Anthony Quinn's illustration of Mad King Sweeney Eorann: All the same, I would prefer a hollow tree and Sweeney bare - that sweetest game we used to play - to banqueting with him today. I tell you, Sweeney, if I were given the pick of all in earth and Ireland, I'd rather go with you, live sinless and sup on water and watcress — Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray “I suppose that I had better take up my den in the tree,” Enniscorthy Sweeny had said. “They won’t know how to drive a

It is like starting a big bird off to fly, and it all comes apart in your hands. — Archipelago When Lafferty titled his translations, he chose Vogelsprachenkund, a word that appears several times in his work and informs “Bird-Master,” one of his great stories. In Friedrich Rückert’s “Aus der Jugendzeit,” the phrase Vogelsprachekund means something like “knowing the language of birds” or “versed in bird-speech.” Rückert addresses the child’s mouth as full of unconscious wisdo

The aim here is to create a record of Lafferty’s translations and an episodic account of Dotty, so what follows is inevitably a bit disjointed. If it has a center, it is in the way poetry remains a constant throughline in Lafferty’s artistic life. People like to say Lafferty wrote tall tales, but in a real sense, he wrote prose poems. Before Lafferty turned to professional writing in 1957–1958, one of his hobbies was translating poetry. (I’ll include a list of his translation