Bernard O'Donoghue

Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL (born 14 December 1945 where he lived on a farm. He obtained a lectureship in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, remaining with the college from 1971 to 1995. Magdalen is where he started writing poetry, prompted by his colleague, John Fuller, who ran the college poetry society. “To go to it you had to write a poem, so that's what I started doing.” O’Donoghue retired from teaching in 2011, but stayed with Wadham as an emeritus fellow.

Poetry Bernard O'Donoghue’s first poetry collection was Razorblades and Pencils, published by John Fuller as “a beautiful green pamphlet" in 1982. Fuller, O'Donoghue’s colleague at Magdalen College, Oxford, was an English poet and novelist, who ran the college poetry society, the Florio Society of which O’Donoghue was a member. This is a poem about a brother and sister who cannot touch each other. "The title, ter conatus (“having tried three times”), is taken from two moments in the Aeneid [books 2 & 6] when Aeneas tries and fails to embrace shades of lost loved ones: first, his wife Creusa; then his father Anchises.

The Anglo-Saxon motif returns in O’Donoghue’s next book, Farmer's Cross (Faber & Faber 2011). "One of the collection's highlights is O'Donoghue's masterly translation of the Old English lyric The Wanderer". Both this, and the next collection, The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber & Faber 2016), were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. followed in 2008 by The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. One of the few Cambridge Companions about a living writer, this comprises thirteen critical essays (Heaney and the Feminine, and so on), with an introduction by O’Donoghue, in which he points to the “political undercurrents that shape Heaney's work: he writes that Seeing Things (1991) ‘must be seen in the context of an improvement in the political situation in Northern Ireland, culminating in the 1994 IRA Ceasefire.’"

Meanwhile his C. Day-Lewis: The Golden Bridle, (co-Edited with Albert Gelpi, Oxford University Press, 2017) attempts to restore the reputation of “one of the major figures in twentieth-century English poetry by any objective measure” by presenting a selection of his prose writings.

O’Donoghue’s translations include A Stay in a Sanatorium and other poetry by Zbyněk Hejda (Southword Editions, 2005), a selection of poems from the contemporary Czeck writer, described by the Irish Times as "a voice out of the grand tradition of central European poetics." His next project was a new translation in verse of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Two early medieval anthologies by O'Donoghue were The Courtly Love Tradition (Manchester University Press, 1982) and the related Thomas Hoccleve Selected Poems (Fyfield Books, 1982). He succeeded Seamus Heaney as Honorary President of the Irish Literary Society of London in 2014.