F 3.10: Irish bardic poetry: texts and translations, together with an introductory lecture

by Osborn Bergin

compiled and edited by David Greene and Fergus Kelly; with a foreword by D. A. Binchy

1970 (repr. 1984, 2003). xi + 320 pp., pl.

€40

ISBN 0 901282 12 X

Poems originally published in Studies, 1918-26, etc.; lecture `Bardic poetry', originally published in 1913

Editorial Note

Osborn Bergin's lecture on Bardic Poetry was given in 1912, and the series entitled Unpublished Irish Poems appeared in Studies during the years 1918-1926; these works are constantly used by every student of the subject and no apology is needed for presenting them in book form. It has seemed desirable to add the remainder of Bergin's editions of Early Modern Irish verse, even where the items do not fall into the 'bardic' category. Our editing has been confined to the elimination of such errors as had crept into the text in the course of copying and printing; Bergin's editorial methods varied considerably from poem to poem and they have been followed as faithfully as possible in each case. Additions and alterations are indicated by square brackets; they are normally confined to bibliographical indications. The translations are unchanged, except in a very few cases where collation imposed a change of reading and a consequent correction. We have provided versions of two poems which Bergin left untranslated.

No collection marked by Bergin himself is known to us, but we had R. I. Best's copy of much of the material and have regarded corrections entered in it as authoritative.

The poems are arranged in three groups: (i) those with an ascription accepted by Bergin, in alphabetical order of poets and first lines, (ii) anonymous pieces, in alphabetical order of first lines and (iii) the Poems attributed to Gormlaith. The first two groups are numbered 1-55; the Unpublished Irish Poems series is included among these and an index has been added to facilitate reference. The Poems attributed to Gormlaith are numbered I-XI, as in the original edition.

David Greene
Fergus Kelly

Foreword

During his later years Bergin was constantly urged by his friends and pupils to republish in a single volume all the bardic poems edited by him in various journals. But it was impossible to move him. 'I would have to collate each of the afresh with the manuscripts', he said, 'and I simply couldn't afford the time. If they are though worth republishing, curent alii!' Just twenty years after his death the present Editors have performed this work of pietas, and both of them deserve our gratitude for the care and skill they have lavished on it.

Those who know Bergin only by hearsay may be inclined to remember him merely as a master of Old Irish. But in fact before he came to the older language he had spent years in the study of Modern Irish, classical and post-classical, and of Irish poetry in particular. This was his first love, and he remained true to it throughout the whole of his life. Indeed, had be been free to follow his own bent, I suspect he would have concentrated on bardic poetry rather than on the language of the Old Irish glosses. And despite the burden of academic teaching and the patient research that formed the background of of his brilliant contributions to Old Irish philiology, he found time to skim off much of the cream in the vast dairy of Irish syllabic verse, as readers of the present volume will surely agree.

There was a special reason for the attraction that bardic verse exercised on him. Bergin was never a 'grammarian' pur sang: he had an intense love of literature, and more particularly of poetry. This was shown not only in his amazingly wide reading (he seemed to be familiar with all the grat works in a great many languages), but even in his choice of friends. He was much happier in the society of poets and writers like Æ, James Stephens, and Frank O'Connor than in that of his colleagues within the groves of Academe. Moreover, he himself composed a considerable number of poems - mainly for private circulation - in Irish, English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, even Arabic! It was Frank O'Connor who first pointed out to me that Bergin's verse-technique in many ways resembled that of the Irish bards: in felicity of language, in metrical skill, in subtle music - and in lack of spontaneity. 'He has all the tricks of the bardic trade', conclude O'Connor: 'he's a most skilful versifier, but he's not really a poet'. I must leave to others to decide how far this severe verdict was conditioned by the judge's unconcealed lack of sympathy with the bardic contribution to Irish literature.

In sober truth only a handful of experts are competent to evaluate this contribution. In their day the filid could demand rewards which were far beyond the resources of the average man; and in our day they demand far more assiduous labour than the average student of Irish is prepared to devote to them. A proper appreciation of their work would require long familiarity with their linguistic, metrical and stylistic canons. Bergin used to dismiss my own facile criticisms of their dullness and conventionality with the terse rejoinder: 'you haven't studied them sufficiently'. And of course he was perfectly right. As he wrote in the preface to Fr. McKenna's edition of the poems of Aonghus Ó Dálaigh (1919): 'A knowledge of one of the modern spoken dialects will give no idea of the rich and subtle music of Bardic Poetry. That can only be appreciated after a careful study of the pronunciation and structure of the classical language as taught in the bardic schools and described in the elaborate treatises of the sixteenth century'. It was Bergin who first edited these treatises, but how many scholars apart from him have really undertaken 'a careful study' of them? Not more than a dozen at the outside.

But Bergin was not content with studying the bardic teaching: he also put it into practice. His own Irish poems in strict metre certainly show what O'Connor disparagingly called 'the tricks of the bardic trade'. To take but one example: read the eulogy composed for Rudolf Thurneysen's seventy-second birthday (celebrated in Dublin in 1929) which was afterwards published in Éigse ii (1940), pp. 286-8. It follows the standard pattern so faithfully that I doubt if any of the old masters such as Tadhg Dall Ó Huiginn would have wished to change a word in it. The chosen apologue is the story of the jealous Dían Cécht who scattered the healing herbs that had grown on his son's grave. And the herbs are interpreted as the treasures of native tradition which had been thrown to the winds by a later Dían Cécht (the English conqueror) and might well have been lost to us for ever had not the great German scholar come over the sea to aid us in rediscovering them:

Minas táirsed in suí slán
co ngliccus glére Germán,
minbloga iar creich cnúas Gaídel,
gúass a beith for bithscaíled.

Táinic co fíal diar fáesam
Rudolf rígda Thurneysen
'na rathrémimm tar Muir Menn,
tuir athlégind na Hérend.

Bile ós crannaib cláir Banba,
lócharnd áesa heladna,
gell glanta cacha caingne,
ar n-altra, ar cenn comairle.

The difficulty of rendering bardic poems in English was stressed by Bergin in the preface from which I have already quoted: 'Unfortunately the polish of the verse is lost in translation, and the singular felicity of language can be felt only in the original... The poems of Aonghus Ó Dálaigh and his peers are as untranslatable as those of Horace'. Yet Bergin's own translations are in general so successful that they can serve as models for other workers in this testing field. Although, unlike Kuno Meyer, he was never prepared to sacrifice accuracy to elegance, his literary instinct enabled him to pick exactly the right word or phrase. As for the opening paper on 'Bardic Poetry', after nearly sixty years it still remains the classic introduction to the subject; the researches of later scholars have provided valuable additional information, but they have not superseded it. All things considered, then, the present volume is a worthy monument to one whom his successor in the Chair of Old Irish has called 'the prince of native scholars', and I feel convinced that it is the monument by which Bergin himself would wish to be remembered.

D. A. Binchy