John Minahane Ireland

JOHN MINAHANE was born near Baltimore, in the south-west of Ireland, in 1950. English was his original spoken language, though he studied the Irish language as a school subject from the age of 5. His first published work, a short story, appeared when he was 18, but he wrote poetry and prose fiction only in short bursts at long intervals, being mainly occupied with Irish, European and world history. These two interests came together in the ancient literature of the Irish language and the peculiar Christian culture bound up with it. Minahane’s main work on this topic, which includes translations of many of the ancient poems (The Christian Druids: on the filid or philosopher-poets of Ireland), was published in Dublin in 1993. A review of a seventeenth-century controversy between poets of the North and South of Ireland (The Contention of the Poets: an essay in Irish intellectual history) followed in 2000.

Minahane went to live in Slovakia in 1996. Over the past few years he has translated many poems and prose pieces by Slovak writers of the past and present, from Ivan Krasko to Ivan Kolenic. His largest undertaking was a selection of the poems and literary essays of Ladislav Novomeský (Slovak Spring, 2004). The long biographical essay included in this volume sets Novomeský in his European context (though it is intended as notes towards a life of the poet, not as a substitute for an adequate biography).

(2010)