O'GRADY, Desmond (James Bernard)

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Nationality: Irish. Born: Limerick, 27 August 1935. Education: St. Michael's Primary School, Limerick; Sacred Heart College, Limerick; Cistercian College, Roscrea, County Tipperary; National University of Ireland, Dublin, 1954–56; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.A. 1964. Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literatures and comparative literatures 1982. Family: Married 1) Olga Nora Jwaideh in 1957 (divorced), one daughter; 2) Florence Tamburro (divorced), one son and two step-sons; 3) Ellen Beardsley, one daughter. Career: Taught at Berlitz School in Paris, 1954–56, Cambridge Institute and British Institute, Rome, St. George's English School, Rome, Roxbury Latin School, West Roxbury, Massachusetts, Harvard University, and Overseas School of Rome; visiting professor, 1971, and poet-in-residence, 1975–76, American University, Cairo; visiting professor of English, University of Tabriz, Iran, 1976–77, and University of Alexandria, Egypt, 1978–80. Member: Aosdána; Academy of Irish Arts and Letters. Address: Rincurran Hermitage, Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland.

Publications

Poetry

Chords and Orchestrations. Limerick, Echo Press, 1956.

Reilly. London, Phoenix Press, 1961.

Professor Kelleher and the Charles River. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Carthage Press, 1964.

Separazioni. Rome, Rapporti Europei, 1965.

The Dark Edge of Europe. London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1967.

The Dying Gaul. London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1968.

Hellas. Dublin, New Writers Press, 1971.

Separations. Dublin, Goldsmith Press, 1973.

Stations. Cairo, American University in Cairo Press, 1976.

Sing Me Creation. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1977.

His Skaldcrane's Nest. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1979.

The Headgear of the Tribe. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1979.

The Wandering Celt. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1984.

Alexandrian Notebook. Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1989.

Tipperary. Galway, Salmon Publishing, 1991.

My Fields This Springtime. Belfast, Lapwing, 1993.

The Road Taken: Poems, 1956–1996. Salzburg, University of Salzburg Press, 1996.

Other

Translator, Off Licence: Translations from Irish, Italian and Armenian Poetry. Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1968.

Translator, The Gododdin, from the Welsh of Aneirin. Dublin, Dolmen Press, 1977.

Translator, A Limerick Rake: Versions from the Irish. Dublin, Gallery Press, 1978.

Translator, Grecian Glances. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Inkling Press, 1981.

Translator, The Seven Arab Odes. London, Agenda, and Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1990.

Translator, Ten Modern Arab Poets. Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1992.

Translator, Alternative Manners, by C.P. Cavafy. Alexandria, Egypt, n.p., 1993.

Translator, Trawling Tradition: Translations 1954–1994. Salzburg, University of Salzburg, 1994.

Translator, The Golden Odes of Love. Cairo, Egypt, American University in Cairo Press, 1997.

Translator, Selected Poems of C.P. Cavafy. Dublin, Dedalus Press, 1998.

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Critical Studies: "Desmond O'Grady Issue" of Stony Thursday Book (Limerick), 1979; "Re-Envisioning Yeats's 'The Second Coming': Desmond O'Grady and the Charles River" by Karen Marguerite Moloney, in Learning the Trade: Essays on W.B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Deborah Fleming, West Cornwall, Connecticut, Locust Hill, 1993.

Desmond O'Grady comments:

My early work dealt with the experience of growing up on the west coast of Ireland, with the leaving of that place for the cities of the Continent and America and the need to connect my life there with the one I had left. My later work deals with the theme of the journey and the theme that emerges from that, separation—separation from people, places, things.

My middle work, the long poem The Dying Gaul, was an attempt at making a self-portrait of what it is to be a Celt. It is this persona that journeys and is separated in my later work. He is a wandering Celt who records his wanderings and experiences and attempts to connect what was left with what is found.

The prologue of my volume Sing Me Creation gives an attempt at condensing my purpose:

Who saw everything to the ends of the land began at the
end of a primary road. Who saw the mysteries, knew
secret things, went a long journey and found the whole
story cut in stone. His purpose: praise, search, his
appointed pain, and the countries of the world that
housed his image. Weary, worn out with his labours, he
returned and told what he'd seen and learned to help
kill the winter.

When I am not writing poems of my own, I translate the poems of others. Translation is to me like drawing is to an artist. As a result there is much translated poetry collected under the general title

Trawling Tradition. For me, however, one of the importances of translation is that it brings me closer to my own language.

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Desmond O'Grady spent some years in Paris, but he has taught in Rome and elsewhere since 1965. In his second collection, Reilly, he uses a bohemian young man as a satirical persona and amusingly describes his reckless adventures in Dublin:

tables and chairs cleared of books and belongings,
the firegrate stuffed with stale fish-and-chips
and a dry whiskey bottle.
Finger-rubbed into the windowpane dust:
Reilly Rotted Here.

The Dark Edge of Europe is a selection from O'Grady's previous work. Many of the poems evoke Paris and Italy, and the imagery in them is contemporary in its unexpectedness, as in "Girl and Widow on a Sea Park Bench":

In this park by the sea, marvellous
As marble, under the fronded green of the palms,
The sun strafing
The stones with flat tracers of light, water like mercury
Tinnular out of the fountain.
You come to me out of the gold stained day like a word.

O'Grady spent his early years in Limerick, and many of his poems are inspired by his return visits, as in "Homecoming":

The familiar pull of the slow train
trundling after a sinking sun on shadowed fields.
White light splicing the broad span of the sky.
Evening deepens grass, the breeze,
like purple smoke, ruffles its surface.
Straight into herring-dark skies the great cathedral spire
is sheer Gothic.

Like Joyce and other Irish writers, O'Grady expresses in compressed lines the effect of a puritanical education:

Unwinking eyes of saints and hushed confession queue—
For one loud nervous boot
Of frightened heart.
I felt the Churcheyed, fidget fear of schooltied youth.

Sometimes he objectifies his early experiences, as in his depiction of an old man who turns "for the safest healer / To a clean and bandaged silence of the heart."

—Austin Clarke