James Clarence Mangan

James Clarence Mangan, poet, translator, and sometime literary hoaxer, was the greatest Irish poet writing in English before Yeats. James Joyce, affirming this assessment, called him one of the most inspired poets of any country ever to make use of the lyric form. He is remembered today, if at all, as the composer of one or two strange original lyrics and a handful of peculiarly powerful versions from the Irish. More than this however Mangan was a prolific translator of German poetry, an idiosyncratic prose stylist, and an exceptional manipulator of all verse forms, both in terms of metrical ingenuity, and through the layers of framing and attribution that make up his texts peculiar place in the world. Exhibiting a constant relish for excess, his poetry oscillates between plangent sorrow and whimsical self-consciousness, frequently departing wildly from its sources, and fathering itself upon real or imagined authors from Germany, Persia, Arabia. Mangan has thus left a collection of translations that are creations unique in the language, and at least one poem, Dark Rosaleen, that has retained an almost supernatural force. People have called him a singular man, but he is rather a plural one a Proteus (Prose II,p.224). So Mangan described himself; and whilst the intensity of his poetry is instantly recognisable, the multiplication of his adopted voices is bewildering. National polemicist, hack writer, literary schizophrenic, comic lyrist, poète maudite, love-lorn melancholic, musician in verse; all these partial truths finally glance off him. This chapter offers a comprehensive assessment and placing of his work and life.