Poems and Translations E-Book

Robin Flower

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

First published in 1931, Robin Flower's enchanting lyric poetry combines with his translations from the old, medieval and modern periods of Irish literature. 'Mr Flower's poetry has loveliness and spontaneity. Though, as his sonnets prove, he can respond to the spell of rich lines and moulded thought, his whole bent is lyrical and individual. Beauty and love are almost all his song - they have the spring-like clearness of the Irish poets whom he translates.' - Glasgow Herald 'He is of the company of those scribes whose glosses it has been his delight to refurbish.' - Spectator 'To my mind, one of the most beautiful books of poetry published this century - here is a collection that will creep into people's hearts like the memory of wind, of birds singing in childhood, of first meetings, and the last words before death.' - Richard Church, Fortnightly Review THE AUTHOR Robin Flower was Deputy-Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum from 1929 to 1944 and a lifelong visitor to the Blasket Islands in Kerry. His books include the Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum (Vol.II, 1926), The Western Island (1944), The Irish Tradition (1994) and a translation of The Islandman (1934) by Tomass O Criomhthain.

Leseprobe

Poems and Translation

ROBIN FLOWER

THE LILLIPUT PRESS MCMXCIV

Preface

THE present volume was first published by Constable & Co Ltd in 1931 with the following note by Robin Flower:

‘These poems and translations are a selection from the too scant harvest of twenty years. They are taken from two published volumes: Éire, 1910, and Hymenaea, 1918; and from seven brochures printed privately for my wife at successive Christmas seasons: Thanksgiving, 1922, TheLeelongFlower, 1923, TheGreatBlasket, 1924, MonkeyMusic, 1925, Trirechinnan-En, 1926, ThePilgrim’sWay, 1927, and FuitIlium, 1928. The volume of Irish translations, Love’sBitter-Sweet, was printed at Miss Yeats’s Cuala Press in 1925. Most of the poems, I hope, explain themselves. But it may be said here that the poem ‘Fand’ is based on the beautiful story of ‘The Sickbed of Cuchulainn and the One Jealousy of Emer’, which relates how Cuchulainn, when his divine love Fand had been taken from him by her husband Manannan, shook his mantle between them for forgetfulness.

I observe some defects here and there in the translations from the Irish, which date in the main from fifteen years ago, but I hope that it will not be accounted to me for cynicism that I have left them as they are, fearing that a too scrupulous scholarship might play havoc with the poetry.’

He was Deputy-Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum from 1929 until 1944 and known to generations of scholars and friends for his wide learning in classical medieval and modern scholarship. A life-long visitor with his family to the Great Blasket Island in County Kerry, he was expert in the history of Irish story-telling in the oral tradition and is especially remembered, among his many other writings, for his WesternIsland and his translation of Tomas O’Crohan’s autobiography, TheIslandman and also for TheIrishTradition, which is being published as a companion volume to this book of poems. He died in 1946.

The family and I are much indebted to The Lilliput Press for bringing the book once more into print.

PATRICK FLOWER

Contents

Title Page

A Dedication page

A Note on the Author by Muiris Mac Conghaill

Peregrinari pro Amore Dei

Saint Ite

The Charm

The Hedge-Schoolmaster to his Love

Fand

The Sidhe

Sea Children

The Nightingale

Joy’s Immortality

The Apple Tree

Personality

Inscription for a Copy of the Song of Songs

On Ivinghoe Beacon

At Golder’s Hill

The Pipes

The Fairy Wood

In the Train

The Vigil of Saint Venus

In Church

Creation

The Dead

MARRIAGE

If the fine needle-point of sense

Primavera

Hymenaea

Marriage

Beauty: A Sequence

THANKSGIVING

Love’s Wing page

Pyrrha and Deucalion

No Marriage

The Tree

Time’s Fool

Love’s Laughter

At Evening

In December

After Holiday

The Treasure

For the Children

MONKEY MUSIC

The Monkey Day

The Rebel

The Monkey Sailors

Ancient Wisdom

Man

Paripace and Paripale

Lullaby

The Wood beyond the Wood

The Moon Monkey

The Parrot

The Forest Ball

The Blooming of the Flower

THE PILGRIMS’ WAY

The Pilgrims’ Way

Tree Heresy

September

The Forest of Dean

Troy page

Sketch for a Picture

At Bury St. Edmunds

Alone

THE GREAT BLASKET

The Passage

Tomás

Brendan

The Seal

Solitude

Poets

The Dance

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE IRISH

Invocation

TRÍRECH INNA N-ÉN

The Ivy Crest

The Scribe

Praise

The Lark

O King of Kings

Worship

O Christe Fidelis

St. Ite’s Fosterling

The Ousel

The Tree of Life

The Good Man

The White Lake

The Wren

Pangur Bán

LOVE’S BITTER-SWEET

The Dispraise of Absalom page

The Blackthorn Brooch

Death and the Lady

Haunted

Women

Speech in Silence

Light Love

Manus O’Donnell and the Earl’s Daughter

The Free Lover

The Wise Lover

At Parting

The Proud Lady

Love’s Bitter Sweet

Odi et Amo

Beware!

He Praises his Wife when she had gone from him

Two Ways of Jealousy

Diarmuid Ruadh Praises Beauty

The Curse

Sheila

The Honey Thief

The Cotter’s Life

The Widow

Four Epigrams

FUIT ILIUM

The Flight of the Earls

The Exile

The Poet in Chains

The Censors

Epilogue

Copyright

A Dedication

(TO BARBARA, SHEILA AND JEAN)

DEAR, yet more dear

For her by whose grace you are here,

Three lights of a continual year!

If in all three

(So diverse-humoured) be

Some wandering part of me:

Some purpose willed

But unachieved, some grace instilled

Into a dream that perished unfulfilled,

Some longing vain

And sweet survival of past pain,

Some hope too high for flesh to entertain;

All these if you

Have, you shall find joy all years through

Common as air and general as dew.

Give all to her

Who is Life’s fullness and Love’s harbinger,

Beauty unchanged while all things change and stir—

Beauty abiding

Calm above all deriding,

A moon behind all clouds serenely hiding;

A moon that still,

Hidden, has power to fill

Those clouds with all the radiance of her will—

And she will give

A charm to arrest the rapt and fugitive

Joy that shall live with you while aught may live.

The song I sing

Is as a bird for ever on the wing

Seeking a country of perpetual spring;

But be you bold!

And, happier-fortuned, you shall hold

For ever the bright wing, the notes of gold.

Then, if you go

This way or that way, you shall know

Nothing but youth that brightens, hopes that glow;

And men shall say

(Reading my faint songs by your valorous ray)

“This was the morning twilight of their day.”

A Note on the Author

ROBIN ERNEST WILLIAM FLOWER (1881–1946) Was born 16 October 1881 at Meanwood, Yorkshire. After a distinguished undergraduate degree at Pembroke College, Oxford, Flower joined the British Museum (now the British Library) in 1906 as an assistant to the Department of Manuscripts. He was to spend the rest of his working life in the Museum, becoming Deputy-Keeper in 1929 until his premature retirement because of ill-health in 1944.

Robin Flower was a scholar poet who lived out his five and three-score years in a rigorous journey to define the nature and terrain of the culture of the medieval world. Fortunately his journey took him to the heart of Irish culture both in its manuscript tradition and to that portion which survived miraculously in the Irish-speaking areas of the west of Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1910 Robin Flower came to the Blasket Island to study the spoken language and culture of the island community, having decided to complete the cataloguing of the vast collection of Irish Language manuscripts in the British Museum. This task had been commenced by Standish Hayes O’Grady (1832–1915), who was not been able to complete it because of illness. Flower corrected and extended O’Grady’s text, and catalogued the manuscripts for the second volume.*

Flower’s undertaking was mammoth and necessitated him to learn Irish in its old, medieval and modern forms. His decision to go to Dublin in 1910 to study Old Irish, and thereafter to learn the living language, was crucial to the formation and elaboration of the mind of this most distinguished medievalist. His ‘thorough knowledge of the literature of the Middle Ages’, as his friend Séamus Ó Duilearga, founding-father of the school of Irish folklore, wrote at his death, ‘enriched his sensitive appreciation of the unique character of early and medieval Irish literature, as also the orally preserved literature of the Gaeltacht which for Flower was part of the Irish culture-heritage—the unwritten counterpart of the literature of the Manuscript Tradition. His CatalogueofIrishManuscriptsintheBritishMuseum will remain as an abiding epitaph to his learning, and to the humanity of his scholarship.’

Five other books contribute to that epitaph in their display of Flower’s learning and humanity: TheIslandman (a translation of AntOileánach by Tomás Ó Criomhthain [1936]); TheWesternIslandortheGreatBlasket (1944); TheIrishTradition (published posthumously [1947; reissued Lilliput 1994]); SeanchasOnOileánTiar (1956) (lore from the Western Island—a collection of stories and other material taken by Flower in Irish from Tomás Ó Criomhthain and other islanders, edited by Séamus Ó Duilearga); and the present volume.

When Robin Flower came to the Blasket Island in 1910, he took lodgings at the house of Pádraig Ó Catháin, where John Millington Synge had stayed in 1905. Ó Catháin (Peats Mhicí) was the island’s ‘king’—RíanOileáin. Carl Marstrander, theNorwegian linguistics scholar who taught Old Irish to Robin Flower in Dublin, had lodged there in 1907 and suggested to Flower that he might stay there also and meet the king’s brother-in-law, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and perhaps learn modern Irish from him as Marstrander had done.

The young Flower’s friendship with Tomás Ó Criomhthain opened up to him the history and culture of the island and its people, and the wider literary culture of Munster.

He had lived on the Island sixty years

And those years and the Island lived in him,

Graved on his flesh, in his eyes dwelling,

And moulding all his speech,

That speech witty and beautiful

And charged with the memory of so many dead.

‘Tomas’, The Great Blasket, 1924

The islanders befriended Flower and gave him a pet name, Bláithin, from the Irish word for flower. Bláithín stepped into the life of the island where to this day he is part of the collective memory of the survivors of the Diaspora who now live on the mainland facing the island, or at Hungry Hill in Boston, Mass.

The letters Flower received from the islanders for over forty years are now among the Flower collection of papers kept in the Department of Irish Folklore, University College, Dublin.

His published work on the Blasket island culture and literature, his British Museum Catalogue and TheIrishTraditionprovide an image of medieval and modern Gaelic-speaking Ireland which is a primary source for all interested in a culture which was dying when Flower first came to Ireland in 1910. His image had informed generations of scholars and readers, and is an enduring one unlikely to be replaced.

It is difficult to separate the scholar from the poet: there is a unity in Robin Flower’s work, an ear for the music of poetry and an eye for the form of words: he wrote that ‘to translate poetry by less than poetry is a sin beyond absolution’.

MUIRIS MAC CONGHAILL

* Volume I of the CatalogueofIrishManuscriptsintheBritishMuseum by Hayes O’Grady and Volume II by Flower were both published in 1926. Volume III (Introduction and Indexes) was published posthumously in 1953, and was revised and passed through the press by Myles Dillon with a preface by A. Jefferies Collins.

Peregrinari pro Amore Dei

OIRISH dead,

I reading in your ancient books all day

And every day

Yet never read

The inner secret thing they had to say.

You took by storm

God’s kingdom brought so far from oversea

And with wild glee

Set shapes enorm

From your fierce hearts about the sanctuary.

Yet tender things

Among the looming shadows gathered round

And a sweet sound

Of many wings

Swept on the waters, trembled on the ground.

And the small beasts

That shun man’s footfall in the woodland ways

Came to God’s praise

And shared such feasts

As the rich forests yield in autumn days.

Here one would take

A fox, and one a deer for acolyte;

And fresh from night

The hawthorn brake

With you gave thanks in scent and song for light.

So beast and tree

And the dim fugitive shapes that gleam and hide

In wind and tide,

From air and sea

Spake to you secrets else to men denied.

Thus would I find

On the stained skins the lost and magic thing,

The eddying wing,

And in the blind

Branch-troubled glades the bird-voice quivering.

Saint Ite

Said Ite: “I will take nothing from my Lord save that He give me His Son in fashion of a babe that I may nurse Him.” Then came the angel that was wont to do service about her. “’Tis good time,” said she to him. Then said the angel to her, “That thou askest shall be granted thee,” and Christ came to her in fashion of a babe.

The Comment of the Féilire of Oingus.

HE came to me

A little before morning through the night

And lay between my breasts until daylight.

How helplessly

Lay the small limbs, the fallen head of gold,

The little hands that clasped and could not hold.

I spoke no word

Lest sleep’s light-feathered wing should lift and fly

From this low earth to that steep heavenly sky.

And when he stirred

And opened frightened eyes and called for rest,

I set him wailing to my maiden breast.

And thence he drew

With soft stirred lips and clutching hands that strove

Sweet mortal milk of more than mortal love.

When morning grew