SOURCE: “The Luck of the Irish,” in The New York Review of Books, February 26, 1987, pp. 25-6.

In the following excerpt, Donoghue expresses dissatisfaction with Kinsella's translations of medieval Irish verse and choice of representative selections in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse.

I should explain how Ireland came to have its poetry in four languages, Irish, English, Latin, and Norman French.

The earliest Irish poem that can be dated is “Amra Choluim Chille,” an elegy on the death of St. Colum cille in 597; it is attributed to Dallán Forgaill. Much of early Irish poetry has been lost, but poems survive from every century since the sixth. Some of these were written in Latin by Irish monks from the seventh to the ninth century. There are also secular poems in Irish, love lyrics, and nature poems much instructed by Latin and Christian poetic forms.

In May 1169 Richard...