Translating Early Medieval Poetry

by Tom Birkett

  Accordingly, the first question I had to ask myself before beginning the translation of Find and the Phantoms was: ‘who do I think will wish to read a Modern Irish version of that poem?’ The needs of the intended audience(s), according to André Lefevere,

  ‘are mainly responsible for the different strategies used … (and) can be seen to guide the translator’s work on the most fundamental level, the level at which the most

  encompassing strategic decisions are taken’.45 The potential readers that I envisage for my translation are a sub-set of those who speak and read Irish. They have a familiarity with language registers associated with Irish literature from the eighteenth century

  on. They may have engaged in academic study or, just as importantly, be familiar with

  Irish language folklore or with the singing tradition in Irish. In my translation, I have drawn on some of the lexical and stylistic elements found in poetry, song and folklore and so have made use of features that do not usual y occur in everyday functional

  Irish.46 The reader I imagine, while not presumed to be able to read the old poem

  with full understanding in its original form, wil , I feel, probably wish to have an eye to the original and so be in a position to glean some of its meaning and flavour. This is why I opted for a parallel translation. As a means of explaining how I conceived

  the task, it may be useful to refer to the following diagram adapted from that devised by Barnstone and reproduced in his Poetics of Translation, p. 94:

  source author

  originality

  servile translator

  new author

  mechanical replication

  originality and imitation

  44 Ibid., p. 11.

  45 André Lefevere, ‘Translation Practice(s) and the Circulation of Cultural Capital’, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (Clevedon, 1998), pp. 41–56, at p. 51.

  46 For examples, see Appendix, lines 48 and 110–12.

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  At the apex of the triangle is the original poem to be translated, while the

  base represents the traditional faithful–free continuum. At the extreme left is the

  completely literalist translation, represented, for example by a crib whose aim is to

  assist students in deciphering an original text in a language that they have not yet

  ful y mastered. Barnstone sums up the limitations of such a translation:

  A bottom-of-page crib for deciphering a foreign poem may be accurate but virtual y

  unreadable, filled with gross error at every significant level of semantic expression.

  Such error – failure to convey music, prosody, wordplay, cultural context, intertextual al usion – is normal y forgiven, since by tradition a crib makes no pretense of going

  beyond surface word-by-word dictionary restatement.47

  At the extreme right, translation is ‘free’ and the translator takes considerable liberty with the source text. An example would be Yeats’ ‘When You Are Old’ inspired by,

  rather than translated from, Ronsard’s ‘Quand vous serez bien vieille’.48 Towards

  the right too, but not as close to the ‘free’ end of the continuum as Yeats’ text, one might position Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s translation of Charles d’Orléans’ Le temps a

  laissié son manteau.49 A quick comparison of Yeats’ and Mhac an tSaoi’s texts with their French originals will show that the Irish poets deal freely with their sources –

  Yeats much more so than Mhac an tSaoi. There is much in the originals that is not

  replicated in the English and Irish texts. Yeats begins with the words, ‘When you are

  old’ – a close translation of the opening phrase of the French poem, ‘Quand vous

  serez bien vieille’, establishing a resonance that is sustained throughout by echoes of Ronsard’s poem rather than by direct verbal correspondence. Both poems involve

  a future projection where the object of the poet’s love, now an old lady, is seated by the fire recalling her youth. In Yeats’ poem, she feels sleepy and is apparently alone but in Ronsard’s poem she said to be engaged in spinning; there is a servant present

  and it is she who is said to be drowsy. In Yeats’ poem, the lady is urged to take down

  ‘this book’, while in the French poem she is imagined singing Ronsard’s verses and

  wondering at the thought that the poet once celebrated her beauty. The carpe diem

  theme, explicit in the last two lines of Ronsard’s poem, gives way to a melancholy

  feeling of lost opportunity in the Irish poem. Mhac an tSaoi’s poem, on the other

  hand, follows its French model much more closely, but poetic effect is favoured

  over exact lexical correspondence. Rhyme, imagery and mood correspond quite

  closely to the French and so the Irish poem could be said to be faithful at the level

  that matters most – the aesthetic level. So it does not matter that ‘jargon’, ‘Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau’ (‘river fountain and stream’) and ‘gouttes d’argent d’orfaverie’

  (‘drops of crafted silver’), for example, have not been translated by exact equiva-

  lents. Although one could apply the technical term ‘loss’ in the Translation Studies

  sense in differing degrees to the work of both Irish poets, there is also notable gain; Yeats and Mhac an tSaoi have created poems of great beauty matching or perhaps

  47 Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, pp. 117–18.

  48 See Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London, 1989), p. 76 and Oeuvres complètes de Ronsard, 1, ed. Gustave Cohen (Paris, 1950), p. 260.

  49 M. Mhac an tSaoi, Margadh na Saoire, p. 67 and Charles d’Orléans: Poésies 2, ed. Pierre Champion (Paris, 1983), pp. 307–8.

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  Tadhg Ó Síocháin

  even surpassing the poetic quality of the old poems, different from them and, thus,

  original.

  This is the point at which translation tips into poetry or, alternatively, has to

  give up as regards transmission of poetic effect. Donald Frame refers to Verlaine’s

  Chanson d’Automne to describe the extent of the challenge facing the literary translator: 50

  You can of course render the meaning of the French easily enough … But when you do, what happens to the sound: the soft nasals … liquids … mute e’s, long liquid syl ables? And for that matter the rhythm, muted but firm? All gone, no? And with them,

  I should say, a good 80 percent of the beauty of the original; for the sense is surely unremarkable. Maximum yield, about 20 percent or less.51

  There are an infinite number of points on the continuum represented by the base

  of Barnstone’s triangle but loss of one kind or another is inevitable at all points.

  Having opted for a parallel translation of Find and the Phantoms, the need to match quite closely the language, ideas and events of the original was automatical y established. Any attempt, then, to replicate the prosody of the original, would, I thought, lead inevitably to too many losses and so not meet the purpose for which it was

  intended.52 Nevertheless, I aimed, to use the words of Ó Tuama and Kinsel a, to

  provide ‘something of the poetic quality’ of the original. Therefore, I imagine the

  translation as occupying a position somewhat to the left of the centre of Barnstone’s

  continuum (i.e. closer to the ‘faithful’ end of the spectrum).

  Problems and Choices

  Choosing Modern Irish as target language, because of its relative proximity to

  Middle Irish, helped towards achieving my aim of representing some of the poetic

  qualities of the original. For example, the Modern Irish version of line 4 required

  nothing more than modernisation of the original spelling of ni hinund (‘is not the same’) and inv
olved no change to the number of syl ables in the line. In line 20,

  the simple addition of the pronoun sé ensured the same number of syl ables as the original when the trisyl abic lanbuada (‘outright victories’) had to be rendered by its modern disyl abic equivalent lánbhua. This kind of ‘pragmatic felicity’, as Barnstone cal s it, presented itself on a number of occasions during the translation. This effect would, I believe, be more difficult to achieve if translating into, say, English or French. Barnstone, an uncompromising advocate of a type of translation that aims

  to recreate a new poem in the target language rather than provide a faithful word-

  for-word version, stresses the value of remaining close to the forms of the original

  whenever possible. Close adherence to the word order of the original, where that

  50 Verlaine: oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Y. G. Le Dantec and J. Borel (Paris, 1968) , pp. 72–3.

  51 Donald Frame, ‘Pleasures and Problems of Translation’, in The Craft of Translation, ed.

  J. Biguenet and R. Schulte (Chicago and London, 1989), pp. 70–92, at pp. 71–2.

  52 For similar reasons, Ó Tuama and Kinsel a opted for unrhymed translations: see An Duanaire, p. xxxix.

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  can be achieved, he says, is not ‘a literalist sign of accuracy’ but rather ‘a literary means of reproducing foreign flavor in the target language’.53 Even where the original syntax had to be altered significantly, it was sometimes possible to preserve

  some of the poetic effect, for example the alliteration in line 11:

  ramorsat Mumnig din maig → Méadú ar a chlú Muimnhigh ón maigh

  (Munstermen of the plain enhanced its reputation)

  Having decided to translate into Modern Irish, a choice had to be made regarding

  the particular form of the language to be employed. For ease of reading, spelling

  conforms, for the most part, to the modern standard, An Caighdeán oifig-iúil, as exemplified by Ó Dónail ’s Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla: Irish-English Dictionary. However, I have departed from An Caighdeán on a significant number of occasions by using forms from the Munster dialect and have sometimes stretched the normal syntax of

  present-day Irish. There were two reasons for this: the first was to preserve some-

  thing of what Venuti cal s the ‘strangeness’ of the source text and thereby, it was

  hoped, to give more of the flavour of the original and recognise its primacy. The

  second is related to the first and is similar to the reason given by Heaney for his

  use of elements of the Ulster dialect of English in his translation of Beowulf. Just as the use of forms characteristic of that variety of English would point up a kind

  of kinship between it and Old English,54 so too, I hoped, the use of dialect forms,

  that are the same as or close to the Middle Irish forms, would help create a feeling

  of familiarity, a sense of closeness to the old poem. Accordingly, I have used the

  synthetic forms of verbs which, though heard today in Munster Irish, are not part

  of standarised usage, for example, ‘nár thánaís’ instead of ‘nár tháinig tú’ (‘that you have not come’) in line 119 and ‘tógaid’ for ‘tógann siad’ (‘they raise’) in line 137. The original poet uses the narrative present interspersed with examples of the past tense; though such a mixture would not be normal in Modern Irish, I have followed the

  original, translating past tense by past tense and present by present.55 While this

  wil , no doubt, strike the modern reader as strange, I do not believe that it makes

  the narrative difficult to follow. It does, I hope, help to create the impression for

  the reader of being brought into the strange world of the original. I have used the

  -(a)ibh / -(a)íbh dative plural ending,56 found today in Munster dialects, but not admitted into An Caighdeán Oifigiúil, as well as the preposition a for as (‘out of’) in line 146, an Old and Middle Irish form surviving, as far as I know, only in West

  Cork Irish. For this reason, too, I have retained the spoken form do t’ instead of the standard do d’ (‘for your’) of Modern Irish in line 32:

  53 See Barnstone The Poetics of Translation, p. 39:, ‘At the heart of any study of the translation of literature is an understanding of the function of literalism, of its benefits as well as of its pernicious plights. Whenever there is pragmatic felicity to the literalist approach, literalism is most welcome, even obligatory.’

  54 Beowulf, pp. xxii–xxx.

  55 For example, lines 65–8.

  56 For example, line 63: ‘le fiannaibh Fáil’ (‘with the warrior bands of Ireland’) and line 116: ‘ar bhacánaibh iarnaí’ (‘on iron hinges’).

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  Tadhg Ó Síocháin

  is aṡiút ech dot araid → Agus seo each do t’ara

  (And here is a horse for your charioteer).

  The use of language associated with the poetic register and found commonly in

  eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poems and songs that are still part of today’s

  singing repertoire was also intended to create the feel of the source text.57

  In summary, I tried to follow Venuti’s advice regarding the use of ‘the remainder’,

  which he explains as meaning elements of the target language that are considered

  non-standard such as slang, dialect words, archaisms and clichés.58 Examples of

  deliberate use of archaism and of non-normative language can be seen in cé táim

  feasach (‘though I am knowledgable’) (line 104) and Mochean do theacht (‘Welcome’) (line 117). The use of the literary register of Modern Irish provided opportunities for compensation, that is the replacement of an effect in the source text by a corresponding though not equivalent effect in the translation,59 for example the preser-

  vation of alliteration and the creation of a slightly archaic, though native effect, in line 2:

  Oenach Life con a lí → Ar aonach Life lánáilne.

  (The beautiful Liffey gathering)

  Similarly, a fairly free translation of line 15 allowed for alliteration:

  ro ḟ ersat t r i graffne glana → Ritheadar trí rás go cóir cothrom.

  (They ran three fair races)

  In line 111, the now unusual gréach’ (‘screech’) was preferred to the more commonly used scréach (pronounced sgréach) and the less common form óna bhfríth (‘from which was got’) was retained in order to preserve the original onomatopoeic alliteration and to give the line a somewhat archaic feel:

  dia fríth gol is g réch is gáir → Óna bhfríth gol, gréach is gáir.

  (Which gave rise to weeping, screeching and wailing).

  In situations where compensating for loss would have led to awkward circum-

  locution, I simply settled for an approximation so as not to disturb the easy flow of

  the narrative. This problem is similar to that encountered by Umberto Eco when

  translating into Italian the word chaumière (whose basic meaning according to Le Nouveau Petit Robert is: ‘a small and poor rustic house with a thatched roof’)

  in Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie. The difficulty lay in the fact that no word in Italian represents the full semantic range of chaumière. His solution was to select a word in Italian that conveyed the sense that best suited the context, even though it did

  not render ful y the significance of the French noun. He describes the loss involved

  57 See, for example, the composite adjective ‘linnbháin’ in line 64.

  58 See Lawrence Venuti, Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (London, 2013), p. 13 and The Scandals of Translation, pp. 9–10.

  59 For a discussion of techniques of compensation, see Umberto Eco, Dire presque la même chose: Expériences de traduction, trans. M. Bouzaher (Paris, 2006), pp. 111–62.

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toms

  135

  as ‘partial’.60 I resorted to this approach when confronted with the word cholbu in line 121. The entry under the headword colba in the Dictionary of the Irish Language gives: ‘part of the structure or equipment of a house, but precise application not

  always clear. In some contexts appar. platform, dais along inside wal s; seat, bench;

  in late texts, outer edge of bed’. Faced with such a broad and uncertain semantic

  range, I simply opted for the prosaic binse (‘bench’) and left it at that so as not to lose the narrative impetus of the quatrain. Similar problems arose with connud (line 123) whose dictionary meaning is ‘firewood’ or ‘faggots’. In order to avoid tautology, I opted for the readily understandable but non-literal gabháil troim (‘an armful of elder’). The weapon used to fell Fionn’s horse is referred to in line 150 as túaig (accusative of túag) connaid meaning ‘an axe for breaking firewood’. Once again, I opted for a more fluid translation, describing it simply as tua (‘an axe’), without specific reference to firewood which would, I felt, have led to a cumbersome translation,

  while adding little to the story.

  Conclusion

  Translation is an imperfect craft and one where even the most accomplished prac-

  titioners can claim no more than partial success. The best that can be achieved,

  according to Biguenet and Schulte, is to render the translator’s individual reading

  of the source text:

  We know that two different translators will never come up with exactly the same trans-

  lation, since their initial way of seeing a work varies according to the presuppositions they bring to a text.61

  Weaver puts it very simply: ‘in translating … there are no perfect solutions. You

  simply do your best’.62 While I can safely assume that my efforts demonstrate the

  truth of Weaver’s statement, I hope that they may also show that translation of our

  older literature into Modern Irish offers the possibility of mediating that part of our heritage for modern readers – of making the old new – in a distinctive way, that

  affirms its primacy and helps to enrich modern Irish-language literary culture. I

  hope too that this parallel translation may give readers a little taste of the strange, mysterious and magical world of early Fiannaíocht – a world where heroic action, danger and death are ever present, where the natural and supernatural are intermin-gled, and the boundary between the human world and the otherworld is uncertain