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#2111 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - Editor: Jerry Katz

Highlights Home Page and Archive: http://nonduality.com/hlhome.htm 

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Issue #2106 -- http://nonduality.com/hl2106.htm -- featured poetry by Gabriel Rosenstock. Gabriel was cited as the translator, however it was not noted that he was also the author. He wrote the poems in Irish and then translated them into English. Here is a blurb I came across about Gabriel:

What is it that makes Gabriel Rosenstock the greatest living Irish lyric poet? He is the best tailor in town, a perfect craftsman, who looks terrific in any poetic garb – from haiku to Canto – and yet exposes raw nerves, suffering words like a wounded bird ‘picking at a wino’s vomit’.

--Peter van de Kamp, editor Irish Literature

I asked Gabriel about the Irish language. He wrote:

Dear Jerry,

What it means to write in Irish is this: one is writing in one of the oldest literary languages of Europe, the oldest after Greek and Latin.

Anybody wishing to listen to some poetry in Irish and enjoy its very sophisticated versecraft may purchase the bilingual anthology and accompanying audio-cassette A TREASY OF IRISH LOVE which I edited for Hippocrene Books, New York.

For me it means that reality is filtered through a medium which does not have the massive exposure - and consequent contamination??? - of English.

I do not  wish to set languages up against each other. This would be wrong. Indeed, I write in both languages. I am interested in the way the Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón tries to reappropriate Nahuatl, a language his grandmother knew. Such linguistic repossession of part of the soul and ritual of pre-Columbian America sounds like a salutary exercise to me.

Isaac Bashevis Singer said he was nourished on dead languages, Hebrew, Yiddidh and Aramaic. Will Irish die? Probably ... but won't all languages die at some stage?

Irish captivated me from an early age:

* sagairtín: a little priest; also, an inedible periwinkle...
* gealach: the moon; also a thin slice of raw turnip...
* iomas gréine: sun inspiration; a sun-bubble caused on herbs which if eaten gives the gift of poetry...
* turcaí: a turkey; also a slang word for a beast kept by a herd in mountain pasture for his own benefit with or without the knowledge
of his master ...
* brionglán: a beam, a shaft, a branch; also, one side of a tongs
* aiteall: joy; also, a bright spell after rain
* múta: one who can do nothing properly
* donn: a prince, a chief, a judge; also, the name of a fairy inhabiting sandbanks off the coast of Clare ....

One could go on, but I think you get the picture!


Gabriel
PS
The website you mentioned is fine ...

This is the website: http://www.fiosfeasa.com/bearla/language/intro.htm. And this is from the website:

Irish is a Celtic language spoken in a number of small communities, mostly in the west of Ireland, and by larger numbers of people scattered across the country. It has been the spoken language of Ireland for over two thousand years, and has an extensive literature stretching back to the seventh century. While Irish speakers are very much a minority in the Ireland of today, they have an importance to the cultural life of the nation far out of proportion to their numbers. Irish is by constitutional law the first official language of the Irish Republic, and was recently awarded official status in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland as a central part of the Good Friday Agreement.

Here is more from Gabriel Rosenstock. I have made some selections from his recent work described below:

He writes,

Dear Jerry,

My selected poems translated from the Irish will be coming out later this year in bilingual format. The translatons are by one Paddy Bushe. He arranged the titles in alphabetical order rather than in chronological order so we have duality and nonduality back and forth a bit, as one might expect over a thirty year period!
In 1992 the poet F. X. Alarcón gave me an Aztec name, Xolotl and this is the title of one of the visionary poems in the collection...

Rogha Dánta

                                       Selected Poems

                                    Gabriel Rosenstock

            Translated from the Irish by Paddy Bushe

            Clár

            Contents

The translator has arranged the English-language versions in alphabetical order.

© Gabriel Rosenstock, Irish originals

© Paddy Bushe, English translations

© 2005 Cló Iar-Chonnachta, this edition

Is mé an solas

Cé thú?

Is mé Khepéirí ar maidin

Rá um nóin

Is mé Atúm um thráthnóna.

Tríonóid an tsolais mé.

Níl sa doircheacht ach díth solais.

Is mé Khepéirí-Rá-Atúm

An ga a thollann Sí an Bhrú

An chéad drithle sa chéad fhuaim

An siolla lonrach deireanach.

Apology

I’m sorry to have to say

That I didn’t really get your poem.

Maybe the fault was my own.

I understood every word of it.

Nothing at all in the syntax

Threw me, I must admit.

Rhythm and expression, needless to say,

Were spot on for the times we’re in.

What’s wrong with free verse?

Formality, after all, has bowed out.

But what I didn’t quite get was this:

Why did you write it in the first place?

It carries no trace at all of midnight

Sweat, or terror, or exuberance

Nor of your being unable to touch base again

Until your poem was safely on paper

And you had hoarsely called back

Your soul, that, like a Daddy Long Legs,

Had gone cavorting high up in the firmament.