Bernard O'Donoghue
[4] He learnt Irish from the age of five in the local school, and served Mass from when he was about ten, “just parroting the Latin answers,” an experience which “inclined him towards the medieval.” [4] When he was 16, his father died suddenly, and the family left Ireland, moving to Manchester, England.
[4] After a year working as a computer programmer with IBM,[4] O’Donoghue returned to Oxford to do a post-graduate degree in Medieval studies, also at Lincoln College.
His former students include the actress Rosamund Pike, the journalist and satirist Ian Hislop, and the writers Alan Hollinghurst and Mick Imlah.
[7] Bernard O'Donoghue’s first poetry collection was Razorblades and Pencils, published by John Fuller as “a beautiful green pamphlet" in 1982.
"The title, ter conatus (“having tried three times”), is taken from two moments in the Aeneid [books 2 & 6] when Aeneas tries and fails to embrace shades of lost loved ones: first, his wife Creusa; then his father Anchises.
[3] This poem features regularly in poetry readings by the author, along with The Iron Age Boat at Caumatruish, In Millstreet Hospital and Shells of Galice.
[3] In The Seasons of Cullen Church, O’Donoghue’s father reappears (in Meeting in the Small Hours), only to leave with the fateful words: "'Time to go back,' he said./ And I don't know if I will get away again.
One of the few Cambridge Companions about a living writer, this comprises thirteen critical essays (Heaney and the Feminine, and so on), with an introduction by O’Donoghue, in which he points to the “political undercurrents that shape Heaney's work: he writes that Seeing Things (1991) ‘must be seen in the context of an improvement in the political situation in Northern Ireland, culminating in the 1994 IRA Ceasefire.’"[14] Meanwhile his C. Day-Lewis: The Golden Bridle, (co-Edited with Albert Gelpi, Oxford University Press, 2017) attempts to restore the reputation of “one of the major figures in twentieth-century English poetry by any objective measure” by presenting a selection of his prose writings.
[15] O’Donoghue’s translations include A Stay in a Sanatorium and other poetry by Zbyněk Hejda (Southword Editions, 2005), a selection of poems from the contemporary Czeck writer, described by the Irish Times as "a voice out of the grand tradition of central European poetics.
"[16] His next project was a new translation in verse of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight[2] (Penguin Books, 2006), in which, Nicholas Lezard writes, "he has done justice to one of the first great works of literature in the language.
"[17] Two early medieval anthologies by O'Donoghue were The Courtly Love Tradition (Manchester University Press, 1982) and the related Thomas Hoccleve Selected Poems (Fyfield Books, 1982).
