Cats from the Mountains

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The Irish country poet Riobard Bheldon (1836-1914)included a poem in a New Year’s card he sent to a woman he’d been fond of when he was young. He wrote two love songs to her before she went off to America with her family. This is not one of them, though: it’s only a silly poem about a cat.

Or is it?

(The card happened to have a picture of a cat on the front and Bheldon pretends he is sending her the cat.)

“Bail ó Dhia ort, séan is rath,

‘s nár bhaine spíach leat ar an mbliain seo ag teacht,

Bí I’d thost go foill is cluthaig lem ais

Go neosad sceol duit gan chlaon gan chleas.

Is cian mo chuaird ag trial that lar

Ón gComarach suairc na sruthán geal.

Cónaíonn cois sléibhe ann fear bocht ait,

Is cuma cé hé, is é luaigh liom teacht.

Dúirt sé liom go rabhais gan cat,

Luchaig is francaigh allta o’d chreach,

Ag struailleadh gach ball, gach am gan stad

Is poll sa trunc taobh thal dem nglas.

Ní tóin le gríosach mé ná spreas,

Ach seibineach groí den síolrach ceart,

Is gear mo ghaol leis an tsean-chat glas

Bhí i gCom Machan na gcraobh le’d mhuintir seal,

Muirnín ghleoite do phléadh a cheart

Ag sciobadh gach spóla bhíodh méith nó maith.

Fuair mé om thógaint leamhnacht ba,

Is bannie bhí soil ón ngaibhairín breac.

Má gheibhim siúd uaitse, cóir is ceart,

Togha gach só mat sport dom chb,

Níl luch ná francach thiar nó theas

Gheobhaidh an ball, ná díolfadh as:

Is gear mo shúil is táim lúfar pras:

S’é an t-ádh a sheol chugat mé, a Bhrín deas.

Here is a translation, but don’t read it until you’ve read the explication below, please.

Blessing of God on you, good luck and prosperity,

No misfortune come on you in the new year to come.

Quiet just a minute now and come here close

‘til I tell something: it’s no lie or deceit.

Far I’ve traveled here to you, over the sea,

From Comeragh Mountains where streams shine silver.

There lives a man, a poor and eccentric man.

It doesn’t matter who, but he’s the one told me to come.

He said to me that you are without any cat,

And the mice and rats are plundering you

Ripping and tearing clothes all of the time constantly

And a hole in the trunk there beside the lock.

I’m no sit-by-the-fire cat, no, nor some useless thing,

But a valiant bruiser of the good old stock,

closely related too to the old gray cat

your people had a while in leafy Com Machan,

a handsome sweetheart who’d make his needs known,

run off with every piece of meat that’s solid and good.

I had, when I was raised, fresh milk of the cow

And the delicious milk from the little gray goat.

If I get the same from you, all my rightful dues,

The choice of every good thing to put in my mouth,

There’s no mouse or rat, neither west or south,

Who’ll come into the place who won’t pay for it.

My eyes are sharp and I’m agile and fast,

And it’s good luck brought me to you, fair Brídín.

Yeah, that sounds pretty stupid or at least totally forgettable.

In translation, it is. In Irish, it’s not.

Translation really only works when the words themselves and the ideas or images they express are simple, clear and obvious, and do not depend at all on context or echoes of other elements of the original literature. My translation was done in five minutes and does not communicate the depths of the original. For that you need to know Irish well.

I know that sounds pompous and “special”. I will try to explain.

There are books that come at you with trumpets and drums sounding. Sometimes those kinds of book are actually good or great, even though the writing clearly knows it’s good and wants to be sure the reader knows too.

There are books that approach quietly and go about their business as quietly and unobtrusively as a carpenter who never looks busy, but then the job is done and done really well: done beautifully, in fact.

There are books that, at first glance, look like the literary equivalent of mass mailing advertising circulars that you glance at, then dump in the recycling.

“Riobard Bheldon: Amhráin agus Dánta” (edited by Pádraig Ó Macháin, The Poddle Press, 1995) at first glance makes you wonder why it even exists. I mean, an 158-page edition of the work of a minor Irish language country poet (1835-1914) from an obscure place in probably the worst period of Irish poetry?

It is a great book, though, if you’re interested in Irish stuff.

The easiest virtue to pinpoint is the physical book itself. It’s a solid, graceful, slim hardback with a wonderfully printed cover, a contemporary painting of the County Waterford place the poet was from. The book is well laid out. It has contemporary photographs of the people who feature in it. There are useful appendices. It is printed on good paper. It is pleasant to hold and look at.

It is written in good, solid, graceful Irish. Yes, very nice, but that’s maybe just one step above paper quality in the list of irrelevant stuff. Books are good because of what they say or how they say it, not because the grammar is right or something. Right?

Here’s where we get into things that are harder to enunciate, at least for me/

Every language, like every person, has its own nature, or better, its own voice, its own “tune”. (I’m not saying, by the way, that it is intrinsic to a language or person. I was almost going to say that Irish is lyrical, vehement and eloquent, but then I remembered the equally characteristic precise, clear and sometimes quietly ironic tune, so I can’t characterize the language that way at all. I will come back to the question of the tune of the Irish language though.

A lot of contemporary English-language writing is mainly derived from other writing, it seems to me, and not from life, the world etc. I don’t mean that the writers should go out and get jobs as cowboys or policemen or prostitutes or something, and have Experiences.

I mean that a lot of our experience in contemporary life rises out of an interaction with words on a screen rather than with people or bugs or sky or whatever, and this shows in the writing

There is this thinness: a lack of a sense of specificity, of the solid reality of all the stuff outside us, and of the beautiful, heartbreaking fragility of it all.

So there’s a tendency for the words to either just pile up or to plod along grayly, and the tune ultimately derives from the office memo or police report. Other times, the writing is carefully calculated for maximum effect, based on latest public relations and publishing industry research. That “tune” ultimately derives from advertising.

Sometimes a literary tradition or, like in Ireland, a whole social discourse, is deeply infused with a perception of the beauty, fragility and consequent necessary solidarity of life, that it facilitates awareness of this in people who make songs and stories in that language. These people don’ t necessarily have to come to some grand perception of beauty etc. themselves: the tools available to them in their tradition often incorporate this perception, so a new poem or song will communicate it “naturally”.

It may communicates such a perception even when that perception is not the supposed subject of the work.

One way it does that is through a certain type of music: a music that pleases and awakens the attention: a clear-eyed, precise and realistic music desperately alive to and in love with this passing world and all its creatures and colors and textures.

Another way it does it is by echoing previous works or even just by alluding to them, even if only in words used, expressions and sound patters that call up listeners and readers’ memory of these works and of the understanding behind them.

Men and women making poetry in the 19th century and earlier grew up in a milieu that prized this old way of understanding life. They had tools available to them with which to express themselves.

If you hear amhráin poetry and song growing up, your own words may naturally fall into those patterns, and if you grow up immersed in poetry and stories that assume and express a way of perceiving the world, you too will absorb that perception. It will seem normal and natural.

Robert Weldon’s poetry should be pretty pedestrian. It’s written to or for or about people and events around where he lived, and then – after he was “discovered” -- to or for or about people and events in the Gaelic Revival of the time.

He was discovered when he composed on the spot and then recited a poem at a local open air Gaelic League meeting, and then in the years after, Patrick O’Carmody (a Clareman living nearby), Pádraig Ó Dálaigh from Dungarvan and and the prior of nearby Mount Melleray monastery encouraged him and wrote down his poems and songs. If he had not recited that poem at the meeting, he would very likely be unknown today.

But his apparently pedestrian work is not pedestrian, and the Irish ,very human music in the poems says a lot more than you might think. A poem welcoming a minor public figure he has met to the area once again, for example, communicates affection, human solidarity, the dignity of the individual, and awareness of precariousness of life, but these are not enunciated overtly. They are there in the music of meter and in tone and wording. These were not things Riobard invented, but they were there at hand when he needed to express deep emotion.

The cat poem is a deeply delt and emotional poem in which he tells the woman he remembers their past together in the mountains, and though life didn’t work out so that they could marry as he hoped and he’s no longer young, he remembers…

Tradition exists or existed for the reason that it can provide us solid means of talking about the real things without having to invent it all ourselves each time. Of course, a dead tradition can also stifle, and a tradition that has lost touch with real things can poison perception and expression, but the Irish language is not one of those.

Okay, now you can go back and read the translation.

What I said above is, yes, very vague and abstract, so here are some specifics:

The poem is amhráin so it is structured around repeating accented vowel patterns.

For example, the vowels that mater in the first line are “a” in bail, “I” in Dia, “é” in séan, and “a” in rath.

Second line: “a” in Bhaine, “I” in spiach, “i” (“ee”) in bliain (“ian” is pronounced “ee” and “a” in teacht.

The pattern changes in detail in line 5 (“Is cian”): in line 11 (“ag struailleadh): 13 (“Ní tóin”)_ and 15 )”Is gear”) and then in 21, and 23 (“Níl luch”) and (Is gear).

Each of these marks also slight intentional shift in music and feeling that in many cases corresponds to a change in focus and implied emotional charge in the words.

The tone overall is familiar, conversational and fond (fond toward the cat, but by implication also to Bríd), and this comes out in cadence, in the register of language and so on.

A small example, and then I have to finish chores” “Tóin le gríosach” is literally, “bum/butt in the (fireplace) ashes , and not only is that a clear image of something in the world rather than just saying “I’m not lazy” but it’s a semi-proverbial expression for somebody who is lazy or a homebody, and thus calls up probably memories of Riobard and Bríd’s life long before in a then more traditional local society. The cadence of the changing vowel pattern there also suggests energy and intention.

Another example is the “muirnín ghleoite” lines where the formal, restrained description of what sounds like a very pushy cat not only is funny in its contrast between language and remembered reality, but again probably calls up memories of a former time (together).

And now I have to feed the goats.Write your text here...

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