Henry Grattan Curran (1800-76)

Life
b. 11 Jan. 1800; natural son of John Philpot; best known novel, Confessions of a Whitefoot, 1884. PI, well-known translator from Irish, many translations appearing in Hardiman’s collection, Irish Minstrelsy (1831); wrote ‘The Wearing of the Green’. natural son of John Philpot; contrib. to the Citizen; Justin McCarthy, Irish Lit., gives ‘Wearing of the green’, and A Lament, from Irish of John O’Neachtain; d. 25 Nov.; biographical notice in H. H. Sparling, Irish Minstrelsy (1888). [No ODNB entry.] PI JMC IF

References
Belfast Public Library holds Confessions of a Whitefoot [missing from collection].

Notes
In his review articles on Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy, in 1934, Samuel Ferguson picks out HG Curran’s version of the ‘Roman Vision’ as an instance of the garbled methods of versification, declaring ‘open war against the original’ he ‘notches, buds, mortises, and mangles; sticks in a ramification of metaphors here, claps on a mistletoe pough of parasite flowers there, and ... so metamorphoses the original that it ... comes out of his hands as unlike itself as an espalier stock that has been once a crab-tree.’ (DUM, 1834, 448, quoted in Welch, Irish Poetry, 1980, p.127.) SEE also Welch, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish 1789-1897 (Gerrards Cross 1988), 81-83, esp. “An Síoghaide Rómhánach” [“The Roman Vision”].

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