Later, throughout the period of Gaelic Ireland’s terminal crisis and decline, complaints about cultural impoverishment focus on the degeneration represented by the native poetry’s move away from strict syllabic metres. If Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa’s ‘The New Poetry’ is gleefully sarcastic and snobbish on the subject, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair’s ‘To see the art of poetry lost …’ rages in desperation at the increasing predominance of accentual song-measures, the slackness of which (in a characteristic racial insult) it associates with the coarse manners of the English. The Midnight Court – that least patrician of Gaelic poems – is by contrast relaxed about the status of poets and poetry. The coded identification of Merriman as protagonist and author near the conclusion suggests that the duties of the amateur versifier consist mainly of
Playing his tunes, on sprees and batters
With his intellectual and social betters.
The English-language poetry of Ireland is rarely as insistent on its own aesthetic status, but it is frequently self-reflexive. Eighteen of the twenty stanzas of the early fourteenth-century ‘Hey!’ close with a couplet complimenting the preceding lines on their formal ingenuity; these self-congratulations are presumably meant to be read as parodic jibes aimed by the Anglo-Normans at a distinctive literary habit of their Gaelic neighbours. In his elegy on the death of Garret FitzGerald (1559?–80), Richard Stanihurst self-consciously concedes the poverty of his powers compared to those of ‘Homer or Virgil’ or ‘Geffray Chauncer in English’. The reflections of ‘Philo-Philippa’ and the Earl of Roscommon on the challenge of transmitting poetic effects from one language to another still seem cogent, especially when the present work relies so much upon poems translated from Irish and other languages.
In more recent times, too, there have been flurries of poetic self-consciousness: Goldsmith’s touching valediction to his art near the end of The Deserted Village; Allingham’s mordant couplet from Blackberries on the gap between aspiration and achievement in a poet’s career; or Yeats’s melancholy illustration of the undependably palliative capacities of poetry in his narrative of the fate of King Goll’s borrowed tympan. (‘The Madness of King Goll’ can be seen as a sort of miniature Buile Shuibhne.) Some of the subtlest contemporary poems meditate on their own procedures: Michael Longley’s deceptively simple ‘Form’ or Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Harvest Bow’; intricate verbal devices that define and embody the characteristic dialectic between presence and absence in lyric speech. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’ and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘The Language Issue’ explore the unstable foundations of poetry in a culture that remains to some degree bilingual. The latter poem is translated by Paul Muldoon, the contemporary anglophone world’s most accomplished user of rhyme and arguably the greatest lyric innovator Ireland has produced in the millennium and a half since the tonsured scribes of the monasteries hit upon the idea of getting the syllables at the end of their lines to chime pleasingly.
Organization of the Volume
Each of the nine sections in this anthology is prefaced by an epigraph taken from one of its constituent texts, and the seven poetry sections open with a poem that gives a historical signature to the material that follows. With the exception of the first section, the poems are arranged chronologically according to the poets’ dates of birth. The prevalence of anonymous and undateable material in the Old and Middle Irish periods made a thematic approach more appropriate; the two song sections also depart from strict chronology, though to a lesser degree.
While each of the nine sections surveys a historical era and can be read as a free-standing mini-anthology, a degree of orchestration has been attempted across the volume as a whole. Thus, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s version of ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ – one of the Old Irish immrama (voyage tales) – is subjected to impish comment later on in the extract from ‘Immram’, a long poem by the ancient protagonist’s contemporary namesake, Paul Muldoon. John Cunningham’s ‘The Ant and the Caterpillar’ has been included both for its intrinsic interest and because it provided the model for Joyce’s ‘The Ondt and the Gracehoper’. Songs by Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, the ‘Late Irish Orpheus’ commemorated by Laurence Whyte in section III, can be found in section IV. Poems commune with other poems within sections also: Seamus Heaney’s protest song ‘Craig’s Dragoons’, for example, draws much of its angry force from its relationship with Thomas Davis’s ‘Clare’s Dragoons’. If the reader discovers a wealth of such correspondences throughout the anthology, many of them will inevitably – given the richness of Irish tradition – be innocent of editorial intention.
The boundaries between sections are to some degree porous. A few of the anonymous love poems presented as a group in section II were composed after 1600, but the generic status of the dánta grá (as these lyrics of love and friendship are customarily called) meant that they demanded consideration together in a designated subsection. In section I the Gaelic text from which ‘The Praise of Fionn’ was translated appears to have been written as late as the 1500s, albeit on the basis of a much older Fenian lay.
The dividing line between ‘poem’ and ‘song’ is similarly permeable. Lyrics in Irish in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were increasingly committed to the song metres that replaced the syllabic measures of the bards, and some of these poems might consequently have claims to inclusion in section IV rather than III. In the event, individual pieces were assigned to one section rather than another on the basis that poems are intended for recitation or private reading, while songs are primarily meant to be sung (or have entered the tradition in sung form).
The poems in The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry have been chosen mainly for their aesthetic interest, and the selections inevitably reflect early twenty-first century critical priorities. It is hoped, however, that the arrangement of the material facilitates the telling of a ‘national tale’ unfolding over many centuries. A few pieces – such as The Song of Dermot and the Earl and ‘Raven’s Rock’, Joseph Campbell’s rapt response to the 1916 Rising – have been included to help carry the historical narrative. Other poems – ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, for example – appear because they represent a characteristic mode of their time.
On the whole this volume is restricted to work by poets born or brought up in Ireland, though again this has been a rule of thumb rather than a strict policy. Patrick, the Bishop of Dublin who was shipwrecked and drowned in the Irish Sea in 1084 (a fate which lends added poignancy to his ‘Prologue’ on marine travel) may have been English. If so, he was a compatriot of William Smith, a Cath olic participant in the religious wars of the 1640s, whose eloquent commentary on the plight of strife-torn Ireland is reproduced in section III. The Norse material in section I originated outside the country, but is included for its vivid responses to Irish people and events.
The Translations
Where it was possible to do so, the selections from Irish and Latin were made on the basis of the attractiveness of the poems in their first language, rather than the availability of English versions. Many new translations had to be written. (More than a third of the book’s two hundred or so translations are printed here for the first time.) Efforts have been made to redress the significant under-representation in earlier anthologies of the bardic poetry that forms the core of Gaelic literary achievement in the late medieval and early modern periods. This volume is hugely indebted to Tiffany Atkinson, Kit Fryatt, Seamus Heaney, Kathleen Jamie, Bernard O’Donoghue, Maurice Riordan and David Wheatley for their splendid versions of bardic and other poems, and also to Peter Davidson and Michael Longley, who have brought unfamiliar Latin and eighteenth-century Irish material into distinguished English.
In my own contributions I tried to remain alert to the fact that although the originals were written in the past, they were not in the past when they were written. A translator’s primary duty is to the poetic animation of the source text, so I sought to avoid the archaisms that can make cribs by some even of the twentieth century
’s most distinguished Celticists sound like amateur costume drama. (Some, not all: the translations here by Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, James Carney and Patrick K. Ford demonstrate that philology and literary sensibility can coexist.) Ever since the controversies surrounding Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) and Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) there has been a sort of low-level war between scholarship and poetry in relation to the representation of other literatures in English, a disagreement rooted in conflicting understandings of fealty. The problem with the ideal of loyalty to lexical and grammatical nuance is that it rests upon a view of the original as a linguistic sample rather than a work of art. Almost without exception the poems in this book (those in English and Scots as well as the Old, Middle, Classical and Modern Irish, Latin, Middle English, Norse and French ur-texts of the translated pieces) are verbal engines designed to give pleasure. The purpose of translation is to carry something of the primary engine-thrum across the language barrier so as to make the non-anglophone poems ‘go’ in English.
Transposition of this sort must incur significant loss, even when most nearly successful. No one is likely ever to find a way of communicating (let alone replicating) in English bardic poetry’s peculiar combination of stylized intricacy with dramatic immediacy, lacquered veneer with passionate utterance. Similarly, the fusion of assonantal sophistication and visceral rage in Aodhagán Ó Rathaille can only be gestured towards in a Teutonic language. To have despaired of transmitting the erotics of the Gaelic and other originals, though, and to have instead presented prose or otherwise unmetrical versions of them, would have been to betray their fundamental status as poems. In general the new translations are conservative – by Poundian standards at least. As literary renditions have done more or less in every age, they affect contem porary rather than historical idioms.
Not too contemporary, however: over-dependence on colloquialism and customary phrasing can detract from the otherness of the past. My version of Baoi’s lament was attempted precisely because so many of the existing translations cancel the distance between our time and the tenth century, robbing the poem of its strangeness by downplaying its mythological dimension to emphasize the universality of the nun’s predicament. It has not ultimately proved possible to be fully consistent in mediating ancient poetry. In a few cases, when a draft began to take on vitality by moving away from the original, I followed verbal impulse to a result founded upon rather than directly representative of the poem I had set out to honour. Thus ‘St Ite’s Song’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Speak No Evil’ are offered as ‘versions after’ rather than ‘translations from’ Old and Middle Irish. Elsewhere, the quest to convey the tonalities of ‘Age’ led away from the metrical structure of the Middle English text towards a shorter-lined, longer poem than the one in the so-called Kildare manuscript (British Library, Harley MS 913). These examples are not typical, it must be said, and the great majority of the translations stay as close to the source poems as the contingencies of verse-making allow.
Section I takes its title from the lyric that serves as its epigraph. The phrase draws attention to the early Irish monks’ predilection for composing in broad daylight to distinguish themselves from the initially pagan professional poets who pursued their craft in darkened rooms. The characteristic sense of the sunlit beauty of the natural world and sensitivity to changes of weather and season in Old Irish lyric have been understood as fortuitous consequences of that preference. While the thematic arrangement and associated headings make the section more or less self-explanatory, a few comments may be helpful.
‘The Song of the Sword of Cerball’ is one of the earliest surviving poems in the bardic manner. It is likely that eulogistic verses were composed throughout the period of clerical hegemony, but that they found their way into manuscript much less readily than the religious poems of the monks, and did not move decisively from the oral to the written domain until well into the second millennium AD. (The situation is complicated by the fact that both the eventually literate filid and the non-literate poetic class known as baird became increasingly involved in monastic life in the centuries after Colum Cille’s convention at Druim Ceat; a crucial consequence of this was the development of the monasteries as centres of Gaelic as well as theological learning.) Tennyson’s ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ is something of a curiosity, a versified reworking of a voyage tale that anticipates Yeats’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ by nearly a decade. The English poet adapts elements of the trans lation of Immram Curaig Máele Dúin in P. W. Joyce’s Old Celtic Romances (1879), but in a manner flattering to his own Tory understanding of Irish ‘character’. The poem is nevertheless a work of some vigour, and one that demonstrates the widening impact of Celtic antiquarianism in the lead-up to the Literary Revival.
The title and epigraph of section II come from the early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman satire ‘The Land of Cockayne’, a poem intriguingly congruent with the Gaelic ‘The Vision of Mac Conglinne’ in the gastronomic if not the erotic features of its imagined earthly paradise. The section signature is provided by four extracts from The Song of Dermot and the Earl, a chanson de geste in crudely functional Old French couplets recounting the arrival of Strongbow and his Normans in Ireland. The Song’s narrative of that first act in Ireland’s protracted drama of conquest and colonization is said to have been based on the reminiscences of Morice Regan, secretary and interpreter to the ousted king of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough (1110–71), whose invitation to Henry II and his barons has made him a byword for treachery in Irish memory.
The confidence of the settler communities who followed in the wake of Strongbow is attested to by the only slightly more sophisticated (if decidedly more spirited) commemoration of the entrenchment of New Ross, written almost a century after the first Norman incursions and (like the Song) committed to the speech they brought with them. Though French would be retained as the language of officialdom throughout most of the period covered by section II, it increasingly gave way to Irish in the day-to-day lives of the Norman nobility. The distinctive dialect of Middle English employed by the poems transcribed beside ‘The Entrenchment of New Ross’ in the Kildare manuscript appears to have been used mainly by the lower orders in the Pale (the region around Dublin directly under the jurisdiction of the English crown) and in the fortified towns of the south-east of the country. This language, too, came under pressure from Irish, and most of the English speakers who stayed on in Ireland during the prolonged Gaelic resurgence of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries followed the example of their over-lords and adopted the linguistic and cultural habits of the more indigenous portion of the population.
The Middle English poems (composed c.1320) are unshadowed by this future, and conjure a fully articulated and secure society. Scholars are divided as to whether or not ‘The Land of Cockayne’ should be interpreted as lampooning the Gaelic monastic life which the invaders had received a papal sanction to reform. It is thought to have been written in the Franciscan (and therefore Norman) abbey at Kildare. The clergy and tradesmen comically evoked in the other major work in the Kildare manuscript, ‘Hey!’ (sometimes known as ‘A Satire on the People of Dublin’), clearly belong to an Anglo-Norman world, even if the poem’s procedures mock Gaelic literary practice.
The Kildare manuscript notwithstanding, the most ambitious and accomplished poetry produced in Ireland in the period under discussion was composed in Classical Irish. This poetic language became standardized some time after 1200 and was sustained over the next four and a half centuries by the stringent professional training undergone by its practitioners. The precise extent of the continuity between the bardic schools and the pre-Christian academ ies of the filid is obscure. It seems clear at least that the monas tic reform attendant on the arrival of Cistercians, Franciscans and other European religious orders around the time of the Norman incursions broke the institutional link between Gaelic and Christian learning that had evolved over the centuries.
A new secular poetic class – drawn from the her
editary learned families – emerged out of these changed ecclesiastical conditions. Like their ancient forebears, the creators of bardic poetry composed indoors, in the dark. They were court poets and their primary duty was to praise their patron. Even so, there is a considerable variety of effect and a broad frame of reference in their work, allied to a sometimes tetchy awareness of the cultural and monetary value – as well as the difficult artificiality – of poetry. Elaborate rules with regard to the deployment in their syllabic quatrains of metre, rhyme, assonance, consonance and alliteration were formalized alongside regulations governing diction. As a consequence, poetic style in a Gaelic world that included north-western Scotland as well as Ireland remained more or less constant for nearly half a millennium, even though the Irish and Scottish Gaelic languages continued to develop and diversify, and to diverge from one another, both in everyday usage and prose literature.
The extraordinary conservatism of bardic practice becomes clear when considered alongside the transformations undergone by English poetry in the same period, the immense literary time-span running from ‘Summer is Ycumen In’ (c.1240) to the heyday of John Milton (1608–74) and Andrew Marvell (1621–78). If that comparison seems Anglocentric, it is no more so than the defence of traditional Irish mores in Laoiseach Mac an Bhaird’s ‘Brothers’. Perhaps nothing in the bardic material included here exemplifies the Gaelic reluctance to adapt to a changing world so vividly as Tadhg Dall Ó hUigínn’s celebration of the continuing vitality of the ancient practices of hostage-taking and cattle-raiding in ‘Enniskillen’, a poem in praise of Cú Chonnacht Mág Uidhir, who was Lord of Fermanagh from 1566 to 1589.
Yet strict-metre verse is not necessarily insular in outlook. The love poems grouped together in section II are notable for their wit and grace, and for an economy of style that bespeaks a highly sophist icated, self-aware milieu. In some respects they belong to a European world, having elements in common both with late medieval courtly love poetry and a line of erotic playfulness in English verse that runs from Sidney and the Elizabethans through the Meta physicals to the Cavalier poets. Worldly, cool and occasionally sly, the dánta grá are not averse to extreme sexual innuendo, as ‘Piece Making’ demonstrates.
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 5