The Táin, translated from the Old Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (review)

A writer venturing on a new literary translation of the Táin has to reckon with a powerful predecessor, rather as Seamus Heaney had to look over his shoulder at a gifted mocker, Flann O’Brien, in translating Buile Suibhne. Thomas Kinsella’s elegant ‘plainstyle’ version of The Táin for Oxford University Press in 1969 has been admired as the finest modern translation of an Old Irish classic, not only for its linguistic achievement but also for creating a coherent new narrative out of the textual components. There might have seemed more room for Carson to take on a different member of that series of strange semi-epics in the Irish tradition: those things that might be called, borrowing W. P. Ker’s term for Beowulf, ‘wild folk-tales’. There are plenty of possibilities: Ciaran Carson says at the start of his Introduction that there are ‘some eighty interrelated stories which recount the exploits of the Ulaid’, the prehistoric people from whom the name ‘Ulster’ derives.

But there are several reasons why Carson might be expected to be tempted by this most formidable text. By now he has established a place as one of the most brilliant translators of long poems into modern English vernacular verse, particularly after his acclaimed versions of Inferno and Merriman’s Midnight Court. Also, the Táin is the big challenge for the Ulster poet, as the text that most memorably recounts the achievements of Cúchulainn, the Ulster national hero par excellence, even though it is in a narrative which deals with the attempt of a queen of Connacht to steal a bull from a king of the Cooley area around counties Down and Louth. There are other reasons too why there is scope for more than one version of the Táin – the principal one being that there is really no such unitary text. Kinsella’s aim, as he said vigorously in his introduction, was to produce a relatively coherent, readable modern version. To this end, he began with eight of the remscéla (preliminary tales) that provide an explanatory context before the main story of the Táin itself begins with the pillowtalk of Medh and Ailill. This was decidedly helpful, but it produced a curiosity in his volume where page 51 has a large heading ‘The Táin’, reminding us that Kinsella’s full title was The Táin, translated from the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cuailnge, where the ‘from’ has some weight. In the introduction Kinsella tells us that the reader who wishes to see the textual condition described by Frank O’Connor as ‘a simply appalling text . . . endlessly scribbled over’ in its various partial forms, should be able to ‘restore the original disarray’ from the notes to his edition.

The story of the recensions ‘is soon told’, to borrow Kinsella’s neat version of the favoured medieval introductory phrase. There are two main forms: the first seems to be a compilation of two earlier versions, to judge by a number of duplicated story elements and references to predecessors. There are two manuscripts which attest to this: the first is the early twelfth-century ‘Book of the Dun Cow’ from Clonmacnoise (in Irish ‘Lebor na hUidre’), complemented by the version found in the fourteenth-century ‘Yellow Book of Lecan’. The second recension, in the twelfth-century ‘Book of Leinster’, gives on its own a more connected account of the story, but in a version which, according to Kinsella, has ‘a generally florid and adjectival style, running at times to an overblown decadence’. Despite this stylistic defect, the completeness of this version led to its adoption by the early translators at the time of the Celtic Revival: the partial rendering by Standish Hayes O’Grady in Eleanor Hull’s The Cucullin Saga (1898) and the complete one by Joseph Dunn (1914). It was the version used by Lady...