I am increasingly of the opinion that the Gaelic Revival had two peaks, producing two bodies of work that deserve immortality: the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and the translations of Stephen MacKenna.

Well, ‘translations’ is wrong; translation singular. But what a translation. The complete Enneads of Plotinus rendered in English—early Yeatsian / Æ-Russellian / Celtic Twilight English, but tighter and more focussed and (frankly) perfected—made into a life’s work and dedicated do chum [sic] glóire Dé agus onóra na hÉireann.1 Contemporary reviews said it was ‘as perfect a piece of English prose as has ever been produced from an ancient original’ and ‘one of the great translations of the century’, and they were correct.

It would be possible to overstate the importance of Neoplatonism to the Gaelic Revival, but right now its influence is understated, and a proper appreciation of the moment should put MacKenna’s immense achievement close to the heart of it. The below, from the first passage of Plotinus that MacKenna ever published (though revised considerably over the decades), could be a mission-statement or manifesto for his entire cultural moment. Yet it transcends in quality almost anything else produced by that moment.

When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity—when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step—you need a guide no longer—strain, and see. [Plotinus, Ennead I.6, trans. MacKenna.]

Readers of Greek can attest that Plotinus himself was not this good a writer. Hell, even Anglophones with no Greek can check this by looking into the other standard translation of the Enneads, A. H. Armstrong’s Loeb edition, which reproduces Plotinus with very high literal fidelity: it’s a nightmare to try to read. Armstrong himself was convinced of the immense merits of MacKenna’s translation: ‘the longer and more closely one studies it the firmer becomes one’s conviction of its excellence.’ MacKenna stayed theoretically and philosophically faithful to Plotinus, while simultaneously spreading his stylistic wings and creating something that ought to be remembered for a long time.

MacKenna was a great exemplar of Ireland’s ‘revolutionary generation’—not the ordinary farmers who actually did most of the fighting in the War of Independence and the Civil War, but the culturally-engaged, sometimes eccentric young people who got the ball rolling in Dublin in the years leading up to 1916. But he doesn’t show up in e.g. Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces, the classic account of this generation and its interlinked cultural and political history.2 Likewise, MacKenna’s work is unanthologised, even in the truly mammoth Field Day Anthology. His absence from historical memory comes down partly to the fact that little remaining primary material remains about his life, but it is largely due to the low status accorded to translation as a creative task.

I’m not about to write the man’s biography, but I’ve come across enough Stephen MacKenna Fun Facts to the point that I’d like to put them somewhere. So I am dumping them here. Many of these come from the volume edited and introduced by E. R. Dodds after MacKenna’s death, Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna (1936), though many are pinched from elsewhere. (Uncited claims should be assumed to be from the Dodds volume.) Consider this a living document, to be updated if I find anything else. I may at some point attempt the biography written by Liam Ó Rinn (yes, the one who wrote the words to Amhrán na bhFiann!), entitled Mo Chara Stiofán; but it’s in Irish, so it’d be a big undertaking for me.

After failing to get into UCL to study classics, the late-teenage MacKenna—a religious Catholic at the time—became a novice in a monastic order. He didn’t last long.

Dear Charles,

I have left W——. It was the damn ‘discipline’ did it: we had to take the beastly thing every morning: I couldn't stand it. It wasn't the pain, of course—I didn't mind that. It was the absurdity of the thing, the coddology of the thing—whacking oneself as if one were a lazy old donkey!

I’m not actually sure which orders ‘took the discipline’ (self-flagellation) as a matter of course in the 1880s / 1890s. If you think you know what order MacKenna might have been a novice in, let me know. ‘Coddology’ (with two ‘d’s!) is a great word to find in a nineteenth-century letter.

MacKenna was very good friends with J. M. Synge; they met in Paris in the 1890s, where MacKenna was trying to make a living as a journalist, and not (at that time) succeeding very well. A joke later relayed to Dodds: ‘How do those two young men live?’ ‘Oh, Synge lives on what MacKenna lends him, and MacKenna lives on what Synge pays him back.’

Pulling together various sources, it seems to me MacKenna was somewhere between ‘close reviewer’ and ‘full collaborator’ on Synge’s book on the Aran Islands, completed in 1901. In turn, Synge seems to have been instrumental in getting the first portion of MacKenna’s Plotinus, tractate I.6 ‘On Beauty’, published in 1908—by which time Synge himself had become famous, though he was also close to death.

More than that, I think Synge may have played a deeper role in encouraging MacKenna’s translation project. At Synge’s grave in 1909, the wreath laid by Yeats carried (a poetically reworked version of) the very last line of the Enneads. Yeats had it as ‘The lonely return to loneliness, the divine to divinity’; ‘This is the life of gods… the passing of solitary to solitary,’ was how MacKenna would later render the phrase. Yeats’ knowledge of Plotinus (in an earlier translation) was independent, but his choice of quote could suggest that he associated Plotinus with Synge. If Synge had an interest in ‘Plotty’ (and it’s not incompatible with what we know that he did), then it may have been linked one way or another to his close friend MacKenna’s interest.

But all of these are guesses, and the truth will forever be unknowable. The pair’s relationship, though undoubtedly close and literarily important, is nonetheless doomed to be very poorly understood. Why? Dodds explains:

… letters of Synge to MacKenna are preserved in the National Library of Ireland. They have unfortunately at some time been so shockingly mutilated, in an attempt to excise libellous and blasphemous matter, as to render them almost worthless.

Ah, twentieth-century Ireland, where fear of the bishops was so bad you’d cut up random letters in the National Library archive, just in case.

In 1897 MacKenna, fired by philhellenism, joined Greek volunteer forces after a declaration of war from the Ottoman Empire. Like the other Greek forces in that war, his unit did not cover themselves in glory, or even in the honour of good and professional soldiers.

Posted for the first time on sentry-duty, he explained the fact politely to an astonished Greek officer: ‘I do not understand, monsieur, the etiquette of this situation.’ He had to be taught there and then how to salute, how to challenge, how to hold his rifle.

Luckily (?), the war was over so quickly that he didn’t have to display any combat bravery. Asked later about his wartime experiences, he said ‘[i]t was like waiting for a train at Mullingar.’

Back in Paris, MacKenna became a very prominent journalist, eventually rising to the role of European correspondent for the New York World. In this capacity, he visited Russia in 1904/1905 to report on the revolution (the pre-war one that led to limited democratisation, not the later, more famous and more important one), and he spoke to many of the most important figures in the country.

Two events are worth relating from this trip to Russia. First, MacKenna was joined by Michael Davitt, the Land Leaguer and one of the most important figures in Irish history, for a visit to Yasnaya Polyana to speak to Tolstoy. I had not previously known that Tolstoy and Davitt had met, but MacKenna himself relates that they met on several occasions and were quite friendly—and leaves us in no doubt about the grounds of the men’s friendship:

I went with Michael Davitt, who knew T. well from former visits made at a time when T. and M. were both cracked over some mysterious ‘Single Tax’ advocated by some ‘George’ or other.

Davitt and Tolstoy, two of the great Georgists of the period, apparently warmed to each other. But while Davitt wrote about his meeting(s) with Tolstoy for the Freeman’s Journal, I’ve not been able to find and access the article, which means that it’s the rather less impressed reaction of MacKenna that I am left with:

One winter in the early years of this century, Michael Davitt and myself went to Yasnia Polyana, saw the Count Tolstoi, looking eminently County, walking his woods, knocked for long at his door, and were at last let in by the Moujik Tolstoi, as Moujiky as in any of the current photographs, to be seated at a table covered, peasant-fashion, with a cloth foul with stains of eggs and coffee—and never, either of us, I think, felt quite easy again about the doctrine trumpeted forth from that stagy shrine.

The other important event from MacKenna’s Russian trip came when, confined by gunfire to his St Petersburg hotel room, he was compelled to read the only book available to him, a Greek copy of the Enneads that he’d picked up on a whim in a bookshop. This was MacKenna’s first encounter with ‘Plotty’ (as he would come to call the philosopher), and it seems to have been a kind of spiritual experience. One of the first things he did after subsequently managing to reach Moscow, presumably having been forced to leave his Plotinus behind him, was to look through the city’s bookshops for another copy of the Enneads.

It really was a turning point in his life. Only two years later, MacKenna was declaring of Plotinus: ‘It seems to me that I must be born for him’. The project of translating the Enneads was underway very quickly. And it may have left a deeper mark on his life: MacKenna would come to lose his Catholic faith and become a kind of Unitarian, at least for a time, though how much of this was owed directly to Plotinus is not clear. (His dedication maybe should have been changed to ‘glóire an t-Aon agus onóra na hÉireann’.) He would later make it a slogan of his that ‘to be a bad Catholic is the best religion in the world.’

MacKenna was a great champion of the Irish language. Unlike some first language English speakers who adopt this kind of attitude, though, MacKenna did have quite good spoken Irish on him (by some accounts: Austin Clarke makes this claim in A Penny in the Clouds). He learned it as an adult, but had the right kind of curiosity about the intricate little functionings of the language:

I know that, were I intellectually eminent to the degree of being commissioned to lecture so, I’d rather live in a brown coat in a country teach na mbocht (how would you say in Irish a house for the poor? Tig or teach na mbocht seems to mean the particular house of these or those particular poors? I s’pose left to our Gaelic selves we'd have given all these things quite other names—names caught from quite other angles).3

But MacKenna’s written Irish, as recorded in letters and such, was often truly woeful: phonetic transcriptions that sometimes barely make sense. And so, while he did apparently attempt some Greek to Irish translations of Pindar, Epictetus, and Sophocles (all lost to history), his truly great work was done in English! Revealed preference is almost always is fearr Béarla cliste…

Hilariously, some Irish language MacKenna-isms made their way into the work of Hugh MacDiarmid:

And greatly I love to hear a girl
Back from three years at school
Say to her father in fluent Greek
‘Morning, old lad: like your eggs fried or boiled?
Going to be cursed hot to-day
But thank Heaven I’ve nothing to do
But grill ἡλιάζω on the lawn
And smoke καπνίζω a handful
Of cigarettes σκιρτεῖν or χειροπηδᾶν’
—All in Plato’s or Xenophon’s style and vocabulary,
Only borrowing from the modern language
The few words necessary
For purely 20th century things,
And wish I might be found so speaking too
fhios dom fhéin some fine day
Tho’ I appreciate Euripides’ use
Of archaic diction too,
But alas I can speak no Greek,
And am now too old to learn.
And nil leiyeas ogam air. [MacDiarmid, ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’.]

‘Fhios dom fhéin’ ought to have been ‘gan fhios dom féin’ (unconsciously, unwittingly, surprising oneself). And ‘nil leiyeas ogam air’ risks being meaningless unless a sharp-eyed soul can find the source, which Gregory Baker has: the phrase was lifted from a letter from MacKenna to Trinity historian Edmund Curtis, dated 1926 and published in the aforementioned Dodds volume in 1936. Dodds adds a gloss, ‘I have no cure for it’, letting us figure out that it should be ‘níl leigheas agam air’.

Amazingly, MacKenna’s letter also contains the other Irish phrase from MacDiarmid’s poem, except rendered with the requisite ‘gan’. It is unbelievably MacDiarmidian to have lifted two Irish phrases from the same letter, to not even have checked them for accuracy, and to have fucked one of them up anyway.4 Dodds’ glosses presumably emboldened the poet, though Dodds warns the reader of MacKenna’s bad Irish spelling.

This led me to poke further, and found that the lines quoted above from ‘Morning, old lad…’ to ‘The few words necessary…’ were directly word-for-word plagiarised from a different letter of MacKenna’s, sent to his sister-in-law on Christmas Eve 1923. The only change (apart from line breaks and minor punctutation) was that MacDiarmid altered the Greek words supplied for ‘cigarette’ to introduce a cryptic allusion to the Bacchae. No greater honour, I suppose!

This one is just plain fun. Patrick Little, future minister of posts and telegraphs, included the following in his Bureau of Military History testimony (all sic erat scriptum):

Stepehn McKenna also contributed articles, and carried on, for some time, lessons on Irish. He had been the European correspondent to the New York ‘Sun’, I think, at a very high salary. Previous to that, he had fought in the Greek war, where his regiment were posted in the Pass of Thermopylae. He was sent to Russia by the American paper, where he interviewed very distinguished people, including Leo Tolstoy. When John McBride became engaged to Maud Gonne, Stephen McKenna made the remark that he thought that it was a tragedy that such a remarkable woman should get engaged to such a rolling stone. This story was reversed, and repeated to McBride, who challenged Stephen McKenna to fight a duel. Stephen, who was always prepared to oblige anybody, accepted the challenge, and they met in a large room, in the offices of the New York ‘Sun’. The weapons were revolvers. Just before they started shooting, Stephen asked McBride what the duel was about, and McBride said that he had been told that Stephen McKenna had said that it was a shame that such an honest man as McBride should marry such a person as Maud Gonne. Stephen said, “Quite the contrary. What I said was, it was a shame that such a turbulent rascal should marry such a splendid woman!” And Seán McBride said, “Shake hands, old man!”

I can find no corroboration for the duel story. Is this source internally plausible? (Ignore the typist’s errors.) As far as I can tell MacKenna never actually worked for the New York Sun, but this could well have been a minor error for the New York World (his ‘very high salary’ at the World was remarked upon by many); and he certainly was at Thermopylae with Greek volunteer forces; and other details (like interviewing Tolstoy) are corroborated. MacBride, Gonne, and MacKenna would certainly have all been in Paris in 1903, and socially very close.

Also, not unimportantly, priors for ‘wacky shit happened in social circles adjacent to Maud Gonne’ should be very high. She had sex at her dead kid’s tomb because she thought she would conceive another child with the same soul! By that standard, ‘her husband nearly shot, or got shot by, an eminent Neoplatonist translator in a misguided effort to defend her honour’ counts as grounded and sensible.

Then again, these BMH testimonies were recorded decades after the events, and are known by historians to often contain myth disguised as memory. It is distinctly possible that the duel story is nonsense. But it also seems distinctly possible that it really occurred in its essentials, even if Little slightly misremembered which paper MacKenna worked for. And I want to believe.

MacKenna was a consistent contributor to the Freeman’s Journal. But living in Paris until 1907, he wasn’t hanging around the paper’s Dublin offices when Mr Bloom and Stephen showed up on 16th June 1904; and even if he had been around, he usually wrote his leaders over long nights, often ending at 2 a.m., so would have been sleeping at the time. Alas; what an addition to the theme of Platonism versus Aristotelianism he might have been!

But, inevitably, if someone doesn’t appear in Ulysses, they will at least be mentioned in it. From ‘Scylla and Charybdis’:

From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

— Mallarmé, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don't you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.

Indeed, MacKenna did know Best in Paris; and more than that, he knew both Æ and John Eglinton—Eglinton and MacKenna set up an imaginary ‘Society for the Study of Thucydides’ with themselves as co-chairs (and no other members!), and they addressed each other as ‘Brother in Thucydides’ in their letters. Sadly, he probably never met Mr Malachi Mulligan, fertiliser and incubator Oliver St John Gogarty, but nonetheless it’s good evidence of MacKenna’s centrality to Irish literary culture at this time that he knew over half of the people who (fictionally) gathered to hear Stephen relate the Hamlet-Hamnet theory.

Padraic Colum, a minor poet, recalled the below of MacKenna:

Often at two o'clock in the morning when we had written our leaders [for the Freeman’s Journal] … we would walk to Donnybrook together through the deserted streets. I said to him once, “It is worth while being out at this time to hear the curlews that are flying over the city.” He looked up in amazement. “I thought the curlew was purely literary invented by Yeats: ‘O Curlew, cry no more into the air!’ Do you mean to say that these are curlews I have been hearing?” This gave me the notion that Stephen MacKenna paid little attention to the sights and sounds of nature.

If you don’t know the poem, it’s ‘Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew’:

O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.

I, uh, don’t know how you could understand this if you didn’t know what a curlew was, or at least that it was a bird? Then again, lots of people manage to enjoy it without knowing who Hanrahan was supposed to be, so maybe MacKenna was just one step further into galaxy-brainedness.

MacKenna had a lifelong tic about his name being written ‘McKenna’ or ‘M’Kenna’—although he clearly did not mind ‘MacEnna’, using it himself infrequently; he just insisted you spelled out ‘Mac’ with an ‘a’, and got very cross indeed if you didn’t.

A fact that does not cast light upon this is the existence of Stephen McKenna, no ‘a’, a minor English novelist and contemporary of our Stephen MacKenna. Many made the mistake—controversy from one Stephen M often resulted in angry letters to the other. But both men seemed to find this amusing rather than irritating, and carried on an infrequent jovial correspondence:

To rise, between novels, to philosophy is accounted to me for grace; but to lapse from philosophy to novel-writing can be doing your reputation no good. [Stephen McKenna, letter to Stephen MacKenna, 28th October 1927.]

How did MacKenna make a living while translating Plotinus? By trade he was a journalist, not a classical scholar, and newspapers don’t normally print new translations of Late Antique philosophy.

The actual answer was that the translation was sponsored by Debenhams, the now-defunct department store. Then-boss E. R. Debenham read the first published tractate, the aforementioned ‘On Beauty’, and decided he was going to ensure the whole thing got completed and published, come hell or high water—including, at one point, having to set up an elaborate trick to disguise the source of the money from the overly-proud MacKenna. It took over a decade and a half of funding from Debenham to finish the project, sometimes with lies about the money’s origins so as not to upset MacKenna’s pride. Dodds describes the translation as ‘a noble monument to an Irishman's courage, an Englishman's generosity, and the idealism of both’.

While living briefly in the States, MacKenna may have been a member of Clan na Gael—the Fenians. Dodds doubts that he ever took the Fenian oath, but there is a piece of second-hand testimony reported by Padraic Colum, who mentions an anonymous Fenian who supposedly met MacKenna at an oathtakers-only meeting in New York. The timings work out. There’s also an anecdote that MacKenna showed up at the GPO on in 1916 several days into the Rising (by which point it was obviously doomed), volunteering to fight; he was, apparently, politely sent home. Whether true or not, several days after the Rising he certainly was in the house of one William Kelly when it was searched and Irish Volunteer rifles found—though MacKenna and his wife were quickly established to just be ‘passing through’ and released.

Regardless of what to make of all this, when the Treaty came in, MacKenna’s republican instincts unquestionably hardened.

I have been invited to co-operate with the honest Repudiation [anti-Treaty] Party; I cannot refuse the call—cannot in conscience.

Over winter 1921–1922 MacKenna wrote several letters in rapid succession Debenham, who probably did deserve an explanation of potential delays to the project he was funding. MacKenna outlined that while he was ‘not hankering after any but … the Plotinus work’, he had taken note of Lloyd George’s threat of waging ‘immediate and terrible war’ in Ireland if the Treaty were rejected, and decided that this risk required his ‘co-operation’. Between the euphemisms of the time, and the deliberate unclarity with which MacKenna wrote to an Englishman during wartime (understandable), I cannot tell what kind of ‘co-operation’ he pledged in the event of a rejection of the Treaty. He wrote later that ‘my service [would be] purely literary’, but ominously warned that ‘there are times when the pen attracts the sword’.

Meanwhile, unable to countenance either the Treaty settlement or civil war against his fellow Irish, he declared that ‘[i]f the country accepts the [Treaty] I shall probably leave it for ever—and Plotinize.’ In the event, this is what eventually happened. MacKenna was not the only man who left the country due to the Treaty split, and he was one of the luckiest, leaving it only out of principle and not out of fear of violent reprisal. But he was a great loss to his country nonetheless.

The great Irish poets of the time all paid tribute to MacKenna. In Louis MacNeice’s 1937 ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, ‘Craven’ (Auden) and ‘Ryan’ (MacNeice himself) trade reminiscences of the dead; when Auden remembers Chekov, MacNeice counters with MacKenna,

Ill and tormented, unwilling to break contact
A brilliant talker who left
The salon for the solo flight of Mind.

A great description—MacKenna’s electric conversation was noted by all who met him. Richard Ellman heard echoes of of Yeats’ ‘All Souls’ Night’ in this passage, but I hear much more of Wordsworth: ‘The marble index of a mind for ever | Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.’

Austin Clarke, as far as I can tell, never wrote a poem dedicated to MacKenna, but was clear in his prose writings that he ‘regarded Stephen MacKenna as my literary father’ (A Penny in the Clouds, ch. 3). James Stephens, however, dedicated the long sequence ‘Theme and Variations’ to MacKenna. Æ dedicated his book The Interpreters to him, as well as the original publication of ‘Promise’,5 possibly my favourite of his poetry:

The unattainable beauty
The thought of which was pain,
That flickered in eyes and on lips
And vanished again:
That fugitive beauty
Thou shalt attain.

While there are deeper mystical resonances here (it’s Æ!), it is also very much meant to function as well as simple praise for MacKenna’s literary achievement, of which the Lurgan mystic wrote: ‘There is not a word here which grates upon us. All is pure and cold and ecstatic as the vision the seer beholds.’

Meanwhile, one of Yeats’ ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, the sequence that more famously includes the Crazy Jane poems, is ‘The Delphic Oracle Upon Plotinus’.

Behold that great Plotinus swim,
Buffeted by such seas;
Bland Rhadamanthus beckons him,
But the Golden Race looks dim,
Salt blood blocks his eyes.

Scattered on the level grass
Or winding through the grove
Plato there and Minos pass,
There stately Pythagoras
And all the choir of Love.

The ‘Words for Music Perhaps’ were published in 1933, by which point the anti-Treatyite MacKenna was dying in England while Free Stater Yeats had done two terms in the Seanad. But Yeats’ poem was a silent tribute to MacKenna. It was based on MacKenna’s translation of a passage from Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (which acted as a preface to the Enneads). Porphyry describes what the Delphic Oracle said asked about Plotinus’ fate after death:

Celestial! Man at first but now nearing the diviner ranks! the bonds of human necessity are loosed for you and, strong of heart, you beat your eager way from out the roaring tumult of the fleshly life to the shores of that wave-washed coast free from the thronging of the guilty, thence to take the grateful path of the sinless soul: where glows the splendour of God, where Right is throned in the stainless place, far from the wrong that mocks at law.

Oft-times as you strove to rise above the bitter waves of this blood-drenched life, above the sickening whirl, toiling in the mid-most of the rushing flood and the unimaginable turmoil, oft-times, from the Ever-Blessed, there was shown to you the Term still close at hand […]

But now that you have cast the screen aside, quitted the tomb that held your lofty soul, you enter at once the heavenly consort: where fragrant breezes play, where all is unison and winning tenderness and guileless joy, and the place is lavish of the nectar-streams the unfailing Gods bestow, with the blandishments of the Loves, and delicious airs, and tranquil sky:

where Minos and Rhadamanthus dwell, great brethren of the golden race of mighty Zeus; where dwell the just Aeacus, and Plato, consecrated power, and stately Pythagoras and all else that form the Choir of Immortal Love, that share their parentage with the most blessed spirits, there where the heart is ever lifted in joyous festival. [Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, trans. MacKenna.]

The Yeats is obviously more compressed, tighter—more, well, late-Yeatsian. The MacKenna is, by contrast, the kind of prose often called ‘lavish’, which your eye may naturally have skipped over from knowledge that it can too often be purple. But go back. MacKenna avoids many of the vices of this kind of writing: the vagueness and imprecision often inherited from the pre-Raphaelites is gone; the long list of immortals, typical of Celtic Twilight writing, is arranged and cut in a way to avoid repetitiveness and emphasise the individuals listed; the core metaphor of the sea is described with surprising specificity.

Meanwhile the virtues of such writing shine much more clearly freed of their baggage. The spiritual heights and religious depths of Neoplatonism, the reasons it could so attract and excite the likes of St Augustine (or indeed, MacKenna himself) are made shiningly apparent. Yeats was one of those who found the excitement in Plotinus through MacKenna, whose translation he agreed was ‘worthy at its best to take its place among the masterpieces of English prose’.

Later in the same year, MacKenna was admitted to hospital in London, almost completely broke, and died a few months later. I have no idea where he’s buried.