Cats and Carpenters

 The Irish country poet Riobard Bheldon (1836-1914) included a poem in a New Year’s card he sent to a woman he’d been fond of when he was young. He wrote  two love songs to her before she went off to America with her family. This is not one of them, though: it’s only a silly poem about a cat.

Or is it?

(The card happened to have a picture of a cat on the front and Bheldon pretends he is sending her the cat.)

“Bail ó Dhia ort, séan is rath,

‘s nár bhaine spíach leat ar an mbliain seo ag teacht,

Bí I’d thost go foill is cluthaig lem ais

Go neosad sceol duit gan chlaon gan chleas.

Is cian mo chuaird  ag trial that lar

Ón gComarach suairc na sruthán geal.

Cónaíonn cois sléibhe  ann fear bocht ait,

Is cuma cé hé, is é luaigh liom teacht.

Dúirt sé liom go rabhais gan cat,

Luchaig is francaigh allta o’d chreach,

Ag struailleadh gach ball, gach am gan stad

Is poll sa trunc taobh  thal dem nglas.

Ní tóin le gríosach mé ná spreas,

Ach seibineach groí den síolrach ceart,

Is gear mo ghaol leis an tsean-chat  glas

Bhí i gCom Machan na gcraobh le’d mhuintir seal,

Muirnín ghleoite do phléadh a cheart

Ag sciobadh gach spóla bhíodh méith nó maith.

Fuair mé om thógaint leamhnacht ba,

Is bannie bhí soil ón ngaibhairín breac.

Má gheibhim siúd uaitse, cóir is ceart,

Togha gach só mat sport dom chb,

Níl luch ná francach thiar nó theas

Gheobhaidh an ball, ná díolfadh as:

Is gear mo  shúil is táim lúfar pras:

S’é an t-ádh a sheol chugat mé, a Bhrín deas.

Here is a translation, but don’t read it until you’ve read the explication below, please.

Blessing of God on you, good luck and prosperity,

No misfortune come on you in the new year to come.

Quiet just a minute now and come here close

‘til I tell something: it’s no lie or deceit.

Far I’ve traveled here to you, over the sea,

From Comeragh Mountains where streams shine silver.

There lives a man, a poor and eccentric man.

It doesn’t matter who, but he’s the one told me to come.

He said to me that you are without any cat,

And the mice and rats are plundering you

Ripping and tearing clothes all of the time constantly

And a hole in the trunk there beside the lock.

I’m no sit-by-the-fire cat, no, nor some useless thing,

But a valiant bruiser of the good old stock,

closely related too to the old gray cat

your people had a while in leafy  Com Machan,

a handsome sweetheart who’d make his needs known,

run off with every piece of meat that’s solid and good.

I had, when I was raised, fresh milk of the cow

And the delicious milk from the little gray goat.

If I get the same from you, all my rightful dues,

The choice of every good thing to put in my mouth,

There’s no mouse or rat, neither west or south,

Who’ll come into the place who won’t pay for it.

My eyes are sharp and I’m agile and fast,

And it’s good luck brought me to you, fair Brídín. 

Yeah, that sounds pretty stupid or at least totally forgettable.

In translation, it is. In Irish, it’s not. 

Translation really only works when the words themselves and the ideas or images they express are simple, clear and obvious, and do not depend at all on context or echoes of other elements of the original literature. My translation was done in five minutes and does not communicate the depths of the original. For that you need to know Irish well.

I know that sounds pompous and “special”. I will try to explain.

There are books that come at you with trumpets and drums sounding. Sometimes those kinds of book are actually good or great, even though the writing clearly knows it’s good and wants to be sure the reader knows too.

There are books that approach quietly and go about their business as quietly and unobtrusively as a carpenter who never looks busy, but then the job is done and done really well: done beautifully, in fact.

There are books that, at first glance, look like the literary equivalent of mass mailing advertising circulars that you glance at, then dump in the recycling.

“Riobard Bheldon: Amhráin agus Dánta” (edited by Pádraig Ó Macháin, The Poddle Press, 1995) at first glance makes you wonder why it even exists. I mean, an 158-page edition of the work of a minor Irish language country poet (1835-1914) from an obscure place in probably the worst period of Irish poetry? 

It is a great book, though, if you’re interested in Irish stuff. 

The easiest virtue to pinpoint is the physical book itself. It’s a solid, graceful, slim hardback with a wonderfully printed cover, a contemporary painting of the County Waterford place the poet was from. The book is well laid out. It has contemporary photographs of the people who feature in it. There are useful appendices. It is printed on good paper. It is pleasant to hold and look at.

It is written in good, solid, graceful Irish. Yes, very nice, but that’s maybe just one step above paper quality in the list of irrelevant stuff. Books are good because of what they say or how they say it, not because the grammar is right or something. Right?

 Here’s where we get into things that are  harder to enunciate, at least for me.

Every language, like every person,  has its own nature, or better, its own voice, its own “tune”. (I’m not saying, by the way, that it is intrinsic to a language or person.  I was almost going to say that Irish is lyrical, vehement and eloquent, but then I remembered the equally characteristic  precise, clear and sometimes quietly ironic tune, so I can’t characterize the language that way at all. I will come back to the question of the tune of the Irish language though.

A lot of contemporary English-language writing is mainly derived from other writing, it seems to me, and not from life, the world etc. I don’t mean that the writers should go out and get jobs as cowboys or policemen or prostitutes or something, and have Experiences.

I mean that a lot of our experience in contemporary life rises out of an interaction with words on a screen rather than with people or bugs or sky or whatever, and this shows in the writing

There is this thinness: a lack of a sense of specificity, of the solid reality of all the stuff outside us, and of the beautiful, heartbreaking  fragility of it all. 

So there’s a tendency for the words to either just pile up or to plod along grayly, and the tune ultimately derives from the office memo or police report. Other times, the writing is  carefully calculated for maximum effect, based on latest public relations and publishing industry research. That “tune” ultimately derives from advertising.

Sometimes a literary tradition or, like in Ireland, a whole social discourse, is deeply infused with a perception of the beauty, fragility and consequent necessary solidarity of life, that it facilitates  awareness of this in people who make songs and stories in that language. These people  don’ t necessarily have to come to some grand perception of beauty etc. themselves: the tools available to them in their tradition often incorporate this perception, so a new poem or song will communicate it “naturally”.  

 It may  communicates such a perception  even when that perception is not the supposed subject of the work.

One way it does that is through a certain type of music: a music that pleases and awakens the attention: a  clear-eyed, precise and realistic music desperately alive to and in love with this passing world and all its creatures and colors and textures.

Another way it does it is by echoing previous works or even just by alluding to them, even if only in words used, expressions and sound patters that call up listeners and readers’ memory of these works and of the understanding behind them. 

Men and women making poetry in the 19th century and earlier grew up in a milieu that prized this old way of understanding life. They had tools available to them with which to express themselves. They learned easily how to be good carpenters

If you hear amhráin poetry and song growing up, your own words may naturally fall into those patterns, and if you grow up immersed in poetry and stories that assume and express a way of perceiving the world, you too will absorb that perception. It will seem normal and natural.

Robert Weldon’s poetry should be pretty pedestrian. It’s written to or for or about people and events around where he lived, and then – after he was “discovered” --  to or for or about people and events in the Gaelic Revival of the time.

He was discovered when he composed on the spot and then recited a poem at a local open air Gaelic League meeting, and then in the years after, Patrick O’Carmody (a Clareman living nearby), Pádraig Ó Dálaigh from Dungarvan and  and the prior of nearby Mount Melleray monastery  encouraged him and wrote down his poems and songs. If he had not recited that poem at the meeting,  he would very likely be unknown today.

But his apparently pedestrian work is not pedestrian, and the Irish ,very human music in the poems says a lot more than you might think. 

A poem welcoming a minor public figure he has met to the area once again, for example, communicates affection, human solidarity, the dignity  of the individual, and awareness of precariousness of life, but these are not enunciated overtly. They are there in the music of meter and in tone and wording. These were not things Riobard invented, but they were there at hand when he needed to express deep emotion.

The cat poem is a deeply delt and emotional poem in which he tells the woman he remembers their past together in the mountains, and though life didn’t work out so that they could marry as he hoped and he’s no longer young, he remembers…

Tradition exists or existed for the reason that  it can provide us solid means of talking about the real things without having to invent it all ourselves each time. Of course, a dead tradition can also stifle, and a tradition that has lost touch with real things can poison perception and expression, but the Irish language is not one of those.

Okay, now you can go back and read the translation.

What I said above is, yes, very vague and abstract, so here are some specifics:

The poem is amhráin so it is structured around repeating accented  vowel patterns.

For example, the vowels that mater in the first line are “a” in bail, “I” in Dia, “é” in séan, and “a” in rath.

Second line: “a” in Bhaine, “I” in spiach, “i” (“ee”)  in bliain (“ian” is pronounced “ee” and “a” in teacht.

The pattern changes in detail in line 5 (“Is cian”): in line 11 (“ag struailleadh): 13 (“Ní tóin”)_ and 15 )”Is gear”) and then in 21, and 23 (“Níl luch”) and (Is gear).

Each of these marks also  slight intentional shift in music and feeling  that in many cases corresponds to a change in focus and implied emotional charge in the words.

The tone overall is familiar, conversational and fond (fond toward the cat, but by implication also to Bríd), and this comes out in cadence,  in the register of language and so on.

A small example, and then I have to finish chores” “Tóin le gríosach” is literally, “bum/butt in the (fireplace)  ashes , and not only is that a clear image of something in the world rather than just saying “I’m not lazy” but it’s a semi-proverbial expression for somebody who is lazy or a homebody, and thus calls up probably memories of Riobard and Bríd’s life long before in a then more traditional local society. The cadence of the changing vowel pattern there also suggests energy and intention.

Another example is the “muirnín ghleoite” lines where the formal, restrained  description of what sounds like a very pushy cat not only is funny  in its contrast between language and remembered reality, but again probably calls up memories of a former time (together).

And now I have to feed the goats.

Married/Unmarried

 

(Note: This essay was written before the last two, but then not posted until now.)

Cia re bhfuil Eiri ac anmhuin?

Mó is righin dá rioghdhamhnaibh,

Críoch na n-iaith linnet leabhar,

Gan triath innti d’áitiughadh.

(For whom is Ireland waiting?

Potential kings are slow in appearing,

The country of wide territories of warm lakes,

Though no lord now inhabits her.)

(Translated from Duanaire Mhéig Uidhitr: The Poembook of Cú Chonnacht  Mág Uidhir, Lord of Fermanagh 1566 – 1589, edited from the Copenhagen manuscript by David Greene, Dublin Institute for advanced Studies, 1972)

Bardic poetry is not for everyone. It’s not just that the language is often compressed and difficult, but the subject matter is usually praise of some now long dead Irish king or lord. I mean, who cares? He was probably just some brutal strongman.

Probably he was sometimes, yeah, but maybe not.

The public presentation of a new bardic poem at the court of the lord for whom it was composed was not a literary or public relations event and the poet was not some bookish guy hoping  to get on the good side of the powerful. It was a public ceremony enunciating and affirming truths central to the society, and one of them was  the symbolic “marriage” of the human realm and nature/the non-human world, as represented in the person of the ruler.

Not that the ruler was believed to have achieved some mystical understanding or status. There were historical periods when he may very well have plotted and murdered to ascend to his position, but the understanding was that, by filling the position of king/lord, a man accepted the fact that he had to maintain justice and proper action in all matters because if he did not, natural and social harmony would be broken. Evidence that he was maintaining the proper way was good weather, good crops of nuts etc. in the forests, fish in the streams and social peace. Evidence that he was not living up to the ideal were bad crops, bad weather, bad acorn and berry crops and general bad luck foe everybody

There are several old stories that illustrate what happened when a ruler did something to satisfy his own desires, even though it went against the proper way of things. Conchobhar Mac Nessa took young and beautiful Deirdre for himself: Conaire Mór allowed close kin to do violence against the people. What happened as a result? Dark forces of chaos and violence erupt and destroy the king and his court. See the story of Deirdre or Togail Bruidne Dá Derga 

So the presentation of a bardic poem was one way that the social descendants of the ancient druids, acting as spokesmen for the proper way of things, affirmed that a particular ruler was following the right path and was a good king etc. It was a precise, important ceremony and though there were no priests and no mention of God, it could almost be called a religious one. If it was a religious ceremony, though, it involved difficult work on the highwire too, as it were, because the requirements of the poetic meter were very strict and required careful training.

Here is description of how traditional bardic students went about learning poetry:

"....the place should be in a solitary recess of a garden or within a sept or inclosure far out of the reach of any noise....The structure was a snug, low hut , and beds in it at convenient distances, each within a small apartment without much furniture of any kind, save only a table, some seats, and a conveniency for clothes to hang upon.  No windows to let in the day, nor any lights used at all but that of candles and these brought at a proper season only.  The students upon thorough examination  being first divided into classes. The professors....gave a subject suitable to the capacity of each class, determining the number of rhimes, and clearing what was to be chiefly observed  therein as to syllables, quartrains, concord, correspondence, terminations and union, each of which were restrained by peculiar rules.  The said subject having been given over night,  they worked it apart each by himself upon his own bed, the whole next day in the dark, till at a certain hour in the night, lights being brought in, they committed it to writing.  Being afterwards dressed and come together in a large room where the masters waited, each scholar gave in his performance, which being corrected or approved of, either the same or fresh subjects were given against the next day....It was six or seven years before a mastery or the last degree was conferred, which you'll the less admire upon considering the great difficulty of the art, the many kinds of their poems, the the exactness and nicety to be observed in each...."

(This is from the Memoirs of the Marquis of Clanricarde, published in 1722, said to be the work of Thomas O'Sullivan, an Irish scholar from Tipperary who was active in London in the 1720s researching manuscripts in order to write a history of Ireland. Good source books on “bardic” metrics are Eleanor Knott's Irish Syllabic Poetry, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1974; and Duainearacht: Rialacha Meadarachta Fhiliocht na mBard  by Cait Ni Dhomhnaill, Oifig an tSoláthair, Dublin 1975.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about at all.

Bardic poetry can be difficult, but the poets did also compose poetry about other things. Mostly it was never written down because there was no one concerned about preserving it. Sometimes, pretty much by accident of history, it was written down and it survived, and this is where the whole corpus of the Dánta Grá, the great love poetry of the late Medieval period comes from.

Then in the late 16th century the world collapsed and Irish men and women watched as hordes of violent, greedy bastards with guns and cannon and big horses grabbed everything and killed anybody who got in the way. It didn’t matter that an Irish ruler observed the way of things: the flood engufhed everyone, It sure looked like all that old stuff was just total crap. It looked like God had abandoned the Irish too. 

Pretty soon, there were almost no Irish lords and the Englishmen who took their land did not care about ceremonies or bardic poetry or letting the old learned families stick around unless they could pay the new rent. “This land was always yours, you say? Don’t make me laugh. Land is a commodity and it’s mine now. Beat it.”

So knowldge of the old system of learning, including bardic poetry, gradually and sometimes instantaneously died out. Mostly it took a generation, though, asnd there were still some people who had been educated in the old system left and they composed poetry in the old way or something like it: poetry about what was happening. Great poetry.

Aodhgán O Rathaille, Seathrúin Ceitinn, Páidrigín Haicéad, Muiris Mac Dáibhi Dubh, O Bruadair, Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta, Piarais Feiritéar and the rest took the careful attention, gravitas and exquisite musical sensibilty of the bards and used them to go up against death and darkness, and I will talk about them next week.

 A thonn-sa thíos is airde géim go hard,

Meabhair mi chinn cloite ó’d bhéiceach tá:

Cabhair dá dtíodh arís ar Eirinn bhán,

Do ghlam nach binn, do dhingfinn féin i’d bhráid.

You, wave down there that cries out so loudly,

My mind is overwhelmed by your yelling:

If help came to fair Ireland once more,

I’d shove your harsh howling back down your throat.

 

Mist and Pigs

I mentioned last week that an Irish/Scots Gaelic king or lord had serious obligations to his people and was expected to be absolutely just and therefore to maintain the harmony of the human with the natural and supernatural worlds.

Power and glory are always a temptation, though, and particularly in periods when the structure of existence seemed shaky (the Norse invasions and aftermath that – like in England – destroyed some kingdoms and thus encouraged the expansion of others: then the rebound from the Anglo-Norman invasions), some men decided to just go for it, to hell with tradition.

Most of the time, though, the structures of daily life and of society made it easier to do the right thing. And, of course, some poet might always appear to tell you that you were screwing up. It wasn’t just the poet: behind him was the whole power of the forces of nature and “supernature”, and his satire would not only  make people snicker at you, but it would also symbolically withdraw the mandate of heaven, and all kinds of bad things would happen to you and your people.

It’s easier to be good when “good” is normal and expected.

The Tudor and Stuart dynasty English who conquered and colonized Ireland in the late 16th and 17th centuries didn’t care about any of that. Their society assumed you could be a rapacious bastard all your life, and as long as you were of the right religion and paid dues to the authorities, you’d be fine. You could always repent on your death bed, but it sure looked like might made right: the guys who killed and plundered got very rich. 

Anyway, Ireland was there for Englishman to get rich. The people were barbarians and followed the wrong religion and didn’t matter, so you could do things there you couldn’t get away with in England, then go home one day and enjoy life. Or you could grab lands and live like a lord in Ireland while the Teigs did all the work.

The Irish didn’t see it that way.

They saw big armies with cannon and big horses. They saw men who did not observe the rules and thought it was fine to destroy crops and starve people, slaughter prisoners and women and children, lie, go back on an oath, swindle, assassinate…that kind of thing. They saw those guys win again and again and take your lands. No harm done, though: if you were harmless and inoffensive and lucky, they would allow you to use some land at a high rent.

The Irish saw the end of the world.

The same thing has happened often in other times and places, and no one knows, but the Irish could write,
Aogán O Raithile from east of Killarney was rediscovered in the Irish Revival of the 1890s etc. and he is worth rediscovering.  He was born about 1670 and, except for an O Dálaigh family that stayed pretty quiet in the backcountry nearby, the bardic schools were gone, so he did not possess the kind of learning that slightly earlier poets like O Bruadair, O Donncha an Ghleanna, etc. did. This makes him more accessible to us, in a way, because he speaks plainly, not in a traditional idiom.

He was more or less a refugee for most of his life, taking shelter wherever he could find a surviving Irish noble family that still had land. (Mostly they were Mac Carthaigh or de Brún of the old lords of his area.) His poems are those of a man pushed to the edge and dealing with ruin and evil, and they do not mince words.

There was hope, to begin, that the Stuart kings would return to England and right what had been done in Ireland, and his vision poems see the Otherworld Queens returning to the land with good tidings:

Maidean sul smaoin Titan a chosa do luaill
Ar mhullach cnoic aoird aoibhinn do lodamar suas,
Tarraster linn scaoth bhruinneasll soilbhir suairc-
Gasra bhí i Sídh Seanaibh solas-bhrugh thuaidh.

Fearastar scím driaíochta nár doracha snua
Ó Ghaillimh na líog-gheal go Corcaigh na gcuan;
Barra gach crainn síor-chuireas toradh agus cnuas,
Meas daire ar gach coill, fír-mhil ar clochaibh go buan…

Oner morning before the Sun even thought to stir his feet,
To the summit of a fine high hill I climbed (literally “we”).
There came to me a band of joyous happy maidens:
A band from the resplendent (Fairy) palace north there, Shee (Shanid?).

A druid cloud spread over all, of no dark appearance,
From Galway of shining stones to Cork with its bays:
The top of every tree put forth fruit and nuts,
A crop of acorns in each oak wood, true honey on every stone,,,

But by was clear by 1729 that darkness was not to lift.

From a lament for a last Irish lord:

Cabhair ní ghairfead go gcuirthear mé i gcruinn-chomhraiinn,
Dar an leabhar, dá ngairfinn, níor ghaire-de an ní dhomh-sa:
Ár gceodhnasch uile, glac-chumasdach shíl Eoghainn,
Is tóllta a chuisle ‘gus d’imigh a bhrí ar feochaidh…

Mo ghlam is minic, is sílimse síordheora,
Is trom mo thubaist ‘s is duine mé ar míchothrom,
Fonn ní thigeann im ghaire ‘s mé ag caoi ar bhóithre
Ach foghar na Muice nach gontar le saigheadóireacht.

Stadfadsa feasta – is gar dom éag gan mhoill
Ó treascaradh dragain Leamhain, Léin is Laoi:
Rachasd ‘na bhfasc le searc na laoch do chill,
Na flatha fá raibh mu shean roimh éag do Chríost.

I will not cry out for help until I’m put in a narrow coffin,
And by the Book, though I called, it would be no nearer to me.
Our whole support, a skilled hand of the seed of Eoghain,
His veins holed now, and all his might decaying.

It’s often I cry out in pain and tears come always,
Heavy disaster I carry always,  a man on uncertain ground,
No music I hear anywhere near as I go down the road lamenting
But only the squeal of the Pig that is not slain by arrows (i.e. death)

I will stop now and forever, for death draws soon near
Since the dragons of (river) Laune, Killarney and Lee are thrown down.
I will go to them in the graveyard, with love for those heroes:
The lords under whom my own ancestors served (as poets) since before Christ died.

Coxie

 Aoghán O Raithile expressed his rage at the invaders openly in the poem translated here last week, and  his despair.
 

Another poet, either Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín of Clare or Cormac O Luinín of Fermanagh or maybe someone else, took a different road.
 

A Courtly Poem For Sir R. Cox (O Luinín) was published in Eigse (vol iv, p.284-6), followed in a later  issue by the article Sgiathluithreach an Choxaigh by Briain O Cuív (A shield-prayer for Cox). O Cuív pointed out that the poem was not the fawning, adulatory exercise that O’Sullivan described, but instead an slightly-camouflaged series of insults. it’s actually hard to see how O’Sullivan missed that fact, but that he seems to have been a contrary and argumentative person.
 

Cox (1650 – 1730) himself was a prominent English landlord, soldier and administrator who as Lord Administrator in 1703 passed “the most penal of the penal laws” and wrote a book, Hibernica Anglicana, telling how the brave, clean-living English defeated hordes of savage barbarian Irish and took control of the place in the interests of good administration. He imprisoned Mac Cruitín in Dublin for daring to publish a book in English dissenting from that view.
 

Do you get the impression he didn’t like the Irish?
 

He also had power, and anybody who wanted to criticize him  could not do it openly.

The  poem in question survives in two manuscripts as far as I know: one by historian of noble Irish family)_ Charles O’Connor (Roscommon), and an earlier one  by Mac Cruitín now at Maynooth. The text is very similar in both.
 

The poem starts out more or less normally enough:

A Risteard mhuirnidh na gcreach,
Go maire tú fá oineach:
Nár théidh tú go hifrionn na gceall,
‘s go raibh tú beo again tamull.
 

A little clumsy in Irish, and, come to think of it, poems of praise don’t usually start by hoping the subject will not go to Hell. The next three quatrains continue to talk about Cox not ending up going to Hell. Yes, a bit odd, but Cox, hearing a translation of them, might just think, “Well, those Irish aren’t much as writers either…”
 

The poem gets weirder:

May you never be felled in an alehouse brawl
 by a four-sided cudgel wielded by a wanderer.
May no unsteady tree ever fall on you:
May your enemies never destroy your coach.

May you never sit on the white mare
A big sore ready to burst on your buttocks.
If ever it happens  you have to go out,
May Christ protect you from the diarrhea.

May you never have to box a big burly soldier
And you with an anguished scab on your neck.
May your britches never fall down in battle
And you without button or button-hole to keep them up
when panicked hasty retreat is called.

May you never have a big open sore on your shoulder
From having to carry heavy bundles each and every day.
May you never be observed sweeping the streets,
Oh  miserable excuse for a mother’s son.

May you and a hag with a hat, on a winter’s day
Never have to stand all day long at the market cross
Crook mouthed from ear to ear
Shivering while you bawl out ballads for sale.

May you never be a penniless wanderer
Traveling all Ireland, cursed and unlucky forever.
With no food, wit hno  clothes, with no  possessions,
Begging hopelessly forever for pennies to live.

May no Church minister ever discover you out in the field
Just as you finish screwing your mother.
May you never have to stand before the congregation,
A sinner’s white sheet all around you.

May you never have to fight for your life
And you on the back of a cursed misshapen horse,
Without saddle, without  reins, without spurs,
Tortured and bothered with the  rain and snow in your face.

while the wind blasts out of the north
Always into your face, never ceasing even for a second,
And you having a tall English hat perched on your head,
Gripping it with desperate fingers lest it fly away.

And then your horse stops all of a sudden, no warning,
Right in the middle of the river ford,
And you in a panic kicking her ribs with your heels
But it’s no good: you have to jump off right there.

It goes on like that for five more verses, four of which are insulting, th last of which could be interpreted as something like praise if you weren’t reading carefully.
 

The poet never says anything like “You’re a vicious tyrant.” He never criticizes Cox at all, and if called out, he could say (like Good Soldier Schweik) “What? I was just saying I hoped bad things don’t happen to you? What did I do wrong?”
Whoever heard the poem in Irish , though, would always think of Cox in these degrading situations and 

might not fear him quite as much. Even if they did, they might smile behind their hands when they saw him ride by.
 

James Scott wrote a big book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale, 1985) about his fieldwork  in a Malaysian  village where he focused on the strategies poor peasants used to deal with big farmers and landlords when any open disagreement or opposition is not tolerated.  His point was that silence and apparent agreement do not always imply consent, and poor obsequious  peasants are often smarter and more determined than their betters think.
 

Praise poems are not always about praise, especially when the big people with power know that you are just an Irish fool trying to ingratiate himself with you

Mongan

Má bhíonn cú mhall subhailceach féin, is minic go mbíonn sí déanach chomh maith. Is amhlaidh go bhfuil an diabhal le fuacht ar an nduiche seo le mí go leith, agus tá brat trom sneachtaigh anois again leis, agus leanann a chuid dualgaisí fuacht agus sneachta araon. Do bhí an bean agam breoite agus cat linn chomh maith, i dtreo na raibh d’uaine agam féachaint ar am nblog go dtí seo.

In 1899, Seoirse MacConmara, a doctor in Corofin, north Clare, noticed a child playing with the leather cover of a manuscript on the floor of a house. He saved the manuscript, passed it on to Douglas Hyde, who passed it on to Seamus O Duilearge who published a tale from it in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philoogie, no 12. (The Germans were the first to take an interest in Old Irish language and Literature in the 20th century.)
 

The tale was entitled Tóruigheacxht (i/e. Tóraíocht) Duibhe Lacha Láimh-Ghile there (The Quest for Black Duck with White Hands)there and it is one of the few copies of a tale usually entitled Serc Duibhe Lacha do Mhongán (Dubh Lacha’s Love for Mongán). (The main other known cooy is in the Book of Fermoy, century), 
 

It’s an interesting enjoyable story. Here, at the beginning, Mongán’s father, Fiachna, king of Dál nAraidhe in what is now county Antrim, has been forced to fight with Ularg, king of Lochlainn (Norway, but often just the Otherworld) in order to fulfill a vow . Things are not going well until a mysterious stranger appears: (my translation)
 

Fiachra summoned the nobility of Ulster then, and set out for Lochlann with a large, warlike host, in order to avenge the offense to himself and the wrong to the dark hag on the king of Lochlann. He gave battle-notice to Ularg when he got there and gave him a delay of three days and three nights, so that he could gather his troops. The King of Lochlann requested battle from Fiachra then, after he'd had gathered his kin.
 

The king of Ulster sent three hundred hardy, valiant warriors into the combat and three venomous sheep were loosed against them from among the king of Lochlann's folk. The sheep went through them and over them like a hawk through small birds, or wolves through scattered herds of sheep on a wide flat plain. That's how the fierce sheep went through Fiachra's folk, and whoever saw them once, never saw them again. The sheep killed three hundred on the second day, and three hundred on the third day, and Fiachra was gloomy at the slaughter and alarming decline that the sheep had inflicted on his folk. He called for his weapons, saying that he'd go to fight the sheep himself, for the sake of his people.
 

"Don't say that, king of Ulster," the lords of his people said. “It's not proper for you to fight sheep."
 

"I give my word," Fiachra said, "that they'll kill no more of the men of Ireland, until I see if I can kill them myself, or until they kill me."
     

Fiachra saw an unknown warrior coming straight towards him then. He was wearing a green mantle, with a fine silk shirt that covered his white skin, a gold band around his hair, and two golden brogues on his feet. 
 

He came up to the king of Ulster “You're gloomy, King of Ulster."
 

"I haven't far to look for a cause: "to be specific, the destruction and stupendous slaughter of my folk by black wizard sheep, and I'm going now to fight them myself."

"What reward would you give to the person that would muzzle them?"  the youth asked in a grave and polite manner.

"Whatever he asked, if it were in my power."
 
"Grant me my own request and I'll muzzle the venomous sheep for you. If you won't, I won't muzzle them, and you won't succeed in doing so either."

"Let me know your reward,.”

"I request the ring that's on your middle finger as a sign to your wife in Ireland, so that I can sleep with her."

"I swear," said Fiachra, "that I won't allow any of the men of Ireland to be killed because I was unwilling to provide that sign."    
 
"It's no loss for you because a miraculous child will be born to your wife, and you'll be called his father. His name will be Mongan mac Fiachra. The boy will be a master of learning in every science proper to the son of a king and high sovereign; and, what's more, I'll take on your own shape, so that your wife won't suffer any indignity."

Fiachra gave the precious ring to the young man who then extracted from the obscure 
recesses of his mantle a sheepdog with a bright silver chain around its neck. 

"At whatever point in time the sheep attack you, loose the sheepdog. I give my word that no a sheep of them will return to the king of Lochlann's dun afterwards and I swear to you that the Lochlann men will submit to you without any further battle after this."

The youth was actually the Many-Skilled One, fair haired Manannan mac Lir, the most learned in druidic powers and arts of all those who lived in that age of the world.

He went on to Ireland, where he slept with the queen and she was left pregnant and heavy-sided.

As regards the sheep: the dog felled them that day, and three hundred of the king of Lochlann's folk along with them. The delight of the king of Ulster and his folk was, as a result of this, unbounded. The gloom and misery of the King of Lochlann and his people was proportionately deep.

Manannan is thus Mongán’s biologic father, and the various anecdotes about Mongán all suggest his mystic knowledge and power, and he played in the traditions of the northeast of Ireland the role of a semi-divine wonder-child who emerged from the womb already versed in the secrets of the universe. He was born of the god Manannan, as in the Toruidheacht17; he was considered the reincarnation of the archetypical seer/poet/hunter of Gaelic tradition, Fionn Mac Cumhaill18; he met the great northern Irish/Scottish saint Colmcille (Columba) and provided him with supernatural knowledge: (See Imacallam Choluim Chiulle agus ind Oclaig oc Carn Eolaire, 8th or 9th century, printed by Kuno Meyer in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie, no. II.)
   
I come from lands of strange things, from lands of familiar things, so that I may learn from you the spot on which died, and the spot on which were born, knowledge and ignorance...I have grazed it (Loch Neagh) when I was a stag, I have swum it when I was a salmon, when I was a seal, I have run upon it when I was a wolf, I have gone around it when I was a human...19  
Manannan prophesied Mongan's birth when he appears to the voyager Bran: 
   
He will have pleasant acquaintance with every elvish dwelling...He will proclaim mysteries (a course of wisdom) without fearing it...The blessed host will take him under a circle of clouds to a festival that is not sorrowful..

 

Mongan did actually live and the annals record his death in 625 A.D., fighting the Britons of Strathclyde in Lowland Scotland. It doesn't follow from this fact that these tales about Mongan have a place in textbooks of early Irish history: the historical Mongan has simply assumed a mythological persona attributed in other centuries to other figures. It's no longer clear why this persona became attached to Mongan in particular. We know that he was of the royal family of the kingdom of Dal nAraidhe (the south of County Antrim), that his father Fiachna Fionn Mac Baetain was provincial king of the Ulaid (Ulstermen) and was killed by Fiachna Dubh Mac Demmain (king of neighboring Dal Fiachrach) in the battle of Lethed Midind in 626, after reigning for some thirty-eight years. Fiachna was also commemorated in a tale (now lost) about his attack on Bamborough in northern England: Sluagad Fiachna meic Baitain co Dun nGuaire i Saxanaib. Mongan did marry Dubh Lacha, daughter of Fiachna Dubh, and was felt to have connections with the important nearby monastery of Bangor. Not much else is known of him. Why he had become within a hundred years of his death a supernatural figure in the tradition is unclear, but stories about Mongan feature in one of the first known manuscripts of written Gaelic literature, the eighth century: Cin Droma Snechta produced at the monastery of Druim Snechta near present-day Monaghan town. 
 

The other short tales and anecdotes about him are scattered in various places. Some are noted in Kuno Meyer and Alred Nutt’s Immram Brain:  The Voyage of Bran (London, two volumes, 1895-7) (The book is now available online:    )
 

Why is Mongán ibn a book focused on the tale of Bran?
Stories of both feature in what is believed to be the first secular Irish manuscript or at least the first well-known one, Cín Dromma Sneacxhtai. Produced probably in the monastery at Bangor. (The Mongán story is Compert M., and the Bran story is Immram Brain.
 

The various tales in the Cín demonstrate the process of the creation of a written literature from a strictly oral one, and a very perceptive examinatiuion of such matters and many others is to be found in Proinsis Mac Cana’s paper Mongán Mac Fiachna agus Immram Brain, Eriu, no. 23, 1972, and  in On the Prehistory of Immram Brain, no. 25, and in The Sinless Otherworld of Immram Brain, no. ?) They are seminal papers of an intelligence not often seen in Irish learning since.

The context was an ongoing debate between Mac Cana and James Carney. 

Irish society was changing quickly in the 196-s and 1970s and drawing much closer to Britain after Fianna Fáil’s half-hearted attempt to build an Irish economy focused on Ireland, drawing away from its long-term dependence on the export of agricultural products (mostly cattle, beef and milk and milk products) to Britain. Postwar European prosperity meant there was more money around everywhere, and private sector business took on an increasing social importance, overshadowing the state sector that had dominated since independence. The newly-influential business sector had no time for or interest in outdated traditions.

One outmoded tradition, as James Carney saw it, was the mostly unstated but general assumption that early Irish literature and tradition draw on native and even pre-Christian roots. Scholars like Myles Dillon drew attention to the many Irish parallels to ancient Sanskrit literary and social practice, and Mac Cana investigated continuity in Irish tradition.
 

Carney saw Christian and Classical Latin sources for Irish literature, and a monastic origin for the structure of learning. Most people didn’t care oner way or the other, but the ongoing Carney/Mac Cana debate had not only academic implications. Was Irish tradition somewhat unique and particular to Ireland, or was it just another expression of a cosmopolitan medieval Latin culture of no particular significance: and, by implication, did Ireland have its own identity and culture, or was it just an unfortunately very backward corner of the EU?
 

Mac Cana was professor at the University of Wales for a while, and after (though Professor at University College, Dublin, between 1971 and 1985,( was mostly associated with Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an institution that intentionally did not have high student.
Professor Carney was at Maynooth, a place with much higher student numbers, and it is interesting to compare the subscribers to their respective festschrift. Mac Cana’s lists a lot of Welshmen, foreigners and Irish scholars who used Irish as a living language. Carey’s lists the mainstream of contemporary Irish scholarship, many of whom had been either students of his or of his students, and Carney’s views have dominated Irish scholarship, really up to the present.
 

I suppose it is clear where my sympathies lie,
 

A similar disregard for the native Irish tradition, or in this case, viewpoint, characterized the field of Irish history since the mid-1960s, for similar reasons. It was only when Kevin Whelan’s closely-researched work on Early Modern Irish social history appeared that the “Revionist” dominance began to wane, and today, it is possible to assume academically that British dominance of Ireland was not an unmixed blessing.
 

It may be that Irish Literature is too minor, inconspicuous a field to support a current debate similar to that which occurred in Irish History. The field has, im my opinion, floundered during the last thirty years, and it is only sat University College, Cork, that engaged, exciting work is being done, and there almost only in Early Modern and Modern literature.
 

The oral tradition is pretty much gone, but the texts are still there, though, and offer just as much as they ever have to those interested. I suppose, though, in a way, what you bring to them influences what you get from them.

Irish? Who Cares?

 Irish? Who Cares?

 

Irish literature is uniquely interesting, the oldest surviving European literature  after Greek and Latin, but it is very different from them\. It is  a voice from ancient Europe, a voice from beyond the town walls, and a vessel of at least 2500 years of human experience in the island of Ireland, and also in the Highlands of Scotland, because the Highlanders were really just Irish with boats.

 

In the late eighteenth and  nineteenth centuries, Irish society underwent a traumatic, extended, violent break with all that had gone before. The social structure that resulted in many areas was an unbalanced, neurotic one; communities of survivors and of people who had watched their neighbors go under. Yes, that was long ago, but the world view and social structures that “long ago: engendered are still with us in a mutated form. In the silence when the power is switched off, ghosts still walk. People learn Irish to reconnect to the main line of  the development of Irish culture.

 

The land in many places still speaks Irish, and I don’t mean place names. Irish land and its “energy” (for lack of a better term) and Irish language have shaped one another, and to know anything really about the place in all its dimensions, one must know Irish and know Irish well. Some people want to reconnect to ‘Eire’ and so learn Irish for that reason.

 

Because no state or corporation has ever used it, it is unlike most modern standard languages. It is not streamlined, slick and facile, and does not facilitate easy assumptions or consumption. Ads in Irish still seem odd and uncomfortable. It is not a language that has been formed more by face-to-face interactions than by the media.. It has not, until very recently cared much about what went on in offices  or in boardrooms.

 

Some people just like languages, and Irish is a fairly unique one. It developed on the margins and  possesses a long written record. It demonstrates fascinating developments in morphology, syntax and phonology, and it’s got palatalized consonants, all those prepositional forms and the weird VSO sentence structure. Some people learn Irish because it’s fascinating.

 

Traditional spoken Irish is a complex, apparently unnecessary language whose logic is not always superficially visible. It’s a language in which there are deep groves of silent trees still, places into which explorers from Google and Apple Corp may never come. It is a language formed by seasons and weather, by the human mind in face-to-face community, and by the necessities of physical existence.  It and other languages like it are part of the Wild, and though Irish cannot offer physical refuge to modern people in our headlong rush to wherever it is we're going, it can offer intellectual, emotional and psychic refuge for a while longer. 

 

But does any of this matter? I mean, is it worth getting all worked up about?

 

Maybe not. Nothing is permanent. So many people and cultures have already gone without a memory.

 

On the other hand…Some of us, cursed or blessed, cannot simply turn away, and let Irish and those other things pass away.

 

Not for its sake, but for our own.

 

 

Tá Mé ’mo Shuídhe

 

I am awake since the moon rose last night,

here kindling the fire restlessly, feeding it desperately.

The folk of the house are all stretched out and I am alone;

the cocks are crowing and all the world’s asleep, but for me.

 

Tá mé imo shuídhe ó d'éirigh an ghealach aréir,

ag cur teineadh sios, faraor, a's ag fadadh go géar.

Tá bunadh an toighe ina luíghe, a's tá mise liom fhéin,

tá na coiligh ag glaoch a's tá an tír ina gcodladh, ach mé.

 

Your mouth, your face are my soul’s desire,

your shining blue eyes for which I abandoned pleasure and rest.

In sorrow after you, I can’t see to walk the road,

and, oh, friend of my heart, the mountains stand between you and I.

 

 Learned folk say that love is a mortal sickness:

I didn’t believe them, until it tore my own heart inside.

A desperate disease, it's my sorrow that I didn’t escape it:

it sends a sharp arrow, a hundred arrows through the center of my heart.

 

I met an elvish woman down at the hollow by the ford:

I asked her was there anything that would loose the fetters of love.

She said quietly, in a gentle fair voice,

“When once it goes into the heart, never, never will it loose its grasp.”