Duanaire

Abstract: The Irish-language term duanaire is now best known as the title of a landmark volume, An Duanaire, 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed , published by Dolmen Press in Mountrath, Portlaoise in 1981. For this dual-language anthology, poems in the Irish language were chosen by academic and poet Seán Ó Tuama, and new translations into English verse were provided by poet Thomas Kinsella. The collection won immediate and lasting acclaim for enabling a much wider readership for these three centuries of creative work by Irish-language poets, and also for foregrounding the cultural and social consequences of language shift and loss in Ireland: "there, more clearly than anywhere else," wrote Denis Donoghue in his review for the London Review of Books , "we can see what an Irish tradition means by marking its loss." Yet behind the word duanaire , made newly prominent by the 1981 collection, is a long linguistic provenance with deep explanatory power, cultural significance, and continuing resonance, a term which records a long cultural history of confident possession and repossession, and not only dispossession and loss.