Pearse Hutchinson

PEARSE Hutchinson, who has died aged 84 of peneumonia, was a Glasgow-born poet, broadcaster and translator. A friend of fellow poet and author Brendan Behan, he regarded himself as "a man of languages rather than nations".

William Patrick Henry Pearse Hutchinson was born into an Irish republican family in central Glasgow. His "deeply loving but strong-minded and puritanical" mother was from Cowcaddens but his father, a printer whose own father had left Dublin to find work in Scotland, was a Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow. He was interned in the Frongoch internment camp in north Wales as an Irish Republican prisoner between 1919-1921.

The family moved to Dublin when Hutchinson was five. His father, having also been imprisoned in the city, died when Hutchinson was still a child. In 1990 he recalled: "Sacked from a good job, deported from Glasgow, interned in Frongoch and imprisoned in Mountjoy."

Following his mother's death in 1968, Hutchinson settled in Dublin and, apart from the last year of his life, lived in the family home on Rathgar Road in the township of Rathmines, just on the fringe of the city centre.

He was educated by the Christian Brothers and went on to read languages at University College, Dublin. On April Fool's Day, 1951, having learned French and Spanish, he got a job in Geneva but returned "to the arms of mother" in 1953. Not for long. From 1954-1957, and later from 1961-1967, he lived in Barcelona, working in The Dublin School of English, run by his friend from Dublin Ernie Hughes. He was then appointed Gregory Fellow at the University of Leeds between 1971-1973.

From 1975 he was co-founder and co-editor of the influential literary magazine Cyphers with, among others, his friend and fellow poet Eilean Ni Chiuilleanain. In 1981 he was among the first appointed members of Aosdana, Ireland's Academy of the Arts.

He published his first poems at the age of 17 in the prestigious magazine The Bell. He allegedly lied about his age, claiming to be 18. Following his appearance in the pivotal Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing (1962) he published his first collection, Tongue Without Hands (1963), followed in 1969 by the most important collection of his early work, Expansions.

Both were published by Liam Miller's Dolmen Press. Since then he has had published in Gaelic (Irish) and English 10 collections with Peter Fallon's The Gallery Press, the latest and last At Least For a While (2008).

Due to his family's experience in the 1930s, Hutchinson had an "ambivalent approach to elements in Scotland" but never towards the Scots or Scotland. He was an early visitor in the Scottish/Irish cultural exchanges that started in 1971, appearing with Michael O hUanachain and Iain Crichton Smith in 1973. His last appearance was in 1992 with Crichton Smith and the Welsh poet Menna Elfyn in St Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh, organised by the then fledgling Scottish Poetry Library for the Edinburgh International Festival.

When living in Barcelona his great love of "minority cultures and their languages" became central to his thinking and infused his work with a compassionate cosmopolitanism that made him unique among his peers. We are in his debt for vivid interpretations of Catalan and Galicoportuguese poems that not only inform us of almost lost poets and poems but also give resonance to his own "heartbeat obsessions".

In the title poem of The Frost is All Over (1975) he states at first: "To kill a language is to kill a people". Then midway in this, his best-loved individual poem, he declares: "To call a language dead before it dies/means to bury it alive". It concludes: "To kill a language is to kill one's self".

He was reticent in writing of his sexuality and the most explicit references are in the Gaelic poems. He was "badly bruised, indeed frightened" by the cruel reactions in Dublin to his friendship with renowned drinker and hell-raiser Behan in the 1950s.

He had the ability to make and keep friendships with both genders but it is his poems that touch on his central values and virtues.

"If love is the greatest reality,/and I believe it is", he writes in Into Their True Gentleness (Watching the Morning Grow: 1972), "We fall in love with people/we consider them gentle,/we love them violently/for their gentleness", and then, "(let) them travel back/released from us,/into their true gentleness,/ even with us.".

Recognised and translated internationally as a poet of importance and "a man of integrity" (Seamus Heaney), his death is a loss to his friends but the substantial body of work he has gifted to us establish him as a positive influence, an emotional guide and an inspirational presence for the literary future.

His friend Professor Augustine Martin once wrote of him: "He is a citizen of the world, egregiously a European, yet his notion of being European is unthinkable without first being Irish." He died in St James's Hospital, Dublin, where he had been a patient for the past year.