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.”