Translators

Bernard O'Donoghue

Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co Cork in 1945, where he still spends part of the year. Since 1962 he has lived in England, and he now teaches Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford. He has published many books on medieval poetry, including an anthology of medieval European love poetry entitled The Courtly Love Tradition (1984), and a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics 2006). 

One of the outstanding Irish poets of his generation, Bernard has published five volumes of poetry of which the most recent is Outliving (Chatto 2003); his collection, Gunpowder,won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1995; and his Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008.

Bernard has also published a number of books on modern Irish poetry, including Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1994), as well as the Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2009).

Poems translated by Bernard O'Donoghue

• A Standard Shirt
• After Midnight
• Another Word For It
• As the Past Approaches
• Did You Hear It Too?
• In Your Own Words
• Not What the Words...
• The Colour of Water
• The Evening News and the Roof of the World
• The Morning Post
• The Photograph
• To the Lost Children