7

Poems in Translation

By God it’s not for nothing that I call myself a pal of Jem Casey.

At Swim-Two-Birds, p. 107

Brian O’Nolan’s MA thesis, ‘Nature in Irish Poetry’, written in Irish, was divided into two. The first part was a discussion of the genre, often couched in circumlocutions newly minted by O’Nolan to convey literary concepts that the Irish language had not yet satisfactorily tackled. The second part was an anthology of Irish nature verse, going back to the days when the language was as different from modern Irish as Geoffrey Chaucer’s English is from Jeffrey Archer’s. Particularly in the early days of the Cruiskeen Lawn column, his enthusiasm for the subject was alluded to, and he would occasionally include a translation of some piece that particularly appealed to him. At Swim-Two-Birds, too, contains many pieces of Middle-Irish verse. These are translations, to be sure, but they are also half-parodies of the work of Standish Hayes O’Grady, whose masterwork, Silva Gadelica, made accessible for the first time much of O’Nolan’s thesis material. An essay by Flann O’Brien, affectionately commemorating O’Grady, his mentor and butt, acts as a preface to this (perhaps) complete collection of O’Nolan’s published verse translations:

Standish Hayes O’Grady

Standish H. O’Grady died on this day 25 years ago. Most people, if asked what they knew of him, would mention The Flight of the Eagle or The Coming of Cuchulainn. This, however, would have annoyed the great man. ‘Let me intimate,’ he once wrote, ‘since I am often tantalised by having a kinsman’s good work attributed to myself, that my trade mark (without which no goods are genuine) is either as on the title page of this book, or thus in full – STANDISH HAYES O’GRADY.’

Standish Hayes plied a much more difficult craft than did Standish James, and the goods he left behind were more laboriously produced. He was a worker in the field of Irish studies, but one of an unusual kind. He combined with profound learning other qualities of humour and imagination which enabled him to deal with early texts in a lively creative way that lifted his work far out of the repellent rut traversed by most philologists. Whether his head was smooth or hairy, he had no place among the fogeys –

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love’s despair …

His originality and agility of mind bubble up in the prefaces to his works and are reflected in the curious and charming English which he devised in an effort to render to the student the last glint of colour in any Irish word. Dr Hyde has described it as ‘half Latin, half early English phraseology, subtly inverted and highly Romanised; as: “he was a covetous and unconscionable man who, though it were but a solitary scruple whether of gold or of silver that he heard of as possessed by any in his country, would by force of arms make his own of it” (fer sanntach díchuibsech atacomnaieside, ocus cin co cluined acht mad aenscrupal óir no airgit oc duine ina thír dobeirid ar éicin chuice féin).’ Occasionally the queer English seems to acquire a peculiar luminance of its own, casting a ghostly charm over passages which read pedestrian enough in the Irish. In ‘The Little Brawl At Allen’ (which seems to have been a sizeable affair): after ‘a fermentation of anger took Goll’ and ‘the parties fell unrelentingly to bone-splitting each other’, we read that ‘an ill place had it been for feeble invalid, or delicate taper-fingered woman, or aged senior of long date’. Usually, however, he gets not only the exact meaning of the Irish but the atmosphere and emotional content. Translating O’Hussey’s well-known Ode to Maguire, he writes, ‘To me it is an ache that Hugh tonight is in a stranger land – by operation of the armed vociferous clouds’ displeasure lies under lurid glow of bolt-fraught lightnings flashing thickly. We hold it a calamity that in the province of Clann Daire our well-beloved is couched betwixt a coarse, cold, wet and grass-clad ditch and the imperious fury of heaven.’

O’Grady’s best-known work was Silva Gadelica, published in 1892, a miscellany of medieval Irish texts, with an accompanying volume containing a translation, notes and a breezy preface in English. The Irish volume has another preface couched in the old Irish of the texts and embodying the editor’s own genealogy: he laments the apathy of the Irish people in relation to their literary heritage and urges the necessity of making an effort to see whether there is yet time for them ‘some fragment or particle of the knowledge and culture of the ancients to preserve henceforth free from extinction and unending loss, with the day now in its late-going and the melodious mother-tongue all but ebbed away … (blogh ná blúire éigin d’ealadhain agus d’ollamnacht na sean do thárrtháil feasda gan bádhadh gan buan-chailleamain ós anois as dol i ndéidenaighe do’n ló agus an teanga bhinn mháthardha beag nach tráighte)’.

O’Grady’s next most important work was his Catalogue of the Irish MSS in the British Museum. This work was never finished, but 672 pages of it have been printed. The first 327 pages are devoted to History, Law, Lexicography and Medicine, and the rest to Poetry. The Catalogue contains extracts from the more important manuscripts, and with O’Grady’s unrivalled knowledge of all relevant historical records and traditional lore, teems with information on words, events and customs. The whole work is highly readable and diverting and has been described as being in itself a most valuable introduction to Irish literature.

His first publication appeared in 1853 when he was twenty-one, and affords interesting evidence of the degree of erudition he had attained even at that age. It consists of passages from a poem dealing with the travels of Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara, the poet, with examples of the poet’s own work, and with translation and notes. It contains the text of a letter of introduction, or ‘pass’, given by the poet to Richard Fitzgerald the Brave in 1759. Such documents were common among the educated classes, being used as ‘passports’ in regions where the writer was known and had influence with the natives; they were frequently availed of for displays of fine language. There is probably no printed record of such a document outside O’Grady’s work.

In 1857 he published the text, translation and notes bearing on ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’ (with a zestful preface) and ‘The Lamentation of Oisin’. Then, after a gap of thirty years, he published a commentary on Kuno Meyer’s edition of ‘The Battle of Ventry’, doing sundry violences to that savant’s reputation as a scholar. This may be found in the Anecdota Oxoniensia. In 1888 he edited ‘King David and the Beggar’ and an interesting narrative poem, ‘The O’Dobharchon’, dealing with a man who was turned into an otter and had to dwell at the bottom of a lake. His next work was Silva Gadelica. Besides the Catalogue, he left another unfinished and partly printed work – text, translation and notes of Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh, a history of the Norman wars in Munster.

O’Grady was born on 19 May 1832. His father was admiral O’Grady, brother of the first Viscount Guillamore. He spent his youth in the colourful Shannon country. The country people in the barony spoke Irish in those days, and it was in his wanderings among them that he contracted his admiration for the beauty and precision of the language, and the beginnings of a vast knowledge of traditional data bearing on place-names, local monuments, folk customs and tales current among the people on historical cataclysms like the siege of Limerick. As a youth and already an accomplished and correct speaker of Irish, he was sent to Rugby to receive the education deemed essential to his class, and came back from there in due course to Trinity College, where he went to work at once on the manuscript collections. He came to know John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry, and also Joseph O’Longan, the last of the old-time scribes. At Trinity he tutored James Godman, of Skibbereen, who subsequently became Professor of Irish in the University. After the appearance of Silva Gadelica, he received the honorary degree of D.Litt. from Cambridge. There his extraordinary range of knowledge enabled him to hobnob on equal terms with scholars who had devoted their lives to other studies. He was at home with the obscurest Orientalist. He died at Hale in England, and was buried at Altrincham Churchyard.

In Silva Gadelica he delivers himself of several characteristic thrusts at self-righteous people who have at one time or another expressed their distaste for the Irishry. ‘Silva Gadelica’, he writes, modestly, ‘is far from being exclusively, or even primarily, designed for the omniscient impeccable leviathans of science that headlong sound the linguistic ocean to its most horrid depths, and (in the intervals of ramming each other) ply their flukes on such audacious small fry as even on the mere surface will venture within their danger.’ To this he adds a footnote: ‘Thackeray warns Bob Brown the younger that, since the days of Æsop, a desire to cope with bulls is known to be fatal to frogs. As yet no Gadelic batrachian has sought thus to burst himself; per contra it were no less instructive than easy to point out how and where lordly cetaceans of philology, enviously invading shallows in which the humble Celtic whitebait sports at ease, lie stranded (as Milton has it) “many a rood in length”.’

Talking of a piece which contained peculiar constructions more readily renderable in Latin, he remarks: ‘The style is not Ciceronian, it is true; but there is no knowing what Tully might have written had he translated literally from Irish. He would have been none the worse for being able to do so.’

That is a sentiment that can be echoed in respect of more than old Tully. Many sound rubs of this kind are to be found in O’Grady’s footnotes. He quotes J. Stanihurst’s account of the characteristics of the native Irish:

The people are thus inclined: Religious, frank, amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinite, very glorieux, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with wars, great almsgivers, passing in hospitalitie; the lewder sort (both clarkes and laymen) are sensuall and loose above measure. They are sharpe witted, lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves, constant in travaile, adventurous, intractable, kinde-hearted, secret in displeasure. … They exchange by commutation of wares for the most part, and have utterly no coin stirring in any great lords’ houses….

À propos of the last sentence he adds this delightfully irrelevant footnote: ‘Writers are fond of remarking either that history repeats itself, or does not repeat itself, according to their exigency. It is safe to affirm that here the former aphorism is the one in point.’

He then castigates Stanihurst for his rancorous attitude to the Irish:

Better for him he had tarried with the wild men that never harmed him, or in some of the lands which he visited after them; when he returned, his own highly civilised countrymen rewarded his John-Bullism with a degree higher than any he had taken at Oxford: in fact, on the 1st of December, 1581, they hanged and quartered him.

His gift of combining the real stuff of scholarship with his own irrepressible breeziness is shown well in the following footnote on the levying of tribute:

From the most remote times collection of any kind of dues has in Ireland been a ticklish business; the extraordinary tale called ‘The Siege of Cnoc Damhgaire’, near Knocklong (county Limerick), is based on king Cormac’s attempt forcibly to exact his revenue from Munster, a province which appears to have habitually and successfully been refractory to the monarchs, i.e., kings of all Ireland as distinguished from the five provincial kings. As for the cíos ‘rent’ (so Elizabethans rendered it, and such it means today) or tribute which the urradha ‘subordinate chiefs’ paid to their chief paramount, it had to be taken. In English a chief’s urradha were called his ‘gentlemen’: thus O’Conor-Sligo was O’Donnell’s gentleman, and continually it needed hundreds of swords and axes (many of whom never saw Tirconall again) to persuade him to his duty. The following again were O’Conor-Sligo’s gentlemen: O’Dowda, O’Gara, O’Hara-Buie, O’Hara-Riach, O’Hart, MacDonough of the Corann and MacDonough of Tirerril, who all were just as reluctant to part. The whole theory is summed up in a still lively tradition of the following correspondence (incorrectly given in the Abbé Mageoghegan’s Histoire d’lrlande): Cuir chugam mo chíos nó mara gcuirir – mise Ó DOMHNAILL, i.e., ‘Send me my rent, or if not – O’Donnell.’ Answer: Ní fhuil cíos agat orm agus dá mbiadh – mise Ó néill. i.e., ‘I owe you no rent, and if I did – O’Neill.’ Fictitious if you will, but typical.

For all his light heart, however, O’Grady does not appear to have been entirely wanting in ideas of personal dignity. His unfinished Catalogue breaks off in the middle of a sentence because he fell out with the Museum authorities and declined to have anything more to do with them. He seems to have had brushes with the staider savants of his day owing to his weakness for erudite multilingual puns and jokes, which were rarely construed in the manner intended by those to whom they were addressed. It is said that he had a violent quarrel with Kuno Meyer over the construction of a few lines of Irish for the Athenaeum magazine, and thereafter the two men never spoke.

It is gratifying to record that the Government Publication Office has recently re-issued, by some reproductive process, the Irish text, notes and English preface of Silva Gadelica; and the price today is seven-and-sixpence, compared with two guineas forty years ago.

Scel lem duib

Here’s a song –

stags give tongue

winter snows

summer goes.

High cold blow

sun is low

brief his day

seas give spray.

Fern clumps redden

shapes are hidden

wildgeese raise

wonted cries.

Cold now girds

wings of birds

icy time –

that’s my rime.

Aoibhinn, a leabhráin, do thriall

Delightful, book, your trip

to her of the ringlet head,

a pity it’s not you

that’s pining, I that sped.

To go, book, where she is

delightful trip in sooth!

the bright mouth red as blood

you’ll see, and the white tooth.

You’ll see that eye that’s grey

the docile palm as well,

with all that beauty you

(not I, alas) will dwell.

You’ll see the eyebrow fine

the perfect throat’s smooth gleam,

and the sparkling cheek I saw

latterly in a dream.

The lithe good snow-white waist

that won mad love from me –

the handwhite swift neat foot –

these in their grace you’ll see.

The soft enchanting voice

that made me each day pine

you’ll hear, and well for you –

would that your lot were mine.

Domforcai fidhbaidae fál

A hedge before me, one behind,

a blackbird sings from that,

above my small book many-lined

I apprehend his chat.

Up trees, in costumes buff,

mild accurate cuckoos bleat,

Lord love me, good the stuff

I write in a shady seat.

Clochán binn

Little bell that rings at night

When the weather’s a holy fright,

I’d rather hear its summons

Than my foolish woman’s.

A dhruimfhionn donn dílis

O Drimin Donn Dheelish,

O cowlet of mine,

The warble-fly’s eating

Your silk of the kine.

Cridhe hé

He is a heart, a pet,

He is a grove of nut-trees,

He is a stripling

– Kiss him!

Ach a luin

Ah blackbird, well for you,

Your nesting-place is where you will

Pilgrim that pays no due,

Sweet, soft and magical your bill.

Int en gaires asintsail

The bird that from the sally calls

(melodious bill), its note is choice,

(the sprightly black man’s yellow beak)

a nimble tune – the blackbird’s voice.

Sgíth mo chrob ón sgríbinn

My hand has a pain from writing,

Not steady the sharp tool of my craft

Its slender beak spews bright ink –

A beetle-dark shining draught.

Streams of the wisdom of white God

From my fair-brown, fine hand sally,

On the page they splash their flood

In ink of the green-skinned holly.

My little dribbly pen stretches

Across the white paper plain,

Insatiable for splendid riches –

That is why my hand has a pain!

Do bhulla, a bhréagóg fhallsa

Your Bull, you lying layabout, it doesn’t drive me crackers; it is a Bull that commands no respect, and not beyant in Rome was it issued.

 

You traipse about here and there, bitterer your voice than henbane; your shape hardly resembling a human, an apparition of ancient iron.

 

You impetuous gabbling prostitute, harder far than iron; how can one estimate a woman of your kind, you fleshless, sterile spook.

 

Your skinny pierced belly, woe to him who sees it at breakfast time; eternally a portent of famine, woman, you cannot hide your blights from the world.

Protopolitics (extract)

One of the greatest poets in the period bordering on modern Irish was named Eochaidh Ó Heodhusa (or O’Hussey), and he … conceded that our ancestors believed in magic, prayers, trickery, browbeating and bullying; I think it would be fair to sum that list up as ‘Irish polities’.

One poem, edited many years ago by Eleanor Knott, takes my fancy, and I will try to convey it.

When the scene opens we see a group of 30 well-favoured T.D.s1 of nephological preoccupation. They are gazing at a cloud and in due course circulate word among the populace to beware of this cloud, to dig great shelters in the earth and shelter from it, because anybody struck by the moisture thereof would forthwith go off his rocker. Here is one of O’Hussey’s verses, with my own weak gloss:

A shluagh an domhain, déanaidh

uamha doimhne i ndroibhéalaibh

(ar lucht eagna an bheatha bhí)

ar eagla an cheatha ad-chluintí.

Now listen lads, please excavate

Forbidding caves most tortuous

(Thus warned those good interpreters)

For fear this shower’ll scorch us.

Crying wolf is an old hazard and the idea of being asked to build underground shelters by these professors just made the citizens laugh. It now began to get very dark and the brains trust thoughtfully retired to certain subterranean diggings of their own. The cloud swells, blackens, explodes, and there is true desolation. Then the sky clears and my 30 technical men come up to the surface in the lift to say WETOLDYOUSO! Right enough, they saw that everybody who had remained out in the rain had gone stark mad. They were pleased at their own cuteness, but hold on till you hear what happened:

Gidh eadh, do chuir cáach i gcéill

don bhuidhin úghdar ainnséin,

(dream dhreichmhiolla na ngníomh nglan)

neimhchríonna dhíobh go ndearnadh.

The dauntless lads however conveyed

To this assembled soggarthary

(This beauteous band of peerless act) –

That hiding was derogatory.

Déanaimne aimhghlic amhuil

Sinn féin, ar na feallsamhain,

beag díol na cruinne dar gcéill

ná bíonn ’san uile acht d’einmhein.

We must make batty just the same

Ourselves, the savants then opined:

Poor price the whole world for our wits,

If all men have not equal mind.

You see the extreme cuteness here? Your men realised they had outsmarted themselves by remaining sane and straightaway decided to make themselves mad, knowing the mad majority would regard them as mad if they remained sane. Here you have the genesis of all political scheming. (Don’t overlook that phrase sinn féin in the third verse!)

 

The next poem, and the ‘Sweeny’ sequence that follows it, have been taken from At Swim-Two-Birds. The story of Sweeny dates back to perhaps as far as the seventh century, although when it was first written down is uncertain. King Sweeny offends St Ronan, and is condemned, through the cleric’s curse, to live the rest of his life as a bird. Flann O’Brien used his own translations of some of this material as a counterpoint to other strands in his novel, but it is, I believe, worthwhile to see the work in isolation. I have altered the order of the poems where this aids continuity.

Finn Mac Cool’s poem

I am a bark for buffeting.

I am a hound for thornypaws.

I am a doe for swiftness.

I am a tree for wind-siege.

I am a windmill.

I am a hole in a wall.

I am the breast of a young queen.

I am a thatching against rains.

I am a dark castle against bat-flutters.

I am a Connachtman’s ear.

I am a harpstring.

I am a gnat.

I am an Ulsterman, a Connachtman, a Greek.

I am Cuchulainn, I am Patrick.

I am Carbery-Cathead, I am Goll.

I am my own father and my son.

I am every hero from the crack of time.

Saint Ronan’s curse

My curse on Sweeny!

His guilt against me is immense,

he pierced with his long swift javelin

my holy bell.

The holy bell that thou hast outraged

will banish thee to branches,

it will put thee on a par with fowls –

the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints.

Just as it went prestissimo

the spear-shaft skyward,

you too, Sweeny, go madly mad-gone

skyward.

Eorann of Conn tried to hold him

by a hold of his smock

and though I bless her therefore,

my curse on Sweeny.

Sweeny tormented

Sweeny the thin-groined it is

in the middle of the yew;

life is very bare here,

piteous Christ it is cheerless.

Grey branches have hurt me

they have pierced my calves,

I hang here in the yew-tree above,

without chessmen, no womantryst.

I can put no faith in humans

in the place they are;

watercress at evening is my lot,

I will not come down.

As I made the fine throw at Ronan

from the middle of the hosts,

the fair cleric said that I had leave

to go with birds.

I am Sweeny the slender-thin,

the slender, the hunger-thin,

berries crimson and cresses green,

their colours are my mouth.

I was in the centre of the yew

distraught with suffering,

the hostile branches scourged me,

I would not come down.

Our wish is at Samhain, up to Maytime,

when the wild ducks come

in each dun wood without stint

to be in ivy-trees.

Water of Glen Bolcain fair

a listening to its horde of birds,

its tuneful streams that are not slow,

its islands, its rivers.

In the tree of Cell Lughaidh,

it was our wish to be alone,

swift flight of swallows on the brink of summer –

take your hands away!

Though my flittings are unnumbered,

my clothing today is scarce,

I personally maintain my watch

on the tops of mountains.

O fern, russet long one,

your mantle has been reddened,

there’s no bedding for an outcast

on your branching top.

Nuts at terce and cress-leaves,

fruits from an apple-wood at noon,

a lying-down to lap chill water –

your fingers torment my arms.

Sweeny’s lay in Glenn na nEachtach

Bleating one, little antlers,

O lamenter we like

delightful the clamouring

from your glen you make.

O leafy-oak, clumpy-leaved,

you are high above trees,

O hazlet, little clumpy-branch –

the nut-smell of hazels.

O alder, O alder-friend,

delightful your colour,

you don’t prickle me or tear

in the place you are.

O little blackthorn, little thorny-one,

O little dark sloe-tree;

O watercress, O green-crowned,

at the well-brink.

O holly, holly-shelter,

O door against the wind,

O ash-tree inimical,

you spearshaft of warrior.

O birch clean and blessed,

O melodious, O proud,

delightful the tangle

of your head-rods.

What I like least in woodlands

from none I conceal it –

stirk of a leafy-oak,

at its swaying.

O faun, little long-legs,

I caught you with grips,

I rode you upon your back

from peak to peak.

Glen Bolcain my home for ever,

it was my haven,

many a night have I tried

a race against the peak.

Glen Bolcain

If I were to search alone

the hills of the brown world,

better would I like my sole hut

in Glen Bolcain.

Good its water greenish-green

good its clean strong wind,

good its cress-green cresses,

best its branching brooklime.

Good its sturdy ivies,

good its bright neat sallow,

good its yewy yew-yews,

best its sweet-noise birch.

A haughty ivy

growing through a twisted tree,

myself on its true summit,

I would lothe leave it.

I flee before skylarks,

it is the tense stern-race,

I overleap the clumps

on the high hill-peaks.

When it rises in front of me

the proud turtle-dove,

I overtake it swiftly

since my plumage grew.

The stupid unwitting woodcock

when it rises up before me,

methinks it red-hostile,

and the blackbird that cries havoc.

Small foxes yelping

to me and from me,

the wolves tear them –

I flee their cries.

They journeyed in their chase of me

in their swift courses

so that I flew away from them

to the tops of mountains.

On every pool there will rain

a starry frost;

I am wretched and wandering

under it on the peak.

The herons are calling

in cold Glen Eila

swift-flying flocks are flying,

coming and going.

I do not relish

the mad clack of humans

sweeter warble of the bird

in the place he is.

I like not the trumpeting

heard at morn;

sweeter hearing is the squeal

of badgers in Benna Broc.

I do not like it

the loud bugling;

finer is the stagbelling stag

of antler-points twice twenty.

There are makings for plough-teams

from glen to glen;

each resting-stag at rest

on the summit of the peaks.

The stag of steep Slieve Eibhlinne,

the stag of sharp Slieve Fuaid,

the stag of Eala, the stag of Orrery,

the mad stag of Loch Lein.

Stag of Shevna, stag of Larne,

the stag of Leena of the panoplies

stag of Cualna, stag of Conachail,

the stag of two-peaked Bairenn.

Oh mother of this herd,

thy coat has greyed,

no stag is following after thee

without twice twenty points.

Greater-than-the-material-for-a-little-cloak,

thy head has greyed;

if I were on each little point

littler points would there be on every pointed point.

The stag that marches trumpeting

across the glen to me,

pleasant the place for seats

on his antler top.

Sweeny travelling

O warriors approach,

warriors of Dal Araidhe,

you will find him in the tree he is

the man you seek.

God has given me life here,

very bare, very narrow,

no women, no trysting,

no music or trance-eyed sleep.

A year to last night

I have lodged there in branches

from the flood-tide to the ebb-tide

naked.

Bereft of fine women-folk,

the brooklime for a brother –

our choice for a fresh meal

is watercress always.

Without accomplished musicians

without generous women,

no jewel-gift for bards –

respected Christ, it has perished me.

The thorntop that is not gentle

has reduced me, has pierced me,

it has brought me near death

the brown thorn-bush.

Once free, once gentle,

I am banished for ever,

wretch-wretched I have been

a year to last night.

The man by the wall snores

a snore-sleep that’s beyond me,

for seven years from that Tuesday at Magh Rath

I have not slept a wink.

O God that I had not gone

to the hard battle!

thereafter my name was Mad –

Mad Sweeny in the bush.

Watercress from the well at Cirb

is my lot at terce,

its colour is my mouth,

green on the mouth of Sweeny.

Chill chill is my body

when away from ivy,

the rain torrent hurts it

and the thunder.

I am in summer with the herons of Cuailgne

with wolves in winter,

at other times I am hidden in a copse –

not so the man by the wall.

Cheerless is existence

without a downy bed,

abode of the shrivelling frost,

gusts of the snowy wind.

Chill icy wind,

shadow of a feeble sun

the shelter of a sole tree

on a mountain-plain.

The bell-belling of the stag

through the woodland,

the climb to the deer-pass,

the voice of white seas.

Forgive me Oh Great Lord,

mortal is this great sorrow,

worse than the black grief –

Sweeny the thin-groined.

Carraig Alasdair

resort of sea-gulls

sad Oh Creator,

chilly for its guests.

Sad our meeting

two hard-shanked cranes –

myself hard and ragged

she hard-beaked.

Chill chill is my bed at dark

on the peak of Glen Boirche,

I am weakly, no mantle on me,

lodged in a sharp-stirked holly.

Glen Bolcain of the twinkle spring

it is my rest-place to abide in;

when Samhain comes, when summer comes,

it is my rest-place where I abide.

For my sustenance at night,

the whole that my hands can glean

from the gloom of the oak-gloomed oaks –

the herbs and the plenteous fruits.

Fine hazel-nuts and apples, berries,

blackberries and oak-tree acorns,

generous raspberries, they are my due,

haws of the prickle-hawy hawthorn.

Wild sorrels, wild garlic faultless,

clean-topped cress,

they expel from me my hunger,

acorns from the mountain, melle-root.

Terrible is my plight this night

the pure air has pierced my body,

lacerated feet, my cheek is green –

O Mighty God, it is my due.

It is bad living without a house,

Peerless Christ, it is a piteous life!

a filling of green-tufted fine cresses

a drink of cold water from a clear rill.

Stumbling out of the withered tree-tops

walking the furze – it is truth –

wolves for company, man-shunning,

running with the red stag through fields.

Ululation, I am Sweeny,

my body is a corpse;

sleeping or music nevermore –

only the soughing of the storm-wind.

I have journeyed from Luachair Dheaghaidh

to the edge of Fiodh Gaibhle,

this is my fare – I conceal it not –

ivy-berries, oak-mast.

All Fharannain, resort of saints,

fulness of hazels, fine nuts,

swift water without heat

coursing its flank.

Plenteous are its green ivies,

its mast is coveted;

the fair heavy apple-trees

they stoop their arms.

There was a time when I preferred

to the low converse of humans

the accents of the turtle-dove

fluttering about a pool.

There was a time when I preferred

to the tinkle of neighbour bells

the voice of the blackbird from the crag

And the belling of a stag in a storm.

There was a time when I preferred

to the voice of a fine woman near me

the call of the mountain-grouse

heard at day.

There was a time when I preferred

the yapping of the wolves

to the voice of a cleric

melling and megling within.

Moling’s tribute to Sweeny

Here is the tomb of Sweeny!

His memory racks my heart,

dear to me therefore are the haunts

of the saintly madman.

Dear to me Glen Bolcain fair

for Sweeny loved it;

dear the streams that leave it

dear its green-crowned cresses.

That beyant is Madman’s Well

dear the man it nourished,

dear its perfect sand,

beloved its clear waters.

Melodious was the talk of Sweeny

long shall I hold his memory,

I implore the King of Heaven

on his tomb and above his grave.

1 Dáil deputies – Irish MPs.