Sir, - It was heartening to read in The Irish Times Magazine (November 24th) that Dermot Bolger had liked and been influenced as a young person by the poems of Francis Ledwidge and Patrick Pearse. But the one, however, that he tells us really set his mind alight was a poem in Irish, An Long (The Ship) by Pβdraig de Br·n.
This poem, of course (but incredibly Dermot Bolger doesn't seem to know this), is a translation of a well-known poem written in English by Oliver St John Gogarty and first published in 1917. Although the work of the young Gogarty had been chosen by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch for the Oxford Book of English Verse (1300-1921), it wasn't until almost 30 years later, when Yeats included 17 Gogarty poems in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse that Gogarty was recognised, in Yeats's words, as "one of the great lyric poets of our age".
To complicate matters further, Dermot Bolger has provided us with a somewhat tepid English translation by Theo Dorgan of the Irish version of Gogarty's poem. One would have thought Messrs Bolger and Dorgan, as men of letters, would somehow have stumbled on the original poem in English, which appeared in so many books of verse and was anthologised.
Incidentally, the translator, Mgr Pβdraig de Br·n, admired Gogarty greatly and was the celebrant of the requiem Mass at Gogarty's funeral in Galway in 1957. After the Mass, chatting in the porch, I asked him why he had not insisted on crediting Gogarty as the author of the original poem of which An Long was such a fine translation. Pβdraig de Br·n's explanation was that, as a well-known surgeon, Oliver St John Gogarty did not want it to be known that he wrote poetry, as it would affect his practice.
This is hardly a satisfactory explanation. However, in the Civil War Senator Gogarty had been on the opposite side to his dear friend Pβdraig de Br·n and that good man might have considered it impolitic (he was, after all, Sean MacEntee's brother-in-law) to link himself with someone who was so detested by some anti-Treaty people that they took him out to shoot him on the banks of the Liffey at Islandbridge on January 23rd, 1923. The event (Gogarty escaped by jumping into the river and swimming to safety) was to produce a brace or so of fine poems, but one never could have imagined that 78 years later it could have been a reason for leaving Dermot with egg on his face. - Yours, etc.,
Ulick O'Connor, Fairfield Park, Rathgar, Dublin 6.