Madam - This year the death of Robert Emmet in 1803 has been very fully commemorated. By contrast, the birth of the Dublin poet James Clarence Mangan in the same year has gone virtually unremarked outside specialist circles (two editions of his poems were published this year). This obscurity seems undeserved when we consider the importance of Mangan's legacy and the debt owed to him by later Irish poets, notably W.B. Yeats.
Mangan was a true cosmopolitan who turned outwards to embrace the literatures of Europe and beyond, even as Dublin, deprived of its parliament, was turning in on itself. His was a double mission: striving to bring Ireland into contact with the European tradition, while reclaiming in translation a Gaelic heritage then in danger of being utterly effaced. His Anthologia Germanica (1843) brought Goethe and Schiller to an Irish readership; his translations for John O'Daly's The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849) prevented the decline of the Irish language from extinguishing all memory of the greatness of Aogán Ó Rathaille.
Emmet's bicentenary has been the subject of numerous articles and official commemorations. Mangan's, while not an event that lends itself to political oratory, deserves also to claim some measure of our attention. - Yours, etc.,
ANDREW CUSACK,
Cromwellsfort Drive,
Wexford.