Interview: John Minahane
Cork-born, Bratislava-based writer and linguist talks to us about his passion for Irish and Slovak literature
"The hardest thing to do is to get in tune with the mind of the author, and a context of an era they lived in." - John Minahane
Ireland has long been renowned for its world-class literature. Some of our great writers have not only authored memorable works of their own but have undertaken the often daunting task of translating the works of others. Indeed, mastering the art of literary translation, especially of poetry, is no easy task. A writer and Irishman living in Slovakia has been doing just that.
Meet John Minahane.
Born in the rural hinterland between Skibbereen and Baltimore in County Cork, Minahane grew up with an innate love of nature and the spectacular countryside of Ireland’s south-west. From his school days, John developed a passion for literature in Irish, English, Latin and Greek. A lifetime immersed in writing has ensued. Over the course of his distinguished career, John has written extensively on literature in the Irish language while also translating the works of other authors into English.
Living in Slovakia since 1996, John spent time working as an English language teacher while pursuing his own literary and translation projects. He soon developed a love for the Slovak language and literature. It seemed almost pre-ordained that such a gifted writer and linguist would devote his considerable talents to translating Slovak authors into English. In doing so, John has brought the best of Slovak literature to the attention of the wider world, an achievement for which he was decorated by the Slovak Republic in 2021.
Where in Ireland did you grow up, and what part of Ireland would you recommend that Slovaks visit?
"I come from the south-western end of Ireland, between the town of Skibbereen and the village of Baltimore on the Atlantic coast. Not far away is a beautiful lake called Lough Hyne, which is the only salt-water lake in Ireland: it is connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a channel through the rock. There is an old poem about it, which begins:
I know a lake, where the cool waves break
and softly fall on the silver sand;
and no steps intrude on that solitude,
and no voice, save mine, disturbs the strand.
If you go there at certain times, you might still find that solitude. Alternatively, you can go to Baltimore to gaze at the splendid harbour, or take a ferry to the nearby islands, Sherkin and Cape Clear. Further, out you can see the Fastnet Rock, which was the last point of land that people, who were travelling in past times to America, the slow way, saw on their journey.
So I recommend Slovaks to go to Baltimore. The locals will be glad to see you!"
Tell us about where you developed your passion for literature. Have you been inspired by someone in particular?
"Secondary school was the crucial time. For five years, I attended a boarding school in Cork. Boarding school had its pluses and minuses, and literature was one of the pluses.
I discovered that I had an ear for poetry; I could hear what I was reading. Moreover, we were doing very intensive study of Shakespeare plays, and marvellous poems by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson and many more.
We also received an introduction to other literatures. I would say that I had some exceptionally good teachers for English, Latin, and (for three years, until the teacher suddenly vanished from the school and from Ireland and was never replaced) ancient Greek.
I will never forget the Medea of Euripides, and how our teacher acted the hissing voice of Medea taunting Jason. It was pretty strong medicine for a very green and innocent fourteen-year-old."
Do you have a favourite Irish writer and why?
"I have favourite stories or novels, and favourite poems or parts of poems, not so much favourite writers.
I have many favourite Irish poems in English and Irish. One of them is the opening twenty lines or so of Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (in English The Midnight Court, there are several English translations). This poem is a thousand lines long, and it is famous as a comic treatment of sex. However, that opening passage is actually a wonderful picture of Nature.
One of my favourite Irish novels would be Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh. It is a picture of Irish country life — I am a country lad by origin, and I know it rings true. No stereotyping there, no reducing the characters to make them easier to handle, as in so many other novels of Irish country life."
How long have you been translating literature? What led you to it?
"Quite a while. Before I came to Slovakia I was less focused on it, but I tried my hand at translating things from Irish and Spanish. Some of the Irish translations were published; as for my versions of Antonio Machado, they remain among the might-have-beens.
What led me to it? Again, I would say that my secondary school had a lot to do with it. At one point, I was studying poetry in five languages, Irish, English, Latin, Greek and Spanish. In fact, the co-existence of English and Irish is extraordinary, and for me it was full of surprises. Actually, many Irish poets who write in English on occasion try their hands at translations from Irish."
Can you tell us about your work? What languages do you translate from and why?
"I live in Slovakia, and Slovak literature has interested me since I came here, so first of all I translate from Slovak. In recent years, translating has been my job. Not all of what I translate is literature, but nearly all of it has to do with literature, art or music.
I sometimes also translate from Czech, doing similar jobs. I do translations from Irish because I have a long-standing personal relationship with that literature. The subjects and the outlets are various: for example, my translation of a 17th century Irish poem will appear in this year’s issue of a local history journal called The Other Clare.
Finally, very occasionally in the past I have done translations from Latin. My most ambitious job was translating a short book by Conor O’Mahony, an Irish Jesuit living in Lisbon. He wrote it in 1645, which was a crucial moment in Irish history, and his book was hyper-controversial: it was actually the first book ever to make a case for Irish independence."
Do you have a favourite Slovak poet/writer and why?
"Yes, Ladislav Novomeský, the first major poet I translated. In the 1920s and 30s he produced some wonderful melancholic lyric poetry. Being that way inclined myself, as I have said earlier, I took to him very much. He ended one of his 1920s poems by saying:
Nateraz žičte krvi mojej
melanchóliu Východu.
In my translation in Slovak Spring (a collection published in Belfast in 2004), this goes:
Wish me, in my blood released,
the melancholy of the East!
Novomeský had another, very complicated, life as a politician. But his poetry doesn’t conform to political labels — and indeed, the conformist literary critics made precisely this point as an accusation against him in 1951 and it helped to very nearly get him shot."
You decided to tackle the translation of Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. He has a reputation for being one of the most difficult Slovak poets to be understood, even for native Slovaks. Was it a challenge?
"Yes indeed, it was a challenge! However, Hviezdoslav has so much to say in the set of poems I translated, the Bloody Sonnets, that the effort was well worth it. As soon as I began to track his thinking, to find his wavelength, the language difficulties became secondary — I was going to overcome them, one way or another.
Here was a kind of poetry that should have emerged somewhere in Europe at the beginning of World War I. Yes, it was something that ought to happen! Yet I had never come across anything like this, or a reference to anything like this, anywhere else. I felt it was up to me to communicate this find in English.
Hviezdoslav had a very personal struggle with the Slovak language, a many-sided struggle. The difficulty of his poetry comes from this. However, for difficult words and phrases there are dictionaries and glossaries, there is the internet, and there are friends. In addition, if all of these fail, the translator can just guess."
Slovaks themselves would often claim that their language is especially hard to learn. Would you agree with that assessment? How long did it take you to master the written language?
"Oh, I’m still trying! That particular learning process is ongoing, and I don’t expect to see the end of it. Mastery is beyond the horizon. Of course, I do email communication constantly, and successfully. But when I compose an essay in Slovak, I need someone to check and polish it, because always I will have said certain things in a clumsy or unnatural way. It’s not easy to master the literary language at a high level.
The Slovak language has a fearsome lot of detail, with all those noun cases and verb inflections. So it’s harder for the beginner to make headway in Slovak than in English or Spanish. On the other hand, Slovak has logical rules, which helps the process."
You are also a distinguished writer in your own right. What topics resonate with you, what do you like to write?
"Now, “distinguished”… whether I am distinguished might depend on whom you talked to! Anyhow, I had many false starts as a writer. The first thing of mine that was published was a short story, which appeared in one of the daily newspapers when I was 18; there was a competition and I got on the short-list but did not win the prize.
The topics that most resonate with me are melancholic. John Keats’s Ode to Melancholy is one of my all-time favourite poems. So is Fáilte don éan in Irish, “Welcome to the Bird”, meaning the cuckoo, by a blind poet who can hear the bird but feels desperately sad because he can’t see him. When I was last in Dublin, I came across Gone Self Storm, a recently published book of poems by Harry Clifton.
I had been aware of Clifton for a long time but never really connected with his poetry, never got on his wavelength. However, Harry Clifton is now just over seventy, and many of these poems are dedicated to friends of his who have died in the last decade or so. The book is tinged with melancholy, and the language is very musical. Although some of his thinking jars with me, still I find I can connect, these poems resonate."
Which work are you most proud of?
"The work I am most proud of: that would have to be The Christian Druids, my vision of what the ancient Irish culture was like, how Christianity interacted with druidism and poetry. That was when I was most inspired."
You have been living in Slovakia since 1996. What brought you here and was it an easy decision to stay so far from your homeland?
"At a certain point, I desperately needed to change my life. I needed a completely new environment. One way of achieving that was to go somewhere to teach English as a foreign language. I was thinking of somewhere in Western Europe, but I had not been able to organise a job there and the start of the school year was approaching. Therefore, I ended up in Bratislava, in the unforgettable Akadémia vzdelávania, more by accident than design, but I must say it was a happy accident.
Bratislava was not very far away. Even then, you could easily fly to Dublin via Prague. Alternatively, you could bus it within two days. I come from a family that has relatives in California, Wisconsin, New Zealand, many far-flung places. An uncle and an aunt of mine lived in Boston, another aunt lived in Surrey in England. Pessimistic friends did say to me: “You’re taking a big gamble, it won’t come off”. But I didn’t see it like that and I am glad I did."
What national characteristics do you value in Irish people?
"This question is too big! But for example, I believe that the Irish have the ability to come up with surprises. They cannot be taken for granted. They may look like they are placidly settling into something, accepting something, and then in a short time they change the whole picture. I value this transformative capacity, and I hope it is not being lost."
Do you see any similarities between the Slovaks and Irish?
"I suppose, they are two small nations with bigger neighbours. Both gained independence only recently, in the twentieth century. Regarding any more personal characteristics, I would be slow to offer a judgment, because what sort of judge could I be? I am not myself the most sociable or the most observant type. But we can say, for example, that both Slovaks and Irish have produced some very fine poets.
The most popular Irish poet of all time was neither Yeats nor Heaney but a man called Thomas Moore, who wrote in the early 19th century. His most famous book was called Irish Melodies, a collection of sweet, piercingly sad, romantic poems about Ireland, which were great for singing with piano accompaniment. Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, I feel certain, must have had his copy of Irish Melodies in the original English, and Moore’s poems made an impression on him.
Anyhow, about 1880 Hviezdoslav produced a poem about Ireland called The Island of Sorrow (the title is in English), where he imitates Moore’s manner and even uses one of Moore’s refrains. In the concluding verses he draws a parallel between the Irish and the Slovaks. I hope to translate it some day."
What places in Slovakia are dear to your heart and why?
"On three separate occasions I’ve been able to spend a month in Banská Štiavnica, thanks to the Slovak Literary Centre. I love those steeply sloping streets, and the hills round about. Then Levoča, with its tremendous Gothic art. Devin. The woods in Lamač, as mentioned before. Villages like Marianka, which in past times I often used to cycle to.
I like Ventúrska and Michalská Streets in the centre of Bratislava, I often walk along them. I feel carefree on those streets, though maybe this is proof I do not notice all kinds of things or that I am not sensitive to echoes. But go a bit further on, to Kozia, Panenská, Palisády — those streets are ghostly. I always have the feeling that they are haunted."
What activities and passions do you pursue in Slovakia?
"Reading, writing, thinking. Sitting in cafes, but not too much. And walking. I am grateful for the woods in Lamač which are very accessible and provide a peaceful natural setting to relax in."
Is there anything you miss about Ireland that cannot be found in Slovakia?
"Oh, lots of things! The sea, sometimes. The very special ever-changing daylight. Or some kinds of food. McCambridge’s stoneground wheaten bread, which I eat all the time when I’m in Dublin, or fairly similar bread elsewhere in Ireland. I have never been able to find an equivalent in Slovakia."
How would you describe your experience of living in Slovakia so far?
"Very positively. Slovakia has given me things that I needed, and offered me more besides. It has given me space and not constricted me. The only time that I momentarily felt caged was during Covid, when the plan to restrict movement of all over-65 years of age was being considered. I must say though that I was delighted with the robust response of the Slovak over-65s to that, and anyhow it was an extraordinary time.
Very occasionally, I have had misunderstandings (and I mean that literally, no euphemism or irony). A misunderstanding can happen with neighbours, or with a branch of the state. With goodwill on both sides, misunderstandings can be rectified. In general, I find it hard to think of anywhere I could have lived during this past quarter century more agreeably and peacefully."