ERIONNACH. The Poets and Poetry of Munster: A selection of Irish songs by the poets of the last century, with metrical translations.

Second Series. Dublin: John O’Daly, 9 Anglesea-Street, 1860. Foolscap octavo. pp. xxviii, 224. Publisher’s olive-green blind-stamped ripple-grain cloth, titled in gilt. Boards lightly rubbed, spine evenly sunned; a clean, tight copy. Title-page with O’Daly’s Celtic strapwork device printed in grey and the translator’s pseudonym spelled “Erionnach.” Irish texts in Gaelic type with facing metrical English translations; short biographical notices and notes. A very good copy. Very rare.
JISC locates 2 copies only.
The first series was translated by James C. Mangan.
Edited by bookseller-publisher John O’Daly who was a central figure in mid nineteenth-century efforts to preserve and popularise eighteenth-century Munster song. His Poets and Poetry of Munster (First Series 1849) helped move Irish verse from antiquarian miscellany to national literature. This Second Series (1860) extends the anthology with further poems and memoirs, drawing on manuscripts and oral recitation and giving the Irish in Irish character with O’Daly’s own or commissioned metrical versions signed “Erionnach” (literally ‘an Irishman,’ the spelling varying between editions). The book carries O’Daly’s Anglesea-Street imprint and his distinctive interlaced publisher’s device on the title, hallmarks of his Dublin press, which also issued Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry.
The selection reflects the breadth of the Munster tradition, aisling, Jacobite, love and satirical verse, by masters such as Aogán Ó Rathaille, Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill, Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin, and others, with glosses on dialect, history and airs that made the material usable by singers and readers with little Irish. While later scholarship has corrected some attributions and readings, O’Daly’s copies often preserve earliest printed witnesses to texts now otherwise lost or altered.
Copies of the 1860 Second Series are notably less common than the 1849 first. An attractive, sound example of a cornerstone anthology in the preservation and transmission of Munster poetry.

[CAT 162]