Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (c.1634) is a landmark work of Irish historiography whose influence on the writing of history, as well as on the language, is measured in centuries rather than in decades. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the only extant and complete contemporary translation of the work, that by Michael Kearney (1635), has attracted so little attention (this translation is preserved in a manuscript housed in the Royal Irish Academy: MS 24 G 16). Keating, in a lengthy vindicatory preface (the díonbhrollach) to his work, justifies his enterprise with precise reference to the ignorant and mendacious shortcomings of New English writings on Ireland. He famously likens those writers to the dung-beetle (“proimpiollán). Kearney is similarly pugnacious and, in this respect at least, outdoes the “Reverend and Worthy Author Father Geffrey Keathinge” in aggressivity, in likening those same New English authors to “wanton Lechers”. Thanks to scholars like Bernadette Cunningham and Marc Caball, Kearney’s translation in its relation to Keating has, to some extent, been characterised. In the present paper, as a preliminary to my project of publishing a critical edition of Kearney’s translator’s liminary to his work, I wish to look more closely at Kearney’s strategies of writing and translating in his own original contribution, which, in the manuscript, follows on from Keating’s preface. Kearney’s use of language but also his engagement with Spenser are topics particularly worthy of our attention.