Translator’s Note: “The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey” by Seán Ó Coileáin

The original author of “The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey” is Seán Ó Coileáin (1754–1817), an Irish poet and scribe born in County Cork. Collins — as his name would probably be contemporized — was educated as a priest, lived by teaching, and was reputedly a rake. The poem’s scene, a speaker’s nostalgic return to a ruined church, is a pitch-perfect scenario for the British Romantic movement of the period, that of Wordsworth and Keats. Yet the diction of our translation is more Celtic than English, more alliterative and more consonantal in the mouth: “That Shaker’s moon /    ...    / crested by corn-colored stars” and “the stink of fox / is the only swinging incense.” One might think more of the thistled, bushy sonic palette of Ted Hughes than Thomas Hardy.

The poem has traveled a long way. In 1951 a Cambridge scholar named Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson published A Celtic Miscellany, a collection of two hundred and fifty translations of verse and prose-extracts from the existing body of Celtic literature. Though Jackson drew from all six Celtic tongues (Irish, Scottish-Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton), his anthology mainly presents work from the dominant literatures, Welsh and Irish.

As a translator, Jackson’s primary aim was literal fidelity. He rendered poems as blocks of prose. He knew he could not retain the entangled grammatical constructions of the original Welsh, for instance, and that to strive for rhyme would cost all naturalness. Jackson also wished to correct for what he called “an intolerable whimsicality and sentimentality” in eighteenth and nineteenth century versions of the poetry, produced to gratify the appetite of English readers for the exotic mystique of Gaelic culture.

It’s in this form that my partner Martin Shaw, a Devon storyteller and mythologist, found Jackson’s texts, and began curiously dipping into their imagination and language. What happened after that is more mysterious. Jackson’s renditions, though meticulously faithful, are often windy and plain, especially in the poem at hand, “The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey.” It’s my impression that what Shaw did in his first drafts was to reach into Jackson’s text, seize a fistful of the structural narrative and its lyric flavor, pull it out, and recast it into the diction and rhythms of his poetic storytelling language.

Shaw himself adds, “Whilst perhaps uncommon in conventional translations, this approach is many hundreds of years old to the oral culture of storytelling. To reiterate word for word the original is seen as bad manners, an ancestral disrespect; my approach is a matter of form and of admiration in the tradition I come from.”

Despite the liberty evident in this method, we think of it as translation. Foremost, perhaps, the narrative structure and lyric voice of the poems have always been retained. Our collaborative iterations of these Celtic poems and stories do not seem like a contemporizing of these old songs, but like an alchemical rehydration of them. The “mouth and ear” of the poems, the living ghost of the crags and moors in which the language was incubated and formed, seems alive in a distinct way. The archaic glamour lingers on the bones and is happy to have been revived.