Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Irish Poets and the East
On May Day, 180 3, James Clarence Mangan was born in Dublin. Like Thomas Moore, his townsman, Mangan was the son of a grocer. There all resemblance between the lives of the two Dublin poets ends. Moore was lovingly reared, carefully educated, and passed a happy life in England almost suffocated with applause. Mangan, according to his own story, was harshly treated by his father as a child, and, according to undoubted evidence, neglected as a youth, compelled to labour into manhood at the toil of scrivenery to support his needy relatives, and his measure of reward starvation in a garret. He was mainly self-taught, had a decided gift for languages and lost no opportunity of extending his knowledge of strange tongues. A priest instructed him in Latin and Italian. How he picked up French and German is unknown. What was the extent of his acquaintance with Asiatic languages or whether he had any such acquaintance at all, remains a mystery even to his biographer. His real knowledge of the East - the near East we call it to-day - came through his German reading. His translations from the German poets, great and small, were among the most welcome of his contributions to the Dublin magazines of his day, and, indeed, the only portion of his work which reached book-form.
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