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Life
| 1935- [Desmond James Bernard O’Grady;] b. Aug. 1935, Limerick; Irish speaker (‘my second language’), passing childhood in West Clare and Co. Kerry Gaeltacht; ed. Jesuits and Cistercians at Roscrea, Co. Tipperary - with Tom Kilroy, Gus Martin and Tom Mac Intyre as contemporaries and friends; also Jack Donovan (artist) and Richard Harris (the actor); moved to Paris, 1955, teaching in a Berlitz school and working for George Whitman at Shakespeare & Co. while living in a Latin Quarter attic at Rue Mouffetard; issued Chords and Orchestrations (1956), a pamphlet collection published in Limerick; visited Samuel Beckett at Rue des Favorites following an introduction effected by Richard Ellmann, then interviewing his teaching-colleague Fred Gallagher (purportedly the character in Joyce’s Dubliners, &c.); moved to Rome as Asst. Head of English School, 1957-62; also knew Brancusi and played the part of the Irish poet in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) - whom he ‘discovered’ and introduced to Roman society; he interviewed Denis Devlin, then ambassador to Italy; issued Reilly (1961), long poem; commenced doct. in Celtic Studies at Harvard, 1962 (var. MA) - later published as Gododdin (1977), with ills. by Louis le Brocquy; |
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taught in Egypt - an Iran, by his own account; friend and secretary to Ezra Pound in Italy; founding-member of the European Community of Writers; organiser of 1966 Spoleta Poetry Festival; European editor of The Transatlantic Review - viz., European counterpart of the American magazine of the 1920s, which he conduted with Joe McCrindle; issued The Road Taken: Poems 1956-1996 (1997), and The Wandering Celt (1984); also twelve collections of translated poetry incl. Kurdish Poems of Love and Liberty (2005); other translations from Irish, Arabic and Croatian; member of Ireland’s Aosdána; received Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship, 2004; attended Beckett Centenary Conference in Dublin that year, 2004; experienced near-death experience under surgery, being found still living when already in the morgue area (‘I didn’t have time to die’); d. Aug. 2014 [aetat. 78]; he has already placed his engraved stone in his local church (‘Live full lives / leave some record’); there is a documentary-interview by Keith Walsh & Adam Wyeth (2014). DIW DIL FDA OCIL |
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[ See also O’Grady’s appearance as the Irish poet in Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) - as infra. ]
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Works| Collections |
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Lapwing publications incl. translations: Zlatko Tomicic, Croatia, My Love (Belfast: Lapwing 2003), 16pp. [ltd. edn. 100]; My Field This Springtime (Belfast: Lapwing 2003), 20pp.; also The Song of Songs (Anam Press 2003), 32pp. [commentary].
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Criticism
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“My Father’s House”, by David Quinn. |
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Desmond Fennell, review of Tipperary (Salmon Publ. 1991): Tiobraid Arann means ‘the fountain of enlightenment or perception’; O’Grady’s is an ‘Ithakian journey’ into ‘thereness’ through ‘passionless England’, ‘blue Paris’, ‘Roman Italy, to Egypt (translating Cavafy) , America, and back to Ireland. He sees his poetry ‘pushing slow lines across the page’, ‘my poems record the past/or passing’; they give ‘a record lived/A record left’.
Michael Smith, ‘A full catch’, Irish Times, 19.4.1997; review of The Road Taken (Univ. of Salzburg 1997), 487pp.; Trawling Tradition (Univ. of Salzburg 1997), 606pp.; cites 1935 as birthdate and Limerick a birthplace; ‘toiled long and hard’; ‘confirm his colourful presence and distinguished stature on the Irish poetry scene’; implies that he has returned to Ireland (‘Now Back where I began to write / here on my lone Pretanic height …’).
James J. McAuley, review of The Wandering Celt ([2001]), remarks that O’Grady ‘has always written in unfashionably declamatory or didactic styles … a trifle adversial from time to time’; ‘shameless name-dropping, fond memories of love-affairs and sad partings’; flat diction and solipsism intrude occasionally but the sheer energy and sweep … is irresistible’. (Irish Times, 4 Aug. 2001, Weekend.)
Sean Lysaght, Letter to Poetry Magazine of Poetry Foundation, Chicago (8 Jan. 2008): ‘In Limerick, where I grew up, the link with Pound was partly circumstantial: our main local poet, Desmond O’Grady, had worked with Pound during the latter’s last years in Italy and therefore acted as a kind of broker for Pound’s presence. O’Grady regularly returned to Limerick from his home in the Mediterranean to read installments from his own Poundian projects. A picture of Pound still hangs in Limerick’s principal literary haunt, a pub known as the White House.’ (For full text version, see under Lysaght - supra.)
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Quotations
Gododdin (1970), trans. by O’Grady - Introduction: ‘As in the interweaving of early Celtic manuscripts or the early Celtic designs and stones, what happens at the corner is as important as what happens at the centre of the parchment or stone because there is no corner or centre other than the surface of the sheet or stone itself.’ Supplied by Facebook by Adam Wyeth, citing his collected translations Trawling Tradition, adding: ‘O’Grady also compares the Gododdin to a stone circle such as Stone Henge, with every stanza as a stone, so that you can enter at any end.’ (Facebook, 20.05.2017.)
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| O'Grady appeared in La Dolce Vida by Fellini (1960) [Available on YouTube - online; accessed 30.05.2017.] |
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| “Purpose” |
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| Posted on Facebook by Neil Patrick Doherty [27.09.2018] |
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References
Peter Fallon & Seán Golden, eds., Soft Day, A Miscellany Of Contemporary Irish Writing (Notre Dame/Wolfhound 1980) gives Prologue; Village; Purpose; Man And Woman; If I Went Away. John Montague, ed., Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974) selects ‘The Dying Gaul’.
| Poetry Salzburg (Salzburg University) |
| ‘Desmond O'Grady was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1935. He left during the 1950s to teach and write in Paris, Rome and America where he took his doctorate at Harvard while a Teaching Fellow there. He has also taught at the American University in Cairo and the University of Alexandria, Egypt. During the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, while teaching in Rome, he was a founder member of the European Community of Writers, European editor of The Transatlantic Review, and organised the Spoleto International Poetry Festival. Now he lives in Kinsale, Co. Cork. His publications number seventeen collections of poetry, including The Road Taken: Poems 1956 - 1996 and The Wandering Celt, ten collections of translated poetry, among them Trawling Tradition: Translations 1954 - 1994 and Selected Poems of C. P. Cafavy , and prose memoirs of his literary acquaintances and friends. He is a member of Ireland’s Aosdána.’ |
| The Gododdin: A Version by Desmond O’Grady / Ink Paintings by Louis le Brocquy (Dolmen Press 1970) |
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Andrew Carpenter & Peter Fallon, eds., The Writers: A Sense of Place (Dublin: O’Brien Press 1980), selects Three poems, ‘One of Them’, after Cavafy; ‘The People of Maikop Plain’; ‘Waiting for the Barbarian’, after Cavafy (pp.158-60).
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, p.728 [def. err.]; Vol. 3 selects from The Dark Edge of Europe, ‘The Poet in Old Age Fishing at Evening; A Limerick Rake, Versions from the Irish, ‘The County Mayo’, ‘The Lass from Ballynalee’ [1359-61]; BIOG, p.1433, ed. UCD and Harvard, studied with Prof. John Kelleher; close friend of Ezra Pound [?]; taught in Rome and Cairo; lives in Paros [the Greek isle] and Kinsale.
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Notes
‘Beckett in Paris’, in Poetry Ireland (Winter 1992/93), pp.126-32; records that, when teaching in Paris, an Irishman also working at the Berlitz known as Fred Gallaher turned out to be Ignatius Gallaher of Joyce’s “Little Cloud”, who had received a letter from Richard Ellmann seeking an introduction, leading in turn to O’Grady’s meeting Beckett.
Mahon tribute: O’Grady is the dedicatee of 'The Sea in Winter', a pamphlet poem of Derek Mahon published in boards by Deerfield Press and Gallery Press, 1979, subscribed Portstewart-Portrush, Oct. 1977-Sep. 1978, and commencing, ‘Desmond, what of the blue nights,/The ultramarines and violets/Of your white island in the south ...[?]’
Namesake: namesakes incl. Desmond O'Grady (1929- ), author of Faith beyond the Empire: Rome and the Church from Constantine to Charlemagne (NY: Crossroads Pub. Co. [2001]), which incls. chapters such as “A party at praetextatus”; “No small thing”; “The split”; “True Romans all”; [...] ”; “ aptain of a shattered ship”; “Theology and thuggery ”; “Hobbling the papacy ”; “Knockin' on heaven's door”; “Another Constantine, another Rome” - and other works incl. a play, Marriage Gamblers (Montmorency, Victoria: Yackandandah 1991), 42pp. Other works published by Veritas and trans. into Polish.
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