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The Shortlist


Fill Arís

Fill Arís

by Seán Ó Ríordáin

Fág Gleann na nGealt thoir,
Is a bhfuil d’aois seo ár dTiarna i d’fhuil,
Dún d’intinn ar ar tharla
Ó buaileadh Cath Chionn tSáile,
Is ón uair go bhfuil an t-ualach trom
Is an bóthar fada, bain ded mheabhair
Srathar shibhialtacht an Bhéarla,
Shelley, Keats is Shakespeare:
Fill arís ar do chuid,
Nigh d’intinn is nigh
Do theanga a chuaigh ceangailte i gcomhréiribh
’Bhí bunoscionn le d’éirim:
Dein d’fhaoistin is dein
Síocháin led ghiniúin féinig
Is led thigh-se féin is ná tréig iad,
Ní dual do neach a thigh ná a threabh a thréigean.
Téir faobhar na faille siar tráthnóna gréine go Corca
                Dhuibhne,
Is chífir thiar ag bun na spéire ag ráthaíocht ann
An Uimhir Dhé, is an Modh Foshuiteach,
Is an tuiseal gairmeach ar bhéalaibh daoine:
      Sin é do dhoras,
      Dún Chaoin fé sholas an tráthnóna,
      Buail is osclófar
      D’intinn féin is do chló ceart.

Return Again

[‘Fill Arís’ by Seán Ó Ríordáin
In an English translation by Barry McCrea]

Leave the Valley of the Mad back east,
and all there is of this age of our Lord in your blood,
close your mind to what has happened
since the Battle of Kinsale,
and, since the load is heavy
and the road long, remove from your mind
the civilised halter of English,
Shelley, Keats and Shakespeare:
return again to your own,
cleanse your mind and cleanse
your tongue which got tied up in a syntax
at odds with your intellect:
make your confession and make
peace with your own race
and with your own house, and do not abandon them.
It is not natural for anyone to abandon his house or his tribe.
On a sunlit evening take the cliff road out to Corca
               Dhuibhne,
and out on the horizon you will see shoaling there
the Dual Number, and the Subjunctive Mood,
and the vocative case on people’s mouths:
     that is your door,
     Dun Chaoin in the evening light,
     knock and there will be opened
     your own mind and your right shape.

From Selected Poems (2014) by kind permission of Cló Iar-Chonnacht and Yale University Press.


About the poem

Ó Ríordáin began visiting the Kerry Gaeltacht in the 1940s and it became, for him, an important source of inspiration. In ‘Fill Arís’, he urges the reader to leave behind the crazed, busy world, to escape the weight of history and the burden of the English literary tradition and return to what makes us wholesome and whole. The place in this instance is Corcha Dhuibhne in West Kerry.

The journey back, to what matters, is a long one – ‘an bóthar fada’ – and it’s a difficult one [‘Is ón uair go bhfuil an t-ualach trom’] but the tone is assertive and confident from the outset. The title ‘Fill Arís’ is repeated at line nine. ‘Fill arís ar do chuid’ – return again to what we are. It’s not natural, says Ó Ríordáin, to abandon or to ditch your own place and your own tradition.

In the closing lines he presents us with a image of natural beauty and freedom when he urges us to take the cliff road on a bright afternoon. The poem’s central theme is the richness of the Irish language and all that it embodies. And the medium in which the poem is written is, of course, Irish.


Seán Ó Ríordáin

Séan Ó Ríordáin, the eldest of three, was born in Ballyvourney, Co. Cork on 3 December 1916. His father was a native Irish speaker and worked as a shoemaker. His mother spoke very little Irish and Ó Ríordáin spoke more English than Irish at home. He was educated through Irish in the local national school at Sliabh Riabhach and there Mo Scéal Féin by An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire, a local writer, was read to him in class and was an important influence. Later Ó Ríordáin said that since encountering that autobiography ‘every placename mentioned in the book is magic to me’.

His father died of tuberculosis when he was ten and in 1932, when he was fifteen, the family moved to Inniscarra, outside Cork. Six years later Ó Ríordáin himself was diagnosed with TB, an illness he suffered from for the rest of his life. He lived in a separate room from the family home, specially built and in keeping with the medical recommendations of the time.

He finished his secondary schooling at Cork’s North Monastery and then joined the Motor Taxation Office in Cork City Hall where he worked as a clerk. Frequently ill, he was absent from work for long periods and wrote his first published poem in a sanatorium in Doneraile in 1944. He later said that he graduated with TB instead of a BA.



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