Walsh, Edward (1805–50), translator, poet, and schoolteacher, was born in Derry city, where his father, an evicted small farmer who became a sergeant in the north Cork militia was posted during the Napolelonic period; his mother was from a more genteel background. After the battle of Waterloo, his parents returned to their native Millstreet, Co. Cork (c.1815), where Edward was educated at hedge schools. Acquiring a thorough knowledge of the Irish language, through his friendships with local people he developed a strong interest in the oral tradition of songs, ballads, and folk tales. He collected some original Irish folk poems of the Cork area, which he would later preserve in his translations. While still young he was employed as an itinerant hedge schoolmaster, and as private tutor to the family of a local politician. He was imprisoned for a time for his part in the tithe-war agitations in the early 1830s. He began writing for the Dublin Penny Journal in 1832, and contributed verses to the Dublin Journal of Temperance, Science, and Literature. Appointed teacher in Tourin national school, Co. Waterford, in 1837, he resigned because of a disagreement with a member of the board of management. He became a national school teacher in Glantane, near Mallow, Co. Cork, but was dismissed in 1842 for writing the article ‘What is repeal, papa?’ in the Nation. Moving to Dublin, through the influence of his friend Charles Gavan Duffy (qv) he secured a position as sub-editor on the Dublin Monitor; subsequently he was employed as a clerk at the Dublin corn exchange.
In Dublin he met John O'Daly (qv), with whom he collaborated on the collection Reliques of Irish Jacobite poetry (1844), a set of poems in Irish accompanied by O'Daly's biographical sketches of the authors and interlineal literal translations, and ‘metrical versions’ in English by Walsh. The collection, which included many aislings and nationalist lyrics by Eoghan ‘Rua’ Ó Súilleabháin (qv) and other eighteenth-century poets, was initially published by O'Daly in penny weekly numbers, in an effort to reach a peasant audience. Walsh was diligent in attempting to reproduce the metaphors, assonances, cross-rhymes, and varied verse rhythms of the Irish originals. His second collection, Irish popular songs, with English metrical translations and introductory remarks and notes (1847), consisted largely of love lyrics, including ‘An raibh tú ag an gCarraig?’, ‘The dawning of the day’, and the haunting ‘From the cold sod that's o'er you’. In his introduction to the volume, Walsh argued that the Irish folk tradition contained nothing that Victorian sensiblilty would find indecent.
Returning to Cork in 1847, Walsh was appointed school teacher at the convict establishment on Spike Island, in Cork harbour. John Mitchel (qv) in his Jail journal (1854) recorded meeting Walsh on the island in 1848 before being transported to Bermuda, and Walsh's addressing him as ‘the man in all Ireland most to be envied’ – in which judgement Mitchel discerned the extent of Walsh's own misery in his job. The encounter resulted in Walsh's losing the post. He was then employed as a teacher at the Cork union workhouse (1848–50). During his time in Tourin, he married Bridget Sullivan, daughter of a teacher from nearby Aglish, Co. Waterford; they had two sons and two daughters. One of his most poignant lyrics, the love poem ‘Mo craoibhin cnó’ (described variously as an original composition, and as a translation from the Irish), was written for his wife while he was working on Spike Island, where she, for health reasons, was unable to join him. He died on 6 August 1850 at 13 Prince's St., Cork, and was buried in St Joseph's cemetery in the city. His widow, who had supported the family as a seamstress during his terminal illness, emigrated with their children to Australia.
Walsh's work was an important influence on poets of the literary revival, and was frequently reprinted in anthologies of the period. A stanza from his translation of ‘Edmund of the hill’, by Edmund O'Ryan, was adapted by W. B. Yeats (qv) as one of his earliest lyrics, ‘Love song’ (1887); Yeats said of Walsh's version that he knew ‘nothing more impossibly romantic and celtic’ (Kelly, 31). Katharine Tynan (qv) included many of Walsh's translations in her edition of Irish love-songs (1892).
More information on this entry is available at the National Database of Irish-language biographies (Ainm.ie).