Icham of Irlaunde
Denis Donoghue
The Faber Book of Irish Verse Edited by John Montague (Faber and Faber £3.50)
In theory it should not be very difficult to make a good anthology: pick the best poems and stitch them together. But in practice the failure rate is high. Many anthologists have discovered, like Rasselas, that "it would be very difficult to effect that which it was very easy to suppose effected." When the poetry is Irish, you have the further complication of two languages, if not three: Irish (Early and Middle, even if you ignore Modern). English, and Anglo-Irish. And if you really lust for problems you can assault the 'who's in, who's out' question; Swift yes, Goldsmith maybe, and so forth. So it can't be as easy as it sounds. I do not imagine John Montague found it easy, his book bears the marks of compromise, one consideration grinding upon another.
Take for instance the translations. Montague insists that the translators should be poets and that their translations should be poems. This is an exorbitant demand. Many of the translations in the Faber Book are poems, good, bad, or mediocre, but they bear only a distant relation to the original Irish. A modern reader who happens to be ignorant of Irish will glean little or nothing from these translations except that the translators have stirred themselves into verse as a result of reading, in some fashion, the original Irish texts. The Irish poems are indeed, as a poem of Montague's says, "lost/syllables of an old order," but few of them are recovered by a modern poet's fancies. James Simmons's version of 'A Hermit's Song' is an unrhymed poem in stanzas of three lines, each line mostly nine syllables: the original is a rhymed poem in quatrains, the lines regularly syllabled, six, five, six, five. So much for the sounds. As for the sense, Simmons has the hermit saying, "for I look to have frequent visits from birds/and sunlight and Jesus the King who made me," but there are no birds in the Irish, no sunlight either. The translator is determined to produce the poem he would have written, had he been there and had he been so minded. This is evidently Montague's intention, too, in those poems he has translated.
He translates a poem from the Leabhar Gabhala which tells of Partholon going off and leaving his wife alone in the house with his servant:
Long they waited in his house, Until the lady, feeling desperate — A state before unheard of — Propositioned the pure servant.
Now a literal translation of the Irish would run somewhat along these lines: "As they were in his house,/the two people — a wonder unknown —/she approached the bright young servant/and he did not approach her." There is nothing about the woman feeling desperate or about such desperation being a state before unheard of. Montague's "propositioned" destroys the delicacy of the original. This would not matter much if it were merely a gloss upon the produced original; if the reader could see for himself what the poetic translator has done. But in this book no evidence of the original Irish is produced except the modern verse translation, so the reader has to assume that what he sees on the page is sound testimony to what the original Irish said. I think there is no really satisfactory way of doing the job except the hard way: print the original text, give a literal translation, the prosier the better, at the foot of the page and,
if you want to go further, give the modern poetic versions in an appendix at the end of the book. In A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry AD 600 to 1200 David Greene and Frank O'Connor gave the texts and a prose translation, though I would prefer the more crabbed prose used by Gerard Murphy in his Early Irish Lyrics. Murphy was not a writer, he left the graces of style to Kuno Meyer and anyone else who cared to serve two masters; he stuck to scholarship. When his book appeared Robert Graves berated him for producing as translations nothing more than a schoolboy's crib, but Murphy meant his translations to be exactly that, and he was right. He made no pretentions to poetry, he merely served the poetry of others. The fact that there is no fine writing in his translations is their great merit, abstemiousness being a scholar's virtue; he took the high road, leav ing the low to others. There is much to be said for prose. Myles na gCopaleen, in his column in the Irish Times, made fun of Frank O'Connor for the inaccuracy of his transla tions from the Irish and offered rival versions to show that accuracy was not impossible. Myles's versions were excellent: in fact, Montague scores several points by using them in the present book, they do very well with sense and sound. By comparison with Myles, most of the other translators are grossly self-, indulgent, they seem to think that the reader is interested in them rather than in the early Irish poets: a mistake as well as an impropriety.
About a third of Montague's anthology is given to the lost syllables of the old Irish order, otherwise I would not be justified in making a fuss about the translations. The rest of the book presents syllables of a new chaos, the Anglo-Irish poetry from Swift to now. The poets are mostly well established names, or at least names to conjure with in Ireland; conjurors in other countries may ,not deem it essential to resort to the same names. The newest poets are Paul Muldoon and Gregory O'Donoghue, both mere striplings of twentythree. But mostly the poets are well if not accurately known. I am not sure that I understand the rationale of Montague's choices. I know why he chose the four poems to represent his own work, they are demonstrably his best poems, that's why, and very fine too. But his touch with other poets is insecure. Agreed that he should include eight poems by Yeats; but who apart from Montague would choose 'The Fascination of What's Difficult,' 'The Great Day,' and 'The Curse of Cromwell' to make three of the eight? It seems odd to represent Louis MacNeice by `Thalassa' and a bit from the Autumn Journal. Montague does quite well by Austin Clarke, though a textual error in 'The Straying Student' does that fine poem no good. Generally, Montague has put in too many poems in which an Irish poet ponders the complex fate of being an Irishman. In principle, this is as good a theme as any other, but it rarely produces good poems. John Hewitt's 'An Irishman in Coventry' is not nearly as strong a poem as his 'The Frontier' or 'The Ram's Horn,' and the inclusion of these three to stand for Hewitt's work has only the effect of demonstrating that at his best he is a very good poet, while on other days he is no better than anyone else. Very often Montague's choices put his poets on show, warts and all, as if he felt we were entitled to know the full truth about his colleagues. Anyway, I'm still wondering why Montague put in all those poems in which the poets are grinding an axe on their "creed-haunted, Godforsaken race," as Hewitt calls it.
Here is a modest theory. Montague, like Eamon De Valera, was born in America, but he soon developed a vocation for being an Irishman and he took the first opportunity of becoming one. So he is a true-bred if not a true-born Irishman. As a young man he lived in Paris for about ten years, with occasional residence in California. About two years ago he came back to Ireland and now lives near Cork. During those several years abroad he made himself learned in poetry and attentive to many voices, French, American, English, Irish. His introduction to the present book is called 'In the Irish Grain,' which I read as a tribute to William Carlos Williams and a hint that Montague thinks of his anthology as doing something like the work of Williams's In the American Grain. "It has been my wish," Williams wrote, "to draw from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless under an old misappelation." But it is my impression that Montague, precisely because he was abroad for those ten years, has been excessively concerned with the fate of being an Irishman. I think the appalling situation in Northern Ireland, Montague's part of the country, has exacerbated this concern; and no wonder. But the result is that the spirit in which he has approached the poetry of Ireland is too self-conscious to be secure.
For all I know, Montague may think his anthology an answer to Burntollet and a parellel text to the famous parallel texts of the Sunningdale agreement. Certainly he does not appear to have scanned the poetry simply to pick the best poems. I sense a more problematic aim in mind though I cannot define it, having only its diverse consequences to read as evidence. There are signs that he intended making his anthology in some way a political act: I feel sure about that. Perhaps he gave this up after a while. My theory only suggests that the self-consciousness of the book, which I find excessive, is explainable. I may be wrong about the details. I regret the heightened self-consciousness because I think it keeps Montague's eyes concentrated on the poetry of national identity and therefore inattentive to poetry which is concerned with other things. It is fine to say 'Icham of Irlaunde,' but once is enough, there are other things to be said. Much of Irish poetry is concerned with perennial themes; women, love lost and found, youth, old age, war, food, Christ, childlessness, the Muse, and what James Stephens's Fionn described as "the music of what happens." Montague seems to read the poetry of national identity as if it were written in italics; so 'The Curse of Cromwell' strikes him as a far better poem than it is, and he chooses from Autumn Journal those lines in which MacNeice asks the not very interesting question: "Why do we like being Irish?" I must acknowledge, though, that one of the finest poems in the contemporary part of the book, Pearse Hutchinson's `Gaeltache is also in a sense a Kathleen Ni Houlihan poem, but the feeling is not self-engrossed, merely self-aware, and at the same time aware of other things. Since this anthology is likely to be current for many years, I am pleased to report that the texts are generally reliable; but there are a few unfortunate lapses. I suppose it doesn't matter much that 'vigils,' in Mangan's 'And Then No More,' appears as 'virgils,' the reader's eye will correct the error as it moves along the line. There is also a minor error in the printing of 'The Fascination of What's Difficult.' Enmities' in the excerpt from 'Meditations in Time of Civil War' comes out as 'enemities.' There are more serious typos in 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' which really alter the meaning of two stanzas. The reader may guess that "We pierced our thoughts into philosophy" sounds odd and should read, "We pieced . . . ", but he should not be put to the labour of guessing. And there are two errors in the printing of 'The Second Coming.' I assume that 'Reubens' in Thomas MacGreevy's 'Nocturne of the Self-Evident Presence' should read 'Rubens.'
Denis Donoghue is Professor of Modern English and American literature at University College, Dublin.
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