by J. M. Synge
The chapter that tells of the courting of Emer, who has the six gifts, the gifts of beauty, of voice, of needlework, of sweet speech, of wisdom, and of chastity, and becomes the wife of Cuchulain, is full of curious charm. Another episode, where Fand, the fairy woman, wins the hero from his wife, apart from the beauty of the composition, has a more scientific interest, as a recent writer, M. Pineau, has found in it the origin of an incident in the Nibelungenlied. The lamentation of Deirdre over the body of her husband and his two brothers, who have been killed by Conchubar that he may win her to be his own wife, is one of the finest passages in this book. It loses in quotation, yet a few stanzas must be given:
‘That I would live after Naoise let no one think on the earth: I will not go on living after Ainnle and after Ardan. After them I myself will not live: three that would leap through the midst of battle; since my beloved is gone from me I will cry my fill over his grave.
‘Oh, young man, digging the new grave, do not make the grave narrow: I will be along with them in the grave making lamentation and ochones!
‘Many the hardship I met with along with the three heroes: I suffered want of house, want of fire, it is myself that used not to be troubled.
‘Their new shields and their spears made a bed for me often. Oh, young man, put their three swords close over their grave.... What is country to me, or land, or lordship? What are swift horses? What are jewels and gold? Och, it is I will be lying to-night on the strand like the beautiful sons of Usnach.’
For readers who take more than literary interest in these stories a word of warning may be needed. Lady Gregory has omitted certain barbarous features, such as the descriptions of the fury of Cuchulain, and, in consequence, some of her versions have a much less archaic aspect than the original texts. Students of mythology will read this book with interest, yet for their severer studies they must still turn to the works of German scholars, and others, who translate without hesitation all that has come down to us in the MSS.
A TRANSLATION OF IRISH ROMANCE
MOST OF THE early Irish romances are written in alternating fragments of prose and verse, like the old French tale of Aucassin and Nicolette, and for this and other reasons the translator of them has a task that is far from easy. The style of the verse portions is usually of a rather stiff elliptical kind, so that a plain literal version of them is somewhat unattractive. Prose versions, on the other hand, which can give the reader a sense that he is reading sometimes rather highly-pitched verse and sometimes simple prose, and are still natural and pleasing, can only be produced by writers of the greatest literary tact. In the present volume Mr. A. H. Leahy has adopted a plan which is perhaps more perilous still, and has translated all the verse portions of his text into English verse. For this he had, of course, many well-known examples, yet it may be doubted whether — putting aside a few paraphrases and imitations made by poets of genius — almost the whole mass of English verse translations, from the time of Pope down, is not a dreary and disheartening exhibition of useless ingenuity which has produced hardly anything of interest for those who care most for literature. A certain number of these verse translations, however, — Mr. Andrew Lang’s translation of portions of Aucassin and Nicolette among them — have justified themselves, and writers have a perfect right to attempt this kind of work. In order to form an opinion of Mr. Leahy’s verses one need not go far. In the opening of one of these romances, the very well known story of Deirdre and the sons of Usnach, a child cries out before it is born — a characteristically wild touch — and terrifies the men of Ulster. Cathbad, the Druid, is asked to explain the occurrence, and he answers in a piece of peculiar verse which Mr. Leahy translates thus: —
’Tis a maid who screamed wildly so lately,
Fair and curling shall locks round her flow,
And her eyes be blue-centred and stately
And her cheeks like the foxglove shall glow.
For the tint of her skin we commend her,
In its whiteness like snow newly shed;
And her teeth are all faultless in splendour,
And her lips, like to coral, are red.
A fair woman is she, for whom heroes, that fight
In their chariots for Ulster, to death shall be dight.
That is seriously put forward in this elaborately edited volume as a translation from the Book of Leinster, a twelfth-century text, and yet it is hard to imagine a more deplorable misrepresentation of the spirit of these old verses. This kind of facile parody has been written very frequently by writers who have set out to translate Gaelic poetry, and their verse has shown to an extraordinary extent the provinciality which — at least till quite lately — has distinguished a good deal of Anglo-Irish taste. It is hardly too much to say that, while a great part of Gaelic poetry itself is filled with the most curious individuality and charm, there is probably no mass of tawdry commonplace jingle quite so worthless as the verse translations that have been made from it in Ireland during the last century. Occasionally a poem like Mangan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen’, which was put forward as a translation, had an independent life and beauty, yet most of these verses were neither translations nor poetry. Those who know no Irish can get some idea of what Gaelic poetry has suffered in this kind of treatment by comparing the beautiful prose translations which Dr. Douglas Hyde wrote of the ‘Love Songs of Connacht’ with the verse translations — in themselves often pleasing enough — which he put in the same volume. When one is dealing with old texts, like those translated in the present volume, the matter is much worse. A stanza in ‘The Courtship of Etain’ is thus translated literally in the notes at the end of the book: ‘If it should please thee in thy wise mind, place hand about my neck; a beginning of courtship, beautiful its colour, a man and a woman kissing each other.’ In the text of the volume this is changed into: —
Is my neck and its beauty so pleasing?
’Tis around it thine arms thou shaft place;
And ’tis known as a courtship’s beginning
When a man and a woman embrace.
A transfiguration which needs no comment! Sometimes, when Mr. Leahy keeps to a strictly trochaic or iambic movement, the effect is not so bad, but on the whole his verses are like those I have given, and as the stories often contain as much verse as prose the whole translation suffers.
In the prose portions the workmanship is very different, and Mr. Leahy shows so many of the qualities of an excellent translator — fearlessness, enthusiasm, and the scholar’s conscience — that one reads every word with interest. In a few places he slips into phrases that are needlessly archaic, but on the whole his style is adequate and not without vigour. If he will translate the less known or unknown Irish romances into good prose many will thank him, and he will help to give a new life to these old romances, in which so much curious imagination has been long hidden away. In the present volume the stories chosen are among those that are already most widely known, and include ‘Cuchulain’s Sick Bed’, ‘The Courtship of Etain’, the wonderful episode of the Tain be Cuailnge, known as ‘The Fight of the Ford’ and some others. In the preface and special introductions several points of importance are discussed and there is a special note by Mr. Alfred Nutt which will be read with interest. The volume is well brought out.
IRISH HEROIC ROMANCE
IN THIS, THE second volume of the Irish Romances translated by Mr. A. H. Leahy, he has adopted a method which differs considerably from that of the first volume, reviewed in these columns not long ago. The romances of the first volume were in prose and verse, and were translated into corresponding forms. The five stories now added, however, are in prose only, and we are given two translations, one in verse, and the other, on the opposite page, in literal and rugged prose. Mr. Leahy explains the reasons which led him to adopt this method. These tales, he says, ‘appear suited for rapid prose recitations, which were apparently as much a feature in ancient as they are in modern Irish. Such pieces can hardly be reproduced in English prose so as to bring out their
character; they are represented in English by the narrative ballad, and they have been rendered in this way.’ This view of the matter will not be shared by everyone. In numberless villages in the west and south of Ireland there are now story-tellers who have a large store of folk-tales which they tell indifferently in English or Irish, and those of them who have fairly good English often give quite the same characteristics in both their versions. On the other hand, the English ballad forms used in the present work have a number of literary associations which, to say nothing of Mr. Leahy’s rather crude versification, create a feeling that is by no means in harmony with the spirit of Irish story-telling. The note of the five stories now translated is, in some ways, nearer the note of the modern Irish folk-tale than to that of the more elaborate romances. They are all of the variety known as ‘Tain’ or ‘Cattle Raid’, and three of them at least have little interest that is not of a purely antiquarian kind. The ‘Tain be Fraich’, however, has considerable value, and one fine passage filled with the peculiar delight in clear, natural colour which is so characteristic of Irish and Welsh romance. Find-abair, the daughter of the Queen of Connaught, sees a prince, who is her lover, swimming in a river with a branch of red rowan berries in his hand:
Exceedingly beautiful she thought it to see Fraech over the black pool; the body of the great whiteness and the hair of great loveliness, the face of great beauty, the eye of great greyness, and he a soft youth without fault, without blemish... and the branch with the red berries between the throat and the white face.
The last tale in the volume, which tells how the great queen or goddess of war appeared to Cuchulain as a red-haired female satirist, and then, when he threw his spear at her, turned herself into a blackbird and told him how she would come against him in a great war that was soon to come, is a fine and characteristic fragment of archaic Irish fantasy. In reading it, as indeed in the other stories, one is tempted to wish that Mr. Leahy had taken more pains with his plain prose translations instead of producing these rhymed versions, which are in the scholar’s way and are not likely to attract the general public.
IRISH FAIRY STORIES
AT THE PRESENT time, when the tendencies of most Irish writers are towards sombreness of thought and language, it is not uninteresting to find in Mr. MacManus a survival of the older school that was founded, nearly a century ago, by Carleton and his successors. Like them Mr. MacManus writes with vigour, and with a real knowledge of the Irish peasantry, but does not reach a style of any particular interest when writing in his own person, or bring out the finer notes of the language spoken by the peasants. To give a specimen of his manner in this book one may quote almost anywhere:
Nancy and Shamus were man and wife and lived all alone together for forty years; but at length a good-for-nothing streel of a fellow named Rory, who lived close by, thought what a fine thing it would be if Shamus would die, and he could marry Nancy and get the house, farm, and all the stock. So he up and said to Nancy:
‘What a pity it is for such a fine-looking woman as you to be tethered with that ould complainin’ good-for-nothing crony of a man that’s as full of pains and aches as an egg’s full of meat..etc.
Such a style has a certain liveliness, yet when it is chosen by Irish writers, a great deal of what is most precious in the national life must be omitted from their work, or imperfectly expressed. On the other hand the rollicking note is present in the Irish character — present to an extent some writers of the day do not seem to be aware of — and it demands, if we choose to deal with it, a free rollicking style. In some of the dialogue of this book Mr. MacManus has caught the jovial note sharply and well, but the language of several of the stories has a familiarity that is not amusing, while it is without the intimate distinction good humorous writing requires.
This volume, it need hardly be said, is addressed to the general public rather than to folk-lorists. Three or four of the ten stories that are retold from the telling of the Donegal peasants are simple folk-tales, with no fairy or supernatural element whatever, and in the others, although wonders abound, there is little that has to do with Irish fairy belief. Mr. MacManus is at his best in the directly humorous tales, such as ‘Conal and Donal and Taig’ which is excellently told. The supernatural stories have the wild imagination and variety that give charm to the invention of the Gael, but here the writer’s method is less satisfactory.
Many of the incidents, such as that in which a dead man comes in a new shape to help a young adventurer who had released his dead body from the bailiffs, and again that of the well with blood and honey coming to the top of it, are found in other collections of Irish folk-tales. Others, such as that of the wine-cellar and the man who goes down every morning to drink wine, seem out of keeping with the details of Irish life which the story-tellers usually adhere to when they are not dealing with anything that is avowedly a wonder. ‘Manis the Miller’ and several of the other stories are to be found in different forms in other parts of Ireland; indeed, with endless variety of detail, the same themes seem to be present wherever the folk-tale has survived among the Gaels. On the whole, this book makes pleasant reading, and it is sure to delight children. It is well printed and brought out. The illustrations are numerous and are often fairly effective, yet the illustrator has not seen the Irish wonder world with a clear eye. It is to be feared that the old story-tellers, to whom the volume is gracefully dedicated, would be bewildered and perhaps scandalised, if they could be shown the shape given to some of the characters they helped to create.
LE MOUVEMENT INTELLECTUEL IRLANDAIS
LA TRANQUILLITÉ RELATIVE qui a régné ces dernières années en Irlande semble toucher à sa fin. Les agissements de The United Irish League, suivis de la proclamation récente de Lord Cadogan n’indiquent que trop clairement que nous sommes au seuil d’une nouvelle époque d’agitation politique. Maintenant si l’on veut se rendre compte, avant d’aborder cette nouvelle période, des progrès faits depuis la mort de Parnell, que trouve-t-on? L’on sait que malgré l’utilité de The Local Government Act et de quelques autres mesures, des années se sont passées sans de grands événements parlementaires. L’habileté de MM. Redmond, Dillon et des plusieurs autres politiciens irlandais est indiscutable, mais un vrai chef populaire a fait défaut, et en Irlande rien ne se fait sans l’influence d’un personnage dominant. Cependant, dans un certain sens, cette période a été féconde — peut-être la plus féconde du siècle dernier — puis-qu’elle a vu naître, ou tout au moins s’épanouir, trois mouvements de la plus grande importance, The Gaelic League, association pour la préservation de la langue irlandaise, puis un mouvement pour le développement de l’agriculture et de l’élevage, et, finalement, une nouvelle activité intellectuelle qui est en train de nous créer une littérature.
Ces trois mouvements sont intimement liés; — il est rare de trouver quelqu’un qui s’occupe d’un seul d’entre eux sans s’intéresser en même temps aux autres — mais ici je vais parler du troisième, comme étant celui qui offre le plus d’intérêt général.
Quand, vers la fin du XVIIe siècle, la langue irlandaise cessa d’être employée comme langue littéraire, toutes les traditions intellectuelles du pays se perdirent. Dès ce moment ce furent plutôt les descendants des immigrés anglais qui firent de la littérature au lieu des descendants des races celtiques antérieures, et puisque ces écrivains ne possédaient ni une tradition, ni une langue à eux les plus doués d’entre eux passaient presque toujours en Angleterre, de sorte que leurs œuvres ne nous appartiennent pas. Parmi eux, on peut citer ces trois écrivains si remarquables dans la littérature anglaise, Burke, Goldsmith et Sterne.
Cet état de choses dura longtemps, mais peu à peu, une connaissance croissante de la langue anglaise dans les classes populaires et une assimilation plus complète des gens d’extraction anglaise dotèrent le pays d’un nouveau terrain littéraire. En 1798, William Carlton naquit dans le comté de Tyrone, et, trente ans plus tard, il publia ses Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, liv
re devenu célèbre, qui marque le commencement définitif de la littérature irlandaise moderne. Depuis ce moment, les écrivains irlandais out été nombreux et féconds. On trouve des romanciers, des jeunes gens moitié littérateurs, moitié politiciens, qui abondèrent surtout vers l’année 1848, des poètes et quelques savants qui s’occupaient principalement des antiquités nationales. Néanmoins, il faut avouer que toute la littérature produite pendant les premiers trois quarts du siècle ne contient que peu de chose d’une réelle valeur. Le sentiment national a été trop ardent, trop conscient, si on peut le dire, chez la plupart de ces écrivains, de sorte que la prose dégénérait facilement chez eux en une rhétorique surchargée, tandis qu’en poésie on croyait avoir tout fait en chantant les anciennes gloires de l’Irlande. De plus, les littérateurs de cette époque écrivaient une langue qu’une grande partie du peuple autour d’eux n’était jamais arrivé à s’assimiler parfaitement. Il s’en suit que leur façon d’envisager la langue anglaise restait entièrement dépourvue de cette intimité spéciale qui, seule, peut donner naissance à de vraies œuvres de littérature.
Maintenant quand on passe à la génération actuelle, on trouve que ces défauts se sont amoindris, s’ils n’ont pas complètement disparu. Avec une culture un peu plus large le sentiment national a cessé d’être une obsession dominante, et, graduellement, la langue anglaise est devenue, dans la plus grande partie de l’Irlande, une véritable langue maternelle. C’est surtout dans l’œuvre de M. W. B. Y eats, écrivain de génie à la tête de la nouvelle école de la poésie irlandaise, qu’on voit la portée de cette amélioration. Chez lui, le sentiment national, tout en restant aussi profond que celui de ses prédécesseurs, se borne à donner un caractère distinctif à l’atmosphère dans laquelle s’épanouissent les créations délicates de son imagination. De l’autre côté, ses rythmes, composés avec une simplicité curieusement savante, font preuve d’une rare connaissance de la langue anglaise. Ce n’est pas en quelques lignes qu’on peut critiquer l’œuvre complète de M. Yeats qui, d’ailleurs, n’est pas inconnu à Paris, ayant collaboré à l’Ermitage, où M.
