James Clarence Mangan
Mangan, James Clarence (1803-1849), poet and translator. Born in Dublin, he was educated in Saul's Court before working as a copy-clerk. In the 1820s he was publishing in local almanacs. In the early 1830s he contributed to the Dublin Penny Journal. During 1833 he met George Petrie, John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry, scholars who were to supply him with versions of Irish poems on which he based his translations. Petrie employed him in the Ordnance Survey Office, 1833-9. His prose contributions to Dublin journals mix autobiographical fantasy, psychological self-scrutiny, and free-wheeling speculation. His wide reading ranged from contemporary German, French, and Spanish authors to Persian, Hungarian, and Icelandic poetry of all periods. From 1835 he regularly contributed to the Dublin University Magazine an ‘Anthologia Germanica’, comprising translations of modern German Poetry. A gloomy and introverted figure, he played the part of a poet in outlandish clothes, including a voluminous cloak, green spectacles, and pointed hat. In early life Mangan had been jilted, and he remained unmarried. In spite of his heavy abuse of alcohol he worked strenuously, and produced a large quantity of verse variously signed and initialled, or unsigned, or under pseudonyms such as ‘The Man in the Cloak’. In 1837 he began for the Dublin University Magazine a series of Oriental translations entitled ‘Literae Orientales’, being versions of Persian, Turkish, and Arabic poems. In 1846 he wrote some of his finest poems and translations, spurred into creative activity by the worsening conditions in the country during the Famine. Contributions to The Nation for that year included ‘Siberia’, ‘Dark Rosaleen’, and ‘Sarsfield’. In 1847 he began in the Dublin University Magazine an Anthologia Hibernica, and started to work on translations of the Jacobite poetry of Munster with John O'Daly, posthumously published as The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849). Mangan composed about this time an Autobiography which gives a lurid and unreliable account of his early years. In the last year of his life he wrote for The Irishman a series of sketches of Charles Maturin, Maria Edgeworth, Gerald Griffin, and others. Mangan was hospitalized on several occasions after May 1848, and fell victim in June 1849 to the cholera epidemic of the Famine years. He was taken to the Meath Hospital, where he died.
Bibliography
Ellen Shannon-Mangan, Mangan: A Biography (1996) and Jacques Chuto et al. (ed.), Collected Poems,
