“Gaelic is my national language but not my mother tongue”: the language question, thus defined by W. B. Yeats, has haunted and inspired generations of Irish poets and writers faced with the decline of the Irish language and the rise of English in Ireland. John Montague’s celebrated poetic image of the “grafted tongue” of the Irish poet writing in English, living and speaking proof of the success of English colonial language policy in Ireland, echoes the laments of seventeenth-century Gaelic poets who first felt the coming dominance of English. Translation has been central to poetic attempts to reclaim the heritage of Irish-language poetry in English and more broadly to what is known as the Irish Literary Revival. Either directly or through translations, poets from Samuel Ferguson to Yeats and Seamus Heaney have drawn on the Irish tradition to constitute a specifically Irish poetry in English. This poetry, characterized by its repertoire of images, heroes and legends, its distinctive sonorities, as well as sound-patterns and metres transposed from Irish, by defamiliarizing to some extent English-medium poetry, resists the hegemony of strictly English literary traditions. Even against this rich culture of translation in modern Irish poetry in English, translation occupies a singularly important place in the poetry of Michael Hartnett. Hartnett first won plaudits for his translations of works such as the The Hag of Beare and other poems from Old Irish, but also for translations from other languages, notably his version of the Tao and a translation of Lorca’s Gipsy Ballads. In this article, I wish to explore Hartnett’s critique of translation in his collection A Farewell to English (1975), as well as his corrective practice of translation in his collection O Bruadair (1985), a volume of poems translated from the Irish of the canonical seventeenth-century poet, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair. In 1975, Hartnett declaimed his long poem “A Farewell to English” to a crowd at a poetry reading in Dublin and set out his intention, “To court the language of my people” and to adopt Irish as his medium of poetic expression. “A Farewell to English” is a lacerating critique of the failure of post-independence Ireland to affirm its own identity. The most powerful passages are those which frame this act of resistance in images translated from seventeenth-century Irish-language poetry. The poem’s speaker singles out Yeats and his poetry for condemnation. The translation inherent in the latter’s Celtic revival are cast not as acts of resistance, but as further acts of colonial appropriation, its results a “celebrated Anglo-Irish stew”. This farewell to English-language poetry was not definitive and Hartnett later published further collections in English. With the O Bruadair volume, Hartnett aimed “to restore and popularise” this poet, chronicler of the death of the lordships of Gaelic Ireland and its system of poetic patronage. I wish to look at the strategies of resistance Hartnett employs in his own translation, as he aligns Ó Bruadair’s century and language with his own.