Customer Reviews

The Water Horse

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The Water Horse is a collection of fabulous Gaelic poetry ably translated for an English reading audience and laced with the power of myth from beginning to end. This bi-lingual collection (Gaelic on the left/English on the right) is an enthusiastically recommended acquisition for academic poetry collections, and will very aptly serve to introduce the reading public to an undeniable modern Irish poetry with an antiquarian bard's feeling for language and imagery. Eithne The Hun: The earliest woman to be cited/in that might tome of Keating--/The Growth of Learning in Ireland--/figured children were for eating.//She'd been fostered out, seemingly,/with the Decies tribe of Munster/who reared her on a diet/of the fatted flesh of youngsters//so as to bring on her menarche/before she was well ready/and get land they were promised/out of the blade who might wed her://but the lamb must still be waiting/to be led to the altar/by the mess they've just made/of those three in Gibraltar.

These are poems that deserve a far wider readership than they are likely to get. The original poems are written in Irish Gaelic, a language that has teetered on the brink of extinction for the better part of the last 200 years. Despite a heartening recent come-back, Irish is still a minority language even in its own country, both as a spoken language and in literary form. I suspect it is quite easy -- even likely -- that most prospective readers would imagine that literature in Irish must necessarily be as marginal as the language itelf. Hardly anything could be farther from the truth, at least as regards Ms. Ni Dhomhnaill.

Although the poems have been ably translated (by Medbh McGuckian and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain), one knows that the Gaelic versions must be still more resonant, richer, drawing as they must on a literary tradition at least 1500 years old. But of course, that is an issue whenever one reads poetry in translation, an issue that in no way invalidates either the translating or the reading.

It is also important to say that these are bright -- in all senses of the word -- perfectly contemporary pieces. There is nothing remote or archaic about them.

Thus don't let a title like "An t'Each Uisce" (The Water Horse) put you off. These are poems worthy in any language.