Mheán Oíche has been dramatised by Tom MacIntyre and Celia de Fréine and has been turned into a comic opera by composer Ana Sokolović with English libretto by Paul Bentley. In 2018, Irish dialectologist Brian Ó Curnáin found an 1817 manuscript of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche in the archives of the Royal Irish Academy. The manuscript, which is signed Éamann Ó hOrchaidh, renders the poem not into the Munster Irish spoken by Brian Merriman, but into the now-extinct dialect of Connacht Irish once spoken in County Roscommon. The discovery is regarded as priceless in what it reveals of a now vanished dialect of the Irish language. Literary translations In the 20th century, a number of translations were produced. Translators have generally rendered Cúirt an Mheán Óiche into iambic pentameter and heroic couplets. Ciarán Carson, however, chose to closely reproduce Merriman's original dactylic meter, which he found very similar to the 6/8 rhythm of Irish jigs, and heavy use of alliteration. According to Frank O'Connor, a German translation of Cúirt an Mheán Óiche also exists. Notable English versions have been made by Anglo-Irish poets Arland Ussher, Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford, and by the Irish Jewish poet David Marcus. A free verse translation has been made by Thomas Kinsella and a partial rhymed translation by Seamus Heaney. Brendan Behan is believed to have written an unpublished version, since lost. Frank O'Connor's translation into heroic couplets, which is the most popular, was banned by the Censorship Board of the Irish State in 1945. Soon after, O'Connor's translation was attacked in print and O'Connor replied. O'Connor alleges that the subsequent debate in The Irish Times, "on the banning of my translation... would make a substantial and informing booklet." The debate began when Professor James Hogan of the National University of Ireland claimed to have found, after reading Cúirt an Mheán Óiche in a literary translation into German, that O'Connor had introduced a blasphemous line that wasn't in the original text. O'Connor responded in print that Professor Hogan did not know enough German to read an Irish language poem in the original. O'Connor also wrote that everything in his translation that the Irish State considered to be obscene was also present in Merriman's original poem in Irish. In his book, A Short History of Irish Literature, O'Connor cites the banning of his translation among several other examples of the crippling effect that the