Launch event for Louis de Paor's Crooked Love / Grá fiar
The launch reading by Louis de Paor with his co-translators Biddy Jenkinson and Kevin Anderson, celebrating the publication of his new book Crooked Love / Grá fiar, is now available to watch online. See below for the YouTube video.
Introduced by Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, Irish-language poet Louis de Paor (in Co. Galway) reads his poems in Irish from his new dual language selection Crooked Love / Grá fiar, with himself and his co-translators Biddy Jenkinson (in Ireland) and Kevin Anderson (in Edinburgh) reading their English co-translations. This is followed by a discussion on translating Louis de Paor’s poetry and Irish-language poetry in general.
Louis de Paor translates his poetry with co-translators, and sometimes it isn’t clear who is author of each translation. This book’s two co-translators are the leading Irish-language poet Biddy Jenkinson (a pseudonym), who famously refuses to allow her own poetry to be translated into English (but allowed Louis de Paor to produce prose translations for his anthology Leabhar na hAthghabhála), and Kevin Anderson, musician, horn-player and champion of both early music and Irish music
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available on the video below.
To order copies of Crooked Love / Grá fiar from Bloodaxe, please click on this link:
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/crooked-love-1290
Readers in Ireland (and the EU) should click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin.
Louis de Paor is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language poetry renaissance of the 1980s and 90s. His dual-language selection The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue was published in 2014, following his selected poems, Rogha Dánta (2012), voted one of the top ten collections in Irish since the turn of the millennium
This new dual-language selection – copublished with Cló Iar-Chonnachta – is mainly drawn from two other collections, Cúpla Siamach an Ama/The Siamese Twins of Time and Grá fiar/Crooked Love, with translations made by Louis de Paor with Kevin Anderson and Biddy Jenkinson. It shows a paring back of language and a greater flexibility of form in his poetry, as well as a preoccupation with the passage of time and its implications for both familial and sexual love
His narrative skill and inventiveness come together in the sequence 'Lá dá raibh/One day', which follows a day in the life of an imaginary village in the west of Ireland where the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, collide. This was adapted for a dual-language radio feature with music by Dana Lyn broadcast on RTÉ Lyric FM and Raidió na Gaeltachta in 2021, which can be heard while reading the sequence in either language by scanning QR codes printed in the book
For details of other books by Louis de Paor please see:
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/louis-de-paor
[25 January 2022]
