Yeats, and a single but breathtaking fragment from the poet Herbert Trench, had set me hunting for good translations of Irish Gaelic myth for years, but I never got round to purchasing anything until this week. Kenneth H. Jackson's A Celtic Miscellany sweeps across not just Irish but wider Celtic prose and poetry, offering samples of epigrams, elegies, love-poetry and satire. A characteristic of much Celtic literature, which explains why I'm drawn to it, is its 'deep sense of wonder,' as accurately put in the blurb- a reverence for, and an ability to find the fantastic in, the natural world.
Bewitching tales abound. Aenghus falls in love with Caer, who alternates, every year, between her human and bird form. He calls to her as she is on the lake with a cloud of other birds; she agrees as long as she may return to the water one last time.
'She went to him. He cast his arms about her, They fell asleep in the form of two swans. and went round the lake three times, so that his promise might not be broken. They went away in the form of two white birds till they came to Bruigh Maic ind Óaig, and sang a choral song so that it put the people to sleep for three days and three nights. The girl stayed with him after that.'
(Jackson (1971), p97)
It's the detail of the 'choral song' (ibid) and its effect which really elevates this passage. Wholly unnecessary to the plot- the story ends here- it is nevertheless added to enhance the tone of cryptic enchantment.
It's not just all hushed mystery, though- there's a vividly brutal beauty and imagination to some of the images crafted in these works. Take this masterful use of colour, and the wonderfully out-of-the-blue simile, in The Story of Deirdre:
'Now once upon a time the girl's foster-father was skinning a stolen calf in the snow outside, in the winter, to cook it for her. She saw a raven drinking the blood on the snow. Then she said to Lebhorcham, 'I should dearly love any man with those three colours, with hair like the raven and cheek like the blood and body like the snow.' '
(ibid, p50).
A similar use of contrasting hues, though here in lingering rather than brutal fashion, can be found in Froech in the Dark Pool (ibid, p171). A youth swims across a pool to fetch a branch of mountain-ash laden with berries; the sight of him swimming back with the bright red berries on his white back so takes away the breath of a woman on the bank, that the beauty of everything she sees from that day onwards pales in comparison. You see now the gift of Celtic writers for creating extraordinary tableaux out of the everyday. The latter two examples stand out, because of the interdependence of the tableau and the ensuing judgement. The two images, however striking, would not stand out if not for the brilliant verdicts of the two women. Similarly, Deirdre's statement would not have been an ingenious leap without the invention of a suitable (however bizarre!) preceding scene; if Findabhair hadn't seen Froech in a suitably vivid context, she wouldn't have dwelt on its beauty for the rest of her life.
Sometimes the images in these works are startling for what feels at first like an anachronistic surrealism- this line from a roughly 400-year-old Irish poem could have come straight out of a Neruda sonnet:
''In your bright-braided tresses there is a flock of cuckoos in
the pangs of labour, a bird-flock which does not sing and
yet torments all men.'
(ibid, p102).
Other descriptions are more sweeping luxuriations in the beauty of the natural world. I'm very fond of the ingenious excuses the writers find to wax lyrical on the subject. My favourite might be The Four Seasons (ibid, p66-7), in which Athairne makes various attempts, throughout the year, to journey on from his foster-son's house, but is detained by the son's descriptions of each season's particular harshness (until summer's beauties are declared conducive to travel). A runner-up would be the 14th-century Welsh lament for a birch repurposed as a maypole, bemoaning the birdsong and seedlings and shade for the primroses lost to the 'cruel maiming' (ibid, p83).
Finally, we reach the wonderful stateliness which poetry steeped in the natural world can achieve, if done right. I'll leave you with this Scottish Gaelic elegy, marked by an effortless purity and sophistication, due to its perfect balance: not unimaginative, not too complex in its imagery. Notice, too, the effective syncopated insertion of exclamations both for emphasis and the avoiding of monotony. All stately poems are to be read out loud, sonorously, and this is no exception.
This poem, as soon as I read it, reminded me of a fine couple of lines by 20th-century Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet, from his poem Au Petit Jour (for copyright reasons, I can't publish a translation), characterised by the same simple majesty:
'Qu'une dernière fois dans la voix qui l'implore
elle se lève donc et rayonne, l'aurore.'
'She died, like the ruddy clouds in the east at the break of
day, which are envied by the sun for their beauty as it rises
in its glory to darken them.
She died, like a glimpse of sunlight when the shadow races
in pursuit; she died, like a rainbow when the shower has
fallen and its glory is past.
She died, like snow which lies on the shore by the sea, when
the pitiless tide flows over it - oh whiteness! - and it did
not enjoy it for long.
She died, like the voice of the harp when it is sweetest and
most solemn; she died, like a lovely tale when the telling
has barely begun.
She died, like the gleam of the moon when the sailor is
afraid in the dark; she died, like a sweet dream when the
sleeper is sad that it has gone.
She died, at the beginning of her beauty; Heaven could not
dispense with her; she died, oh MÃ iri died, like the sun
quenched at its rising.'
(ibid, p.267)
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