Author: Callanan, Jeremiah J.
Biography:
CALLANAN, Jeremiah Joseph (1795-1829: DIB)
He was born in 1795 in Ballinhassig, an Irish-speaking area of County Cork where his father was a medical practitioner. He was educated locally and at Cobh, County Cork, before entering the seminary at Maynooth where he began training for the priesthood. He left Maynooth first to work as a tutor and then to go to Trinity College Dublin where he studied medicine. He stayed for just two years and won an award for a poem on Alexander the Great. Callanan enlisted with the Royal Irish Regiment but friends caught up with him when the regiment was in the Isle of Wight and procured his release. On his return to Cork, he taught at a school run by William Maginn who encouraged him to contribute his verse translations from Irish to Blackwood’s Magazine. In Cork he was a member of an artistic society, the Hermitage, that included Maginn; John Windele, an antiquary; and Thomas Crofton Croker (q.v.). Inspired by Thomas Moore (q.v.), Callanan travelled in West Cork researching materials for a projected but ultimately unrealised collection called “Munster Melodies.” He struggled financially and intermittently worked as a tutor. In 1824 he issued a prospectus in Cork for issuing a collection of poems by subscription but abandoned the idea in favour of selling the copyright to a London publisher; this plan too was unrealised and it is not clear how many of the poems intended for the volume were actually written. Croker, who did not speak Irish, asked Callanan to help with his Fairy Legends and Traditions but Callanan declined on the grounds that he planned a similar book of his own. Callanan contracted tuberculosis and, hoping to benefit from a warmer climate, accepted a position as a tutor in Lisbon with an Irish family. While there his health further declined and he died on 19 Sept. 1829. He was buried in the cemetery at San José. The Recluse of Inchidony was issued posthumously and Windele later edited and published a larger collection of Callanan’s poems and translations. Windele’s collection of his manuscripts and letters is now held by the Royal Irish Academy. (DIB 23 Oct. 2023; ODNB 23 Oct. 2023; [John Windele], “Memoir,” in The Poems of J. J. Callanan [1847]; Robert Welch, A History of Verse Translation From the Irish 1789–1897 [1988]) SR
Other Names:
- J. Callanan