Copernicus Is A Charlatan And A Hypocrite

There, that got your attention, didn’t it?

My recent reading, The Redress of Poetry, a collection of Seamus Heaney’s lectures delivered while Professor of Poetry at Oxford includes a stirring treatment of Brian Merriman’s “An Chúirt Meánoíche”. My interest piqued by Heaney’s partial translation, I set about identifying where one might find a complete version, preferably one with the original Irish text in paralell. Although tempted by a recent version by Ciaran Carson (whose new translation of Dante’s Inferno I recently enjoyed), I demurred at the absence of an Irish text. My best bet it seemed was to get hold of an anthology covering the relevant period, which would as a matter of course include this classic of versifying as Gaeilge.

Who better to guide me then, but Copernicus, presiding magistrate at The Midnight Court? Surely he wouldn’t be such a cad as to name his establishment after a work which he had not within his posession? Reader, he would. His library thing account reveals no Merriman, nor any anthology which might contain some. The man is but a rogue and cur.

Undaunted, I searched the archive of the New York Review of Books, and discovered that a paralell text was available, along with many other riches from the Gaelic tradition, in An Dúanaire, a bilingual anthology compiled and translated by Seán Ó’Tuama and Thomas Kinsella. The book is (disgracefully, when you think about it) out of print, but copies are easily enough found online. I decided to sleep on the matter. The very next day, I saw that Ó’Tuama had died at the age of 80. I felt that I owed it to him to familiarise myself with his greatest scholarly achievement, and thus Kenny’s bookshop of the city of Galway are as we speak conveying it to me. This would all be with no thanks to a certain fraud, one “Copernicus” (if that is his real name) of whom I will speak no more, as I have run out of new synonyms for scoundrel. His secret shame revealed, he can now save his honour only by answering to me by way of pistols at dawn. Or else reply in the comment box. Y’know, whatever suits.

Edit: Post title edited to spare author’s blushes at an elementary spelling mistake. See potato’s comment below for details, ridicule.