Translating Early Medieval Poetry
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2 Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, ed. Aislinge Meic Conglinne (Dublin, 1990). While Jackson did not publish a translation of the entire text, he did include a translation of one page of the
‘Guest House at the Monastery of Cork’ section of the text in his A Celtic Miscellany (London, 1951), pp. 205–6.
3 Austin Clarke, ‘The Son of Learning’, Selected Plays (New York, 2005), pp. 1–42. In Clarke’s play – a much condensed version of the original text – Mac Conglinne’s buffoonish tendencies are emphasised and he is not rewarded for his actions at the end of the text.
Additional y, Clarke enlarges the role of Ligach, one of the few female characters in the original text (also see below).
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Lahney Preston-Matto
popular Radio Éireann play ‘The Vision of Mac Conglinne’.4 As for more traditional
translations, there have been three since Meyer’s in 1892: Tomás Ó Floinn translated
the text into Modern Irish in 1980;5 Patrick Ford translated Jackson’s edition into
English in 1999;6 and my translation into English came out in 2010 with Syracuse
University Press.7 I was able to do what no other translator has done: I replicated
the metres of the original Irish verses, as well as some of the rhyme schemes and
alliteration, although those latter items were a bit more difficult to simulate. The
multiple references to food were one of the biggest challenges to me as a translator,
and also possibly one of the reasons the tale may not have been translated recently:
the references are often arcane at best, and at worst, the food being mentioned can
no longer be identified (worse yet, the reader might wish that some of the images,
such as men dressed in corned-beef coats, or rowing a boat through buttermilk
streams under trees that drip meat juices, had never been imagined). This chapter
focuses on these references to food, the challenges I faced trying to piece together
exactly what food was being mentioned, what these food references can tell us about
twelfth-century cultural life in Ireland, and why this might matter to a twenty-first-
century English-reading audience.
Translation, Medieval Food and Cultural Significance
To give an idea of the oddity that is this text, here is a pared-down plot summary of
Aislinge Meic Conglinne: Mac Conglinne is our hero of sorts, an ecclesiastical scholar who decides to give up studying in order to pursue poetry, and he is quite gifted at
satire. He decides to go to the court of Cathal mac Finguine, the king of Munster,
who is plagued with a demon of gluttony. On his way to see Cathal, Mac Conglinne
stops at a monastic guest-house in Cork run by the abbot, Manchín. He receives
awful hospitality and so he satirises the monks and abbot of Cork, whereupon they
4 Padraic Fallon, ‘The Vision of Mac Conglinne’, Irish Drama, 1900–80, ed. Cóilin Owens and Joan Radner (Washington, 1990), pp. 456–538. Fallon’s version is one of three adaptations of early Irish material that he did in the early to mid 1950s for Radio Éireann: the other two radio plays he wrote were Diarmuid and Gráinne and The Wooing of Étáin. None of these are direct translations, but are instead reimaginings of the original sources. For instance, Fallon has Mac Conglinne serve Queen Ligach, who is depicted as fickle, alternating between two kings. In the original text, Ligach is a minor character, the sister of a king who never has a voice and disappears from the text after the first five pages.
5 Tomás Ó Floinn, Aisling Mhic Conglinne (Gaillimh, 1980). Ó Floinn is translating diachronical y, from Middle Irish to Modern Irish, and some might think that it is easier to match the metre and the rhyme schemes in that instance. However, anyone who has ever tried to translate Chaucer from Middle English to Modern English, keeping the metre and rhyme scheme, knows that diachronic translation is just as tricky as synchronic translation. Ó
Floinn’s translation does not replicate all the poems in the original text, and for those poems he does include, none of them attempt to match the metre of the original, although he seems to have slightly more success with rhyme schemes.
6 Patrick K. Ford, trans. ‘The Vision of Mac Con Glinne’, The Celtic Poets: Songs and Tales from Early Ireland and Wales (Belmont, 1999), pp. 112–50. Ford’s translation is a good one, but the book is not easily accessible.
7 Lahney Preston-Matto, trans., Aislinge Meic Conglinne: The Vision of Mac Conglinne (Syracuse, 2010).
Aislinge Meic Conglinne
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flog him and later decide to crucify him, an even larger breach of hospitality. While
he is waiting to be crucified, Mac Conglinne has a vision, which he recites to the
monks the following morning. Based on the contents of the vision, Manchín, the
abbot, realises that Mac Conglinne is the one who is supposed to help rescue Cathal
mac Finguine from the demon of gluttony, and sends him off to save Cathal instead
of crucifying him. Cathal is on a circuit of his territory, so Mac Conglinne final y
encounters him at the establishment of Pichán mac Mael Find, who then col udes
with Mac Conglinne to trick Cathal, his king (for his own good, of course). Mac
Conglinne uses a more detailed recitation of his vision, and also torments Cathal
by eating in front of him without letting him eat, to lure out the demon of gluttony,
through the recitation of his vision in more detail. Mac Conglinne is then hailed as
a hero and given material and spiritual rewards aplenty.
Before getting into the translation proper, I would like to call attention to one
of the underlying cultural expectations of the medieval time period, particularly in
Ireland, that of hospitality. Hospitality was such an important part of their society
that there was a separate social status, equal to that of a lord, accorded to briugu or
‘hospitallers’, men who were obliged to offer limitless hospitality to any freeman
who requested it. Fergus Kel y argues that ‘the office of briugu seems to have been one by which a wealthy man of non-noble birth could acquire high rank through
displaying the hospitality and generosity so admired by the early Irish.’8 But all
freemen were obligated to be generous, and part of the agreement between a king
or lord and his retainer(s) required the retainer(s) to throw at least one feast for his king or lord, while the king or lord was in return obliged to advance his stock or
land to his retainer(s). Kings and lords could lose their honour price by refusing
hospitality.9 Simply from the synopsis of the text above, then, Mac Conglinne could
reasonably have expected hospitality from the monks in Cork, Cathal and Pichán,
in addition to rewards upon the successful completion of Cathal’s demon eradica-
tion; in exchange, he would offer entertainment in the way of poetry, something
that would have been seen as an equal exchange. Since so much hospitality is bound
up with food, both amounts and quality, the text’s emphasis on visions of food is
completely appropriate.10
Here is a brief example of a poem within the Aislinge that uses food to create a building, its furnishings and its inhabitants:
A dí ersaind bocai brechtáin,
The doorposts were of soft
custard
A léibend do gruth is d’imm,
The floor of butter and curds
Imdadai do blonaig bladaig,
Couches made of splendid suet,
Scéith iumdai do thanaig thimm.
And shields of pliant pressed
cheese.
8 Fergus Kel y, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1988), p. 36 .
9 Ibid., p. 27.
10 For more on hospitality in medieval Ireland, see Preston-Matto, Aislinge Meic
Conglinne, pp. xxi–xxiv. See also Catherine Marie O’Sullivan, Hospitality in Medieval Ireland 900–1500 (Dublin, 2004).
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Lahney Preston-Matto
Fir fo sciathraigib na sciath-sin,
The men strapped into those
shield-straps
Do moethail buic mel aig mín,
Were delicious smooth cream
cheese;
Fir cen tuicse gona Goedil,
Engaged not in a Gael’s killing;
Goeí gruitne cech oenfhir díb.
Each man there had butter
spears.
Coire ra-mór lán do luabin,
Full of stew a giant cauldron
Dar liumm ro lámus riss gleó,
(I thought I could handle it)
Braisech bruithe duillech dond-bán,
boiled, leafy, brown soup of
cabbage,
Lestar lommnán lán do cheó.
a huge cup brimful of milk.
Tech saille dá fhichet toebán,
Bacon house with forty rafters
Coelach coelán, coimge chlann;
ripe roof-wattles keep clans safe
Da cech biúd bud maith la duine
Every food pleasant to people –
Dar lium bátar uile and.11
It seemed to me all was there.12
This poem is spoken by the eponymous Mac Conglinne when he is trying to cure
the king, Cathal mac Finguine, of a ‘demon of gluttony’, and in this case Mac Cong-
linne is reciting the poem while depriving Cathal of the same choice morsels he is
feeding himself. Cathal is thus engulfed in a sensory experience: listening to a poem
that is all about food he cannot have, smelling the food as it cooks, seeing the food
that is not being given him, and feeling the heat on his skin of the fire that cooked
the food. What he lacks is taste, and there is a subtle joke here by the writer because even when Cathal eats, he eats so quickly that he cannot taste anything, and his lack
of taste also reflects a larger social issue: Cathal is not tasteful or appropriate in the way he responds to adversity.
As for the poem itself, and its creation of an alternate world made of food, these
were some of the most difficult things for me to translate for two reasons: we do not
tend to use our imaginations to create buildings or their furnishings out of food
(except, perhaps, in some popular phone games as Candy Crush Saga); and because
they are part of a very specific and somewhat technical lexicon. The different varie-
ties of foodstuffs mentioned in this section of the text are somewhat repetitive in
category, but not in the specifics of those categories: how many different kinds of
cheese are/were there, for instance, and exactly what kinds of cheese should be used
to create a human being, as opposed to the kind of cheese that should be used to
create a shield? Soft and squishy (with a somewhat firmer casing) for a human being,
obviously, and hard for a shield, but how specific should I get, since the names of
cheese that we use today are not real y similar to the names for cheeses used nine
centuries or so ago? Should I use current names for cheese at all? Is custard some-
thing that early medieval people ate in Ireland? Or is the judicious use of anachro-
nisms appropriate?
11 Jackson, Aislinge Meic Conglinne, pp. 25–6.
12 Preston-Matto, Aislinge Meic Conglinne, pp. 37–8.
Aislinge Meic Conglinne
113
These types of questions are what I found myself wrestling with while trans-
lating. But they certainly were not the only questions I had to answer. As with any
medieval text, the passing of time has affected our understanding of the way that
certain institutions – religious and political, mainly – operated. The media that we
use to transmit information is only in some cases the same media that an early
medieval society used; in this case, poetry was much more highly valued in the
medieval world than it tends to be in ours. Additional y, I was working on a text that was purposely outrageous for the time period, one that uses fantastic imagery to
lampoon both religion and the political situation through satire. How much of this
could I realistical y convey in my translation?
The visions are the crux of the tale, and because they are in verse, difficult to
translate accurately while keeping similar rhyme schemes and metres. The following
is a sample of part of his less detailed version of the vision (this is the one Mac
Conglinne recites to Manchín):
Lodmar isin loech-lestar,
We went into the man-of-war
Laechda in chongaib chonaire
And took the path daringly
Dar bolc-lenna lir,
Over the rough waves;
Cor bensumm na sesbémend
We pulled ourselves – stroke/
stroke/stroke –
Dar muncind in mur-t(h)ráchta
Over the sea expansive
Co tochrad a mur-thorud,
And stirred up the carrageen,
Mur-grian amal mil.
Honey-colored sand.
Coem in dúnad ráncumar
We reached a fort wonderful
Co n-a ráthaib ro-brechtán
With ramparts all custardy
Resin loch anall;
On the lake’s far shore;
Ba h-imm úr a erdrochat,
Fresh butter, steps’ construction,
A chaisel ba gel-chruitnecht,
The stone rampart wheaten-
white,
A shondach ba sal .
Palisade of pork.
Ba suarc ségdae a shuidiugud
In a pleasant position
In tige treóin trebarda
Was the house, strong,
substantial.
I ndechad iar tain;
And then I went in
A chomla do thirm-charnu,
Through the door of meat-jerky,
A thairsech do thur-arán,
The threshold of dried-bannock,
Do maethluib a f(h)raig.
The wal s of soft cheese.
Uaitne slemnai sen-cháise,
Pil ars of cheese barnyardy
Sailghe salle súgmaire
And broad beams all bacony
Serndais ima-sech;
Alternately spread;
Sessa sena sen-chrothi,
Jol y joists of heavy-cream
Fairre finda fír-grotha,
Bright rafters of cottage-cheese–
fo-loingtis in tech.
They support the house.
Tipra d’fhin ’n-a fhír-iarthar,
Just behind, a wine-wel spring,
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Lahney Preston-Matto
Aibne beóri is brocóti,
Beer, bragget in riversrun,
Blasta cech lind lán;
Tasty each full pool.
Lear do braichlis bláith-lendai
A malt sea for ale-brewing,
Ós brú thopair thremantai
At a whey-wel ’s boundary
Do-roi(ch) dar a lár.13
Flows over the floor.14
As can be seen from this brief description, food becomes the building block for
all society, taking precedence over everything else, so that footpaths are made of
butter and palisades of pork.15 Food also replaces natural phenomena here, not just
man-made ones, such as rivers of beer and sand compared to honey. All the food
mentioned here was highly processed in the
Middle Ages: white wheat is much
more expensive, for example, than plain barley wheat. Bacon takes curing, wine
and beer require fermenting, cheese needs careful mould application; all of the food
mentioned leads to a description of a building that is labour-intensive. Some natural
resources, such as timber and stone, can be used in their natural state, with very
little human interference (such as cutting, sanding or carving), while other natural
resources like iron need more intensive labour to make them useful. But food items
add at least another level of labour, as most food undergoes a fairly transformative
process: grains need to be milled into flour, animals need to be smoked or salted
(or both!) or dried to be preserved, and various ingredients combined and cooked
in order to make items such as beer, custard, bread etc. The vision of a paradise
made of food, then, actual y represents a world that is far more difficult to achieve
because it is so much more labour intensive; and it has the added benefit of being
delicious, which you cannot real y say about most medieval stone buildings. Food,
then, becomes indicative of an advanced, civilised society; the more work you have
to perform to produce the final food product, the more civilised you are. As with
most civilised societies, however, advancement comes with attendant corruption,
and some critics of the tale have linked corruption in the medieval Irish church with
the description of the processed food in the tale.
Scott James Gwara very careful y connects Cathal mac Finguine’s unfortunate
demon possession to gluttony, and talks about the medieval Irish church’s vision of
gluttony as a sin tied and leading to lust.16 He goes on to assert that Mac Conglinne
himself is also a glutton, and that ‘the cure of gluttony by gluttony questions the
nature of sin itself.’17 Ultimately, Gwara claims that since Mac Conglinne plays a
variety of mock-religious roles within the text, including that of Jesus and a saint,
who is capable of forgiving someone’s sins, the text ‘denigrates, even denies, the
merit of absolution, a principal function of the Church’.18 Gwara thus ties the tale’s 13 Jackson, Aislinge Meic Conglinne, pp. 14–15.