page_title: Brian Merriman
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Brian Merriman / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney at the University College Dublin, February 11, 2009.
context_page_description: Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre was an Irish language Bard, farmer, and hedge school teacher from rural County Clare. His single surviving work of substance, the 1000-line long Cúirt An Mheán Oíche, which is often compared to the works of François Rabelais, is widely regarded as a masterpiece of comic verse and as being truly unique in the history of Irish poetry.
context_section_description: Cúirt An Mheán Oíche was never written down by its author and was preserved, like much Irish and Scottish Gaelic poetry, by being memorized by successive generations of local seanchaithe. It was eventually written down and published in 1850, by the Irish language poetry collector John O'Daly.
  In the 20th century, a number of translations were produced. Translators have generally rendered Cúirt An Mheán Óiche into iambic pentameter and heroic couplets. Ciarán Carson, however, chose to closely reproduce Merriman's original dactylic meter, which he found very similar to the 6/8 rhythm of Irish jigs, and heavy use of alliteration.
  According to Frank O'Connor, a German translation of Cúirt An Mheán Óiche also exists.
  Notable English versions have been made by Arland Ussher, Frank O'Connor, Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford, and by the Irish Jewish poet David Marcus. A free verse translation has been made by Thomas Kinsella and a partial rhymed translation by Seamus Heaney. Brendan Behan is believed to have written an unpublished version, since lost.
  Frank O'Connor's translation, which is the most popular, was banned by the Censorship Board of the Irish State in 1945. When his translation was attacked in The Irish Times by Professor James Hogan of the National University of Ireland, O'Connor responded in print that Professor Hogan, who knew Cúirt An Mheán Óiche only through a translation into German, did not know enough German to read an Irish language text in the original. O'Connor also wrote that everything in his translation that the Irish State considered to be obscene was also present in Merriman's original poem in Irish. In his book, A Short History of Irish Literature, O'Connor cites the banning of his translation among several other examples of the crippling effect that wartime censorship was having on Irish literature.
  Cumann Merriman was founded in 1967 to promote the poet's work. They run an annual Merriman Summer School in County Clare each August.
  In 2005, the Clare County Library released a CD recording of a local seanchaí reciting Cúirt An Mheán Óiche in the traditional oral manner. Although it has not been made available for purchase, Cumann Merriman has posted excerpts on their website. For added contrast, the same passages are also reproduced from a modern dramatic reading of the poem.
  In recent years, Merriman's poem and other Irish and Scottish Gaelic comic poetry have been admired, imitated, and translated by several modern Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella.
  Cúirt an Mheán Oíche has been dramatised by Tom MacIntyre and Celia de Fréine and has been turned into a comic opera by composer Ana Sokolović with English libretto by Paul Bentley.
  In a review for The Guardian of Ciarán Carson's 2006 translation of Cúirt An Mheán Óiche, David Wheately wrote, "When it came to translating Merriman's poem, the temptation might have been to put its four-stressed lines into Swiftian octosyllabics, but instead he has opted for the hop, step and jump of an anapestic beat. According to Carson's introduction, however, his real inspiration was the 6/8 rhythm of Irish jigs, which as a fiddler himself Merriman would have known well. ... The alphabet soup of earlier Carson books such as First Language serves him well here with the alliterative riffing of the Gaelic metre (befuddled and boozed in a bibulous Babel)... For all its problems with the censor, Frank O'Connor's version is the drawing room performance; this one's for the shebeen in the wee small hours."
  In 2018, Irish dialectologist Brian Ó Curnáin found an 1817 manuscript of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche in the archives of the Royal Irish Academy. The manuscript, which is signed Éamann Ó hOrchaidh, renders the poem not into the Munster Irish spoken by Brian Merriman, but into the now-extinct dialect of Connaught Irish once spoken in County Roscommon. The discovery is regarded as priceless in what it reveals of a now vanished dialect of the Irish language.
  At the end of a 1993 lecture on Merriman's life and work, Seamus Heaney declared, "Perhaps I can convey the ong
caption: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
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