When I’m feeling low I like to pull a book off my poetry shelves and immerse myself in something completely different; as often as not it’s one of Trevor Joyce’s, and just now I was flipping through What’s in Store (see this post) when I was caught by his lovely version of the sorrowful old Irish ballad “Seán Ó Duibhir a’ Ghleanna” (sometimes Englished as “Seán Dwyer of the Glen”). You can see the whole thing in Irish with a literal translation (and some YouTube links) here; I’ll quote the first and last stanzas of Trevor’s version:
Through the early sunshine
of this summer morning
hounds raise up their howling
while the sweet birds sing.
The small beasts and the badger
keep covert with the woodcock,
all lie low from the echo
and the booming of the guns.
Fox red on rock keeps lookout
on the horsemen’s hurly-burly
and the woman by the wayside
lamenting scattered geese.
But now the woods are levelled
let us leave familiar landmarks
since, Séan, my friend, it’s over,
the game is up and gone.
[…]
My one regret this morning
that I did not die reproachless
that time before the scandal
caused by my own kind,
when many the long bright evening
saw apples crowd the branches,
when leaves enclosed the oakwood
and dew was on the grass.
But now I am an outcast,
lonely, far from friendship,
I lodge alone in thickets
and fissures in the rock;
but unless there’s no harassment
from this town’s petty gentry
I’ll leave all my possessions
and so resign my soul.
As a tidbit of linguistic interest I’ll point out that the verbal noun in the second line, “Grian an tsamhraidh ag taitneamh” (The summer sun was shining), is from the verb taitin ‘shine,’ which in combination with the preposition le means ‘to please, be liked by’; it goes back to the Old Irish do·aitni (eDIL), which has the same pair of meanings, and as usual the OIr. verbal prefix has gotten mashed into the original verb to produce an unanalyzable lexeme (see the discussion of Old Irish verbal morphology in this ancient post).
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