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Banned and beloved in equal measure, The Midnight Court is a canonical eighteenth-century text widely considered to be one of the greatest comic Irish poems. Despite its simple storyline, Merriman’s poem addresses a wide range of themes from its satirical treatment of sexuality to its biting social commentary. This volume, the first critical edition, offers readers a fluid translation and five essays that contextualize the poem, making it an ideal text for any student of the poem and eighteenth-century Irish literature.
Originally written in the Irish language by the 18th-century poet Brian Merriman (circa 1745-1805), The Midnight Court is here translated by one of Ireland's distinguished contemporary poets, Ciaran Carson. This extended satiric poem assesses the growing economic, political, and familial constraints of late 18th-century Catholic Ireland under British colonial rule, while subversively playing on the tradition of the aisling (or vision) poem in which a beautiful woman represents Ireland's threatened sovereignty. At the beginning of The Midnight Court, a dreadful female envoy from the fairies appears in a dream to the unmarried poet. She summons him before the court of Queen Aoibheall in order to answer charges of wasting his manhood while women are dying for want of love. He listens to complaints that vary from the celibacy of the clergy to marriages performed between old and young for purely economic reasons. In all their bawdy tales, the female courtiers praise fertility, as well as sexual fulfillment, and condemn the conventions of the day. At last the Queen pronounces judgment on the poet, who awakens as he is being severely chastised by all of the women of the court. While containing many insights into 18th-century social conditions, The Midnight Court is also an exuberant, even jaunty work of the comic imagination. As the translator Ciaran Carson states in his foreword: "The protagonists of the 'Court, ' including 'Merriman' himself, are ghosts, summoned into being by language; they are figments of the imagination. In the 'Court' the language itself is continually interrogated and Merriman is the great illusionist, continually spiriting words into another dimension."
"This is a racy, word-rich, bawdy poem; full of uncompromising language and attitudes which have earned it increasing admiration and popularity since it was first composed by Brian Merriman in 1780. The bachelor uninterested in marriage and the aged bone-cold married man, the spouse-hunting lady and the dissatisfied spinster: the celebration of a woman's right to sex and marriage; disapproval of clerical celibacy--all these elements form part of the subject-matter of 'The Midnight Court'. Years ago, few speakers of Irish were without some knowledge of this full-blooded piece of literature, while very many people could recite the entire thousand and more lines of 'The Midnight Court' in the version popular in their own area. It is one of the most interesting as well as entertaining survivals of the literature of Gaelic Ireland in the Penal times where humour, irony, literary tradition and sense of proportion had not fallen victims to oppression and humiliation. The translation supplied with this edition of Merriman's poem is an endeavour to come as near as possible to the rural expression and attitudes which are part and parcel of the style of the original. Although actual use of dialect is avoided, the translator has used words and modes of exprsession occasionally which are found in English as spoken in the Irish countryside"--Publisher's description, back cover.
This book tackles a hitherto neglected topic by presenting Ireland as very much a part of the Black Atlantic world. It shows how slaves and sugar produced economic and political change in Eighteenth-century Ireland and discusses the role of Irish emigrants in slave societies in the Caribbean and North America.