“Carson’s translation of 'The Midnight Court' is that rarest of things: a small and utterly enjoyable masterpiece. It brings to a wider audience than ever before a great and neglected piece of 18th century literature and, to an American readership, something equally important. In this country, poetry now is more frequently written than read, and the pleasures of the long poem are all but lost. By and large, our poets lack ambition and their meager audiences the patience. What Carson offers the willing in these 60 pages of poetry with a brief introduction is a rollicking evening of instruction in the pleasures of a long and entertaining poem.”
Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

Master poet, storyteller and translator Ciaran Carson has great fun with this eighteenth-century erotic masterpiece, which deals with the topic of repression, sexual and otherwise. The Midnight Court has been called "one of the greatest comic works of literature, and certainly the greatest comic poem ever written in Ireland." (Seán Ó Tuama)

The story is an aisling — a Gaelic literary genre, in which a poet wanders and meets a beautiful fairy woman who is ultimately identified as Ireland herself, prophesying the return of her power — but this is an aisling stood on its head. As Carson explains: "Merriman subverted all that. His fairy woman is not beautiful, but a threatening monster. The vision that she discloses is not of a future paradise, but a present reality. … 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."

The Midnight Court
by Brian Merriman, translated from the Irish by Ciaran Carson
from Part One

'Twas my custom to stroll by a clear winding stream,
With my boots full of dew from the lush meadow green,
Near a neck of the woods where the mountain holds sway,
Without danger or fear at the dawn of the day.
And the sight of Lough Graney would dazzle my eyes,
As the countryside sparkled beneath the blue skies;
Uplifting to see how the mountains were stacked,
Each head peeping over a neighbouring back.
It would lighten the heart, be it listless with age,
Enfeebled by folly, or cardiac rage —
Your wherewithal racked by financial disease —
To perceive through a gap in the wood full of trees
A squadron of ducks on a shimmering bay,
Escorting the swan on her elegant way…
…
Beat out as I was and in need of a doze,
I laid myself down where a grassy bank rose
By the side of a ditch, in arboreal shade,
Where I stretched out my feet, and pillowed my head…

$50 clothbound (Limited, signed, and numbered first edition with plain vellum wrapper; no image)
ISBN: 1-930630-26-3
ISBN13 978-1-930630-26-0

$12.95 paperback
ISBN 1-930630-25-5
ISBN13 978-1-930630-25-3

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