In January 2014, Irish philosopher and poet Richard McSweeney published Bradawn Yeats — A Kahlil Gibran Tribute to W.B. Yeats: a remarkable work of lyrical philosophy that brings together two of the twentieth century's most spiritually luminous voices across the divide of time, culture, and language.
Kahlil Gibran Collective · 28 April 2014
Richard McSweeney — Irish philosopher and poet, author of Bradawn Yeats.
The affinities between Kahlil Gibran and W.B. Yeats are not difficult to feel. Both were poets who moved between worlds — between East and West, between the mystical and the earthly, between the ancient and the urgently modern. Both believed in the power of beauty to carry truth where argument cannot reach. That no formal literary tribute from Gibran to Yeats has survived makes the imaginative act at the heart of Richard McSweeney's Bradawn Yeats all the more intriguing.
Published in January 2014, the book imagines Gibran — speaking from beyond this life — expressing a longing he had never fulfilled while living: to compose a dedicated literary work in honour of William Butler Yeats. To realise this aspiration, the book presents a philosopher-poetess named Myriam, from the ancient Phoenician port city of Byblos in Lebanon, who travels to the isle of Ireland and shares her profound wisdom — a device that allows Gibran's voice, spirit, and imagery to flow through an entirely new vessel, in an entirely new landscape.
The result is a work that McSweeney describes as capable of serving both the everyday contemplative and the cloistered: an invitation to encounter familiar concepts — from both Gibran's and Yeats's traditions — in surprising and resonant new associations. It is, in his own words, "a deeper song; a greater tower in the sky."
The book sits within a body of work that draws simultaneously on the literary traditions of Ireland, Lebanon, East Asia, and the Arab world — a range of influences that speaks directly to McSweeney's own unusual biography.
A lyrical philosopher of Éire (Ireland), Richard McSweeney holds a BA in Korean Language and Literature and an MA in Classical Chinese Philosophy — both completed through the mediums of Korean and Classical Chinese respectively. He spent thirteen years living in the Republic of Korea, three in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and a further three in the United Arab Emirates before returning to Ireland in 2001, where he has lived and written ever since.
His literary influences span Native Irish tradition, the Authorised Version of the Bible, Shakespeare, the Chuang-Tzu, and the works of John M. Synge — alongside, pre-eminently, the poetry and philosophy of Kahlil Gibran. Bradawn Yeats is one of a growing body of works in which McSweeney brings these threads into lyrical dialogue.
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