Poetry: Ciaran Carson's rendering of 'Cúirt an Mheán Oíche' matches the vitality of the original, writes Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
There is no text, not even Ulysses, whose fate in the 20th century interacted with the national culture as significantly as Brian Merriman's late-18th-century Gaelic poem, Cúirt an Mheán Oíche. Sniggered over, or rejoiced in, or occasionally coolly dismissed in the original by Irish speakers and readers, it was censored in English translation, most memorably for me in the energetic version by Frank O'Connor.
I well recall the disappearance of the book containing the second printing of that translation, Kings, Lords and Commons, from the shelves of Cork Public Library when I was a teenager, its banning perhaps the last of a series of insults to O'Connor, a writer who had tried to see Ireland whole, ancient and modern, Gaelic and English, an insult to a voice capable of the scrupulous meanness of Joyce's Dubliners and, almost, of the bardic grandeur of O'Rahilly - or Merriman - invoking the gods of the defeated.
Even an odder symptom of the position into which Irish had been manoeuvred, was that the first 20 lines of that same excommunicated poem were to be found in the poetry book we studied at school, Fíon na Filíochta. The freshness of their salute to the natural world certainly earned them a place, but the continuity between the poet's grasp of a summer morning, birds and sunrise, and his capturing of human passion in the same active idiom, meant we had to stop there.
It is human desire and frustration in the mass - mostly female sexual desire - that Merriman deals with, the spokeswomen and men like his presiding goddess, Aoibheall, speaking for the common good of a country where sexuality, marriage and procreation are difficult and distorted. As they were to remain. Though famine is not mentioned and emigration and mass respectability are still in the future in Merriman's day, their companions, poverty and meanness, were already to the fore.
His poem seems at times prophetically far-sighted, though its form is archaic, combining the aisling with the "court" or "parliament" form, reminding us that at the time of writing, outside of visions, courts and parliaments were dominated by the English-speaking minority. (It can also be truly obscene in its vituperation.)
The holding of the first Scoil Merriman in 1968, a memorable Saturnalia, celebrated the poem, claimed for the language the rediscovered energy of the Fleadh Ceoil of the 1960s already saluted by John Montague as the death knell of "Puritan Ireland" (not however a "myth" as he called it). Like the Fleadhanna it asserted the value of a skill like the fiddler's, whether the poet's blinding technique and creative handling of archaism, or the scholarly skills which had recovered an alternative Irish past. It did that, the admission of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche to public view and academic debate broke up several pointless antitheses, especially the one between language and the freedoms of modernity.
A reading of Ciaran Carson's Cúirt reinforces my sense of how serious a poem this is, how concerned with issues from clerical celibacy to class, fashion, language and idiom, that have preoccupied Ireland for most of the past three centuries.
The poem's recuperation also posed a challenge as to how a voice was to be found for its idiom, so saturated with the "poetic" phraseology of a learned poet in a learned time, writing a work of high debate, with personages drawn from myth and satire, in the English language of an age that rejects formal grandeur. O'Connor had gone for a vigorous colloquialism which could on occasion be coarse. Ciaran Carson calls on a style he knows well, the style of the Irish song in English, which accommodates itself to traditional airs, is capable of the grandiose or bathetic and can capture the artificialities of literary convention while remaining unpretentious, like a traditional performer. A virtue is that a reader is constantly aware of a misty presence beyond it, the true grand style which has gone out of our reach. It alludes to the ballads, ("O all you young men who are single and free/Beware of that yoke until death guaranteed . . . "); it can be repetitive, literary; its flexible line allows that, though the force of rhetorical repetition in Irish can sound more comic in English than it really is in all cases. If wedding guests can be "Befuddled and boozed in a bibulous Babel", an august tone must be found for the visionary fairy palace, "stately, capacious, ornate, chandeliered".
Carson's handling sounds serendipitous but like his own verse is full of choices, torsions, flexions aptly and subtly made.
Bright Phoebus arose from the darkness of night
And got back to his business of spreading the light.
Around me were branches of trees in full leaf
And glades decked with ferns of a sylvan motif . . .
This is verse made on the living, spoken or sung phrase, rather than the word, and it matches perfectly the readability of the original, swinging from narrative to invective and back. And Brian Merriman, though his name is absent from the book's front cover, is alive again in his poem, as in the dream-encounter (related by Carson in his introduction) with the greatcoated bard and his "intricate Irish".
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a poet and translator, and an associate Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
The Midnight Court By Ciaran Carson Gallery Press, 62pp. €11.50pbk/ €18.50 hbk