising as well as journalism and play on words was second nature to him and is evident in his creative work," says Butler, adding that O'Neill was influenced by the great Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, and by the humanist side of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo.
He had a strong sense of himself as an O'Neill, once declaring: "I am the son of an Irish lord. I will take possession of those emerald estates when my father kicks the bucket. This waiting makes me impatient, since I am very fond of Irish coffee and of the shamrock . . ."
It is there, for example, in the poem translated by Butler as 'Self Portrait':
Regarding love? He believes in love (or he wouldn't be an O'Neill!)
And has the whim to know how to make it . . .
The Dublin event is organised by the Portuguese embassy in association with Poetry Ireland and with support from the Portuguese cultural organisation, Instituto Camões.
The event starts at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, December 8th, at Poetry Ireland, 120 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2. It is open to the public and free of charge. Details: embpordub@yahoo.co.uk
A sure winner
A Dublin-born poet, Joe Kane, has won the £5,000 Duncan Lawrie Bank First Prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition for his poem, 'The Boy Who Nearly Won the Texaco Art Competition', some lines of which run evocatively as follows:
he put red flowers in the front of the picture and daffodils in the bottom corners
and his dog major chewing a bone and mrs murphys two cats tom and jerry
and milo the milkman with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth
and his merville dairy float pulled by his wonder horse trigger
that would walk when he said click click and the holy family
in the top right corner with the donkey and cow
and sheep and baby jesus and got the 40A bus
on monday morning in to abbey street to hand
it in and the man on the door said
thats a sure winner
The judges of the biennial event this year are Jamie McKendrick, Tom Paulin and Jean Sprackland. Kane has published poems in The SHOp and Envoi and came third in the Patrick Kavanagh Awards this year and second in the Smurfit Samhain International Poetry Competition, also this year.