JOHN ANSTER OF CHARLEVILLE (1793-1867)

A plaque honouring the memory of the poet and translator John Anster, who was born in Charleville in 1793, will be unveiled on the building formerly known as the Imperial Hotel on this Friday evening, 24th May at 7.30pm, by Cllr Ian Doyle, vice-chair of Charleville Heritage Society.

The Anster family were local brewers as well as land owners Their son John Anster entered Trinity College in Dublin in 1810. He had converted from Catholicism to the Church of Ireland, and was admitted to the bar in 1824. He contributed prose essays to the North British Review, and twenty-eight poems to the Amulet in 1826. Eventually he became Regius Professor of Civil Law at TCD, having held office as registrar of the Admiralty Court, from 1837. He practiced in Cork for a period.

In Blackwood’s Magazine for June, 1820, Anster published fragments of a translation of the German poet, Goethe’s Faust, and reprinted in England and America. He published the first part in 1835 as Faust: A Dramatic Mystery. His translation was acclaimed as a work of art in its own right. It is still regarded as the readiest and most reliable way of getting at the flavour of the German poet, Goethe’s original work.

Anster, spent the last years of his life translating the second part of Faust, which was published in1864 three years before his death on the 9th June 1867 in Dublin at the age of 73. He was a contributor to the Dublin University Magazine between the years 1837-56.[1]

ANSTER’S WORKS:

· Ode to Fancy, with Other Poems (Dublin: Milliken 1815)

· Lines on the Death of Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte of Wales (Dublin: R. Milliken; London: Longman 1818)

· Poems with Some Translations from the German (Dublin: R. Milliken; London: Cadell & Davies; Edinburgh: Blackwood 1819)

· Goethe’s Faust (1820)

· Xeniola (1824)

· Faust (London: Harrap 1925)

· Faustus: A Dramatic Mystery; The Bride of Connth; The First Walpurgis Night, ‘translated by J.A.’ (London: Longman 1835)

· Xeniola: Poems including Translations from Schiller and de la Motte-Fouqué (Dublin: R. Milliken 1837)

· The Fairy Child in the Ballad Poetry of Ireland, Charles Gavan Duffy, ed.(1845) · Introductory Lecture on the Study of the Roman Civil Law (Dublin: Hodges & Smith 1850) · Schiller, Dublin University Magazine, Vol. VII, No. 37 (Jan. 1856)

· Faustus: The Second Part, from the German of Goethe (London: Longman 1864).