06/08/2026
🎻 Lá a Trí: A Short History of Happiness by Stephen Sexton 🎻
Read the poem and translation using the link in our bio, or find a copy of the pamphlet in the Seamus Heaney Centre.
Translator’s note by Cian Dunne:
This poem presented novel challenges, in dealing with its rectangular shape, its enjambments, its one continuous, complete sentence. Some of its grammar and syntax was difficult to pin down in Irish – the undefined ‘someone’ quickly becoming a ‘she’ is hard to adapt to as a reader, and harder still to adapt as an Irish translator. But, as I settled into the rhythm of its sentence and the story it unfolds, the words came easier. Though it is often required by Irish syntactical conventions, it was not obligatory in this instance that I show my hand too soon. However, with some sense of growing confidence, like a first time poker player happily shocked at having progressed to being only inept rather than completely clueless, I decided to be bullish of my own accord. So, in the original, you hear of the ‘waste-paper basket’ and the ‘magic amaryllis’ before you learn of ‘his never watering it’, before you finally know that it ‘shows new, majestic, red flowers’, in spite of all. In the Irish, instead, you hear prematurely of the flowers before you know that they miraculously exist despite never having been watered.
Earlier in the poem comes the revelatory line: ‘where history is what we call/what might have happened differently/and didn’t’. In Irish, again, I’m initially steered towards repetition, this time of the verb rather than the noun: ‘a d’fhéadfá a tharla […]/agus níor tharla.’ However, I change tack to introduce an alternative verb, ‘níor bhac.’ This I mean in the sense of, ‘neglected to’, i.e. history neglected to occur in that way, and also gesturing to our good everyman at the end, who himself was, for whatever reason, neglectful, of his flowers, who, in other words, perhaps couldn’t be bothered, and who, yet, in spite of himself, ends up smelling the roses. In this line, in Irish, I want to say ‘ach’ (but), instead of ‘and’(‘agus’), but I can’t bring myself to make the change. And yet, even so.
