Pearse Hutchinson

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Pearse Hutchinson (born 1927) is an Irish poet, broadcaster and translator.

He was born in Glasgow of Irish parents and grew up in Dublin from the age of five. He went to school at the Christian Brothers, Synge Street where he learnt Irish and Latin. In 1948 he attended University College Dublin where he learnt Spanish and Italian. He left after a year and a half.

In 1950 he went on a holiday to Spain and Portugal. A short stop en route at Vigo brought him into contact for the first time with the culture of Galicia. Later, in Andalusia, he was entranced by the landscape and by the works of the Spanish poets Lorca, Prados and Cernuda: 'That early September of 1950,' he writes, in the introduction to his 2003 collection Done Into English, 'the light walked for me as it never had before, and I walked through the light I'd always longed for'.

In 1951 he left Ireland again, determined to go and live in Spain. Unable to get work in Madrid, as he had hoped, he travelled instead to Geneva, where he got a job as a translator with the International Labour Office, which brought him into contact with Catalan, a language then largely suppressed in Spain. An invitation by a Dutch friend led to a visit to the Netherlands, in preparation for which he taught himself Dutch. He returned to Ireland in 1953.

The next year he travelled again to Spain, this time to Barcelona, where he got to know Catalan poets such as Salvador Espriu and Carles Riba. With the British poet P. J. Kavanagh, he organised a reading of Catalan poetry in the British Institute.

He returned to Ireland in 1957 but returned to Barcelona in 1961, and continued to support Catalan poets. An invitation to translate some poems by Josep Carner led to the publication of his first book, a collection of thirty of Carner's poems in Catalan and English, in 1962. A project to publish Hutchinson's translation of Espriu's La Pell de brau (The Bull-skin), fell through some years later. Some of the poems from this are included in Done Into English.

In 1967, having spent nearly ten years altogether in Spain, Hutchinson returned to Ireland, making a living as a poet and journalist. He writes mostly in Irish and English. As well as Catalan, his translations include works in Galicoportugeuse, and, with Melita Cataldi, Italian versions of Old Irish Poetry.

From 1977 to 1978 he compiled and presented Oró Domhnaigh, a weekly radio programme of Irish poetry, music and folklore for Ireland's national network, RTÉ. He also contributed a weekly column on the Irish language to the station's magazine RTÉ Guide for over ten years. His Collected Poems were published in 2002 to mark his 75th birthday.

A co-editor and founder of the literary journal Cyphers, he received the Butler Award for Irish writing in 1969. He is a member of Aosdána, which he has described as "a miracle and a godsend": "I was fifty-four when I was invited to become a member and frankly I was at the end of my tether. I might have carried on, but I would have been in the gutter because I would have been evicted or I would have gone mad or killed myself or both." He lives in Dublin.

[edit] Works

Josep Carner: Poems (Oxford, The Dolphin Press, 1962)
Tongue Without Hands (Dublin, The Dolmen Press, 1963)
Faoistin Bhacach [A Lame Confession] (Baile Átha Cliath, An Clóchomhar, 1968)
Expansions (The Dolmen Press, 1969)
Watching the Morning Grow (Dublin, The Gallery Press, 1972) ISBN 0-9040-1100-3
The Frost is all Over (The Gallery Press, 1975) ISBN 0-9029-9634-7
Selected Poems (Oldcastle, Co Meath, The Gallery Press, 1980) ISBN 0-9040-1128-3
Climbing the Light (The Gallery Press, 1985) ISBN 0-9040-1186-0
The Soul that Kissed the Body: Selected Poems in Irish with translations into English (Dublin, The Gallery Press, 1990) ISBN 1-8523-5060-1
Le Cead na Gréine [By The Sun's Leave] (An Clóchomhar, 1992)
Barnsley Main seam (The Gallery Press, 1995) ISBN 1-8523-5155-1
Collected Poems (The Gallery Press, 2002) ISBN 1-8523-5312-0
Done Into English: Collected Translations (Dublin, The Gallery Press, 2003) ISBN 1-8523-5315-5