“Every Irishman is an Arab” (Mangan’s Oriental “Translations”)

‘To an acquaintance who objected that a particular translation was not Moorish, he replied: “Well, never mind, it’s Tom Moorish.’’ ’

– Charles Gavan Duffy

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‘Every Irishman is an Arab’:

James Clarence Mangan’s Eastern ‘Translations’

An essay by Melissa Fegan

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“This article examines James Clarence Mangan’s ‘Literæ Orientales’, six articles he published in the Dublin University Magazine between 1837 and 1846. Many of the translations of Persian and Turkish poems Mangan offers in these articles are, in fact, original poems masquerading as translations, and Mangan uses them, and his reflections on orientalism and contemporary translation theory, to critique the ignorance and arrogance of Western attitudes to Eastern literature and culture, and undermine facile notions of transparent translation. He also plays on the long-standing association of Ireland and the East, seen in Mangan’s Dublin University Magazine colleague Samuel O’Sullivan’s labelling of papists and nationalists as ‘Affghans at home’, to plant subversive comparisons of the Irish and Oriental colonized in the journal of Anglo-Irish cultural hegemony.”

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http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/tal.2013.0113

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Mangan’s Englishing of German verse

Although its stanzas read like the easy and natural expression of an Irish wag’s literary idiom (all the while anticipating the rhyming patter of Percy French, W. S. Gilbert, and Chesterton), THE METEMPSYCHOSIS is one of Clarence Mangan’s translations from the German — in this case a poem from the pen of Ignaz Franz Castelli, an Austrian contemporary.

With all the influence Mangan had upon James Joyce —who loved to recite Mangan’s threnody “The Nameless One”— we might note that in the novel Ulysses the reader encounters the term metempsychosis (Greek for “transmigration of souls” – thank you, Leopold Bloom ; or “met him pike hoses”, as his lady wife, Molly, renders it).

Below that offering is a link to Castelli’s original poem, Die Seelenwanderung, out of which the Irishman made his wonderfully ebullient oversetting. He alters the poem noticeably. For example, the litany of “Leibnitz, Chubb and Toland” (to rhyme with “soul, and…”) is pure added Mangan.

Then please find MY THEMES, which is Mangan’s rendering of Ferdinand Freiligrath’s poem Meine Stoffe (the German original is linked underneath it). Mitigating a reputation as a spurious translator of Oriental verse, we may state that Mangan’s German Orientalist connection, which he turned to his advantage through his proficiency in German, actually reveals an occasionally genuine source of Eastern material, though it is once removed for its Teutonic medium.

Third and last, behold NATURE MORE THAN SCIENCE, Mangan’s exquisite Englishing of Das eine Lied (“The One Song”) by Friedrich Rückert.

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                   THE METEMPSYCHOSIS.

                                        (Castelli.)

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I’ve studied sundry treatises by spectacled old sages
.     Anent the capabilities and nature of the soul, and
Its vagabond propensities from even the earliest ages,
.     As harped on by Spinosa, Plato, Leibnitz, Chubb and Toland;
But of all systems I’ve yet met, or p’rhaps shall ever meet with,
Not one can hold a candle to (videlicet, compete with)
The theory of theories Pythagoras proposes,
And called by that profound old snudge (in Greek) Metempsychosis.

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It seems to me a pos’tive truth, admitting of no modi-
.     Fication, that the human soul, accustomed to a lodging
Inside a carnal tenement, must, when it quits one body,
.     Instead of sailing to and fro, and profitlessly dodging
About from post to pillar without either pause or purpose,
Seek out a habitation in some other cozy corpus,
And when, by luck, it pops on one with which its habits match, box
Itself therein instanter, like a sentry in a watch-box.

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This may be snapped at, sneered at, sneezed at. Deuce may care for cavils.
.     Reason is reason. Credit me, I’ve met at least one myriad
Of instances to prop me up. I’ve seen (upon my travels)
.     Foxes who had been lawyers at (no doubt) some former period;
Innumerable apes, who, though they’d lost their patronymics,
I recognised immediately as mountebanks and mimics,
And asses, calves, etcet’ra, whose rough bodies gave asylum
To certain souls, the property of learn’d professors whilome.

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To go on with my catalogue: what will you bet I’ve seen a
.      Goose, that was reckoned in her day a pretty-faced young woman?
But more than that, I knew at once a bloody-lipped hyena

.     To’ve been a Russian Marshal, or an ancient Emperor (Roman).
All snakes and vipers, toads and reptiles, crocodiles and crawlers
I set down as court sycophants or hypocritic bawlers,
And there I may’ve been right or wrong—but nothing can be truer
Than this, that in a scorpion I beheld a vile reviewer.

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So far we’ve had no stumbling-block. But now a puzzling question
.     Arises: all the afore-named souls were souls of stunted stature,
Contemptible or cubbish—but Pythag. has no suggestion
.     Concerning whither transmigrate souls noble in their nature,
As Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Schiller—these now, for example,
What temple can be found for such appropriately ample?
Where lodge they now?  Not, certes, in our present ninnyhammers,
Who mumble rhymes that seem to’ve been concocted by their Gammers.

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Well, then, you see, it comes to this—and after huge reflection
.     Here’s what I say: A soul that gains, by many transmigrations,
The summit, apex, pinnacle, or acmé of perfection,
.     There ends, concludes and terminates its earthly per’grinations.
Then, like an air-balloon, it mounts through high Olympus’ portals,
And cuts its old connections with Mortality and mortals;
And evidence to back me here I don’t know any stronger
Than that the truly Great and Good are found on Earth no longer.

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http://tinyurl.com/85pd42h

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.                           MY THEMES.

.                        TO MY READERS.

.                              (Freiligrath.)

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.       “Most weary man !—why wreathest thou
.  Again and yet again,” methinks I hear you ask,
.       “The turban on thy sunburnt brow?
.          Wilt never vary
.             Thy tristful task,
.       But sing, still sing, of sands and seas as now,
.  Housed in thy willow zumbul on the Dromedary?

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.       “Thy tent has now o’ermany times
.  Been pitched in treeless places on old Ammon’s plains!
.       We long to greet in blander climes
.          The Love and Laughter
.             Thy soul disdains.
.       Why wanderest ever thus in prolix rhymes
.  Through snows and stony wastes, while we come toiling after?

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.       “Awake!  Thou art as one who dreams;
.  Thy quiver overflows with melancholy sand!
.       Thou faintest in the noontide beams!
.          Thy crystal beaker
.             Of Song is banned!
.       Filled with the juice of poppies from dull streams
.  In sleepy Indian dells, it can but make thee weaker!

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.       “O! cast away the deadly draught,

.  And glance around thee then with an awakened eye!

.       The waters healthier bards have quaffed

.          At Europe’s Fountains

.             Still babble by,

.       Bright now as when the Grecian Summer laughed,

.  And Poesy’s first flowers bloomed on Apollo’s mountains!

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.        “So many a voice thine era hath,
.  And thou art deaf to all!  O, study Mankind!  Probe
.       The heart!  Lay bare its Love and Wrath,
.          Its Joy and Sorrow!
.             Not round the globe,
.       O’er flood and field and dreary desert-path,
.  But into thine own bosom look, and thence thy marvels borrow.

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.       “Weep!  Let us hear thy tears resound
.  From the dark iron concave of Life’s Cup of Woe!
.       Weep for the souls of Mankind, bound

.          In chains of Error!

.             Our tears will flow
.       In sympathy with thine when thou hast wound
.  Our feelings up to the proper pitch of Grief or Terror!

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.       “Unlock the life-gates of the flood
.  That rushes through thy veins!  Like Vultures we delight
.       To glut our appetites with blood!
.          Remorse, Fear, Torment,
.             The blackening blight
.       Love smites young hearts withal—these be the food
.  For us!  Without such stimulants our dull souls lie dormant!

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.       “But no long voyagings—oh, no more

.  Of the weary East or South—no more of the Simoom—

.       No apples from the Dead Sea shore—

.          No fierce volcanoes,

.             All fire and gloom!

.       Or else, at most, sing basso, we implore,

.  Of Orient sands, while Europe’s flowers monopolise thy Sopranos!”

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.       Thanks, friends, for this your kind advice!
.  Would I could follow it—could bide in balmier lands!
.       But those far arctic tracts of ice,
.          Those wildernesses
.             Of wavy sands,
.       Are the only home I have. They must suffice
.  For one whose lonely hearth no smiling Peri blesses.

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.       Yet, count me not the more forlorn

.  For my barbarian tastes. Pity me not. Oh, no!

.       The heart laid waste by Grief or Scorn,

.          Which inly knoweth

.             Its own deep woe,

.       Is the only Desert. There no spring is born

.  Amid the sands—in that no shady Palm-tree groweth!

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http://tinyurl.com/6nfr5ff

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NATURE MORE THAN SCIENCE.

                 (Rückert.)

I have a thousand thousand lays,
.   Compact of myriad myriad words,
And so can sing a million ways,
.   Can play at pleasure on the chords
Of tunèd harp or heart;
.   Yet is there one sweet song
.   For which in vain I pine and long;
I cannot reach that song, with all my minstrel-art!

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A shepherd sits within a dell,
.   O’er-canopied from rain and heat:
A shallow but pellucid well
.   Doth ever bubble at his feet.
His pipe is but a leaf,
.   Yet there, above that stream,
.   He plays and plays, as in a dream,
One air that steals away the senses like a thief.

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A simple air it seems in truth,
.   And who begins will end it soon;
Yet when that hidden shepherd-youth
.   So pours it in the ear of Noon,
Tears flow from those anear.
.   All songs of yours and mine
.   Condensed in one were less divine
Than that sweet air to sing, that sweet, sweet air to hear!

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‘Twas yesternoon he played it last;

.   The hummings of a hundred bees

Were in mine ears, yet, as I passed,

.   I heard him through the myrtle trees.

Stretched all along he lay,

.   ‘Mid foliage half-decayed.

.   His lambs were feeding while he played,

And sleepily wore on the stilly Summer-day.

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                       —o—

       DAS EINE LIED.

Ich weiß der Lieder viele,
Und singe was ihr liebt.
Das ist wol gut zum Spiele,
Weil Wechsel Freude giebt;
Doch hätte Lieb’ und Friede
Genug an Einem Liede,
Und fragte nicht, wo’s hundert giebt.

Jüngst sah ich einen Hirten
Im stillen Wiesenthal,
Wo klare Bächlein irrten
Am hellen Sonnenstral.
Er lag am schatt’gen Baume,
Und blies als wie im Traume
Ein Lied auf einem Blättlein schmal.

Das Lied, es mochte steigen
Nur wenig Tön’ hinauf.
Dann mußt’ es hin sich neigen,
Und nahm denselben Lauf.
Es freut’ ihn immer wieder;
Gern hätt’ ich meine Lieder
Geboten all dafür zum Kauf.

Er blies sein Lied, und lies es,
Und sah sich um im Hag,
Hub wieder an und blies es,
Ich schaute wie er lag:
Er sah bei seinem Blasen
Die stillen Lämmlein grasen,
Und langsam fliehn den Sommertag.

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The ten most read Irish authors [part 2]

—Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.
—Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.
Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.
—Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?
—I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the west, sir?
—I am an Englishman, Haines answered.
—He’s English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland.
—Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.

                                            – Ulysses, James Joyce

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A friend asks : “How many of these works were translated into Erse ?”

Lacking an actual number count, here is one answer (and stick around for the story of Uiliséas below).

To begin conversely, one of the writers in the list of favourites (in the preceding post) was the blind bard Anthony Raftery (1784 – 1835), a fiddler and poet who composed his rhymes in Gaelic (Erse) ; but some widely read versions of him are English translations, and amongst Ireland’s youngest pupils he is recited in both tongues :

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Mise Raifteirí an file,
  I am Raftery the poet

Lán dóchas is grádh,
  Full of hope and love,

Le súile gan solas,
  Eyes without light,

Le ciúnas gan chrá.
  Silence without torment.

‘Dul siar ar m’aistear
  Going west on my journey

Le solas mo chroí
  With the light of my heart

Fann agus tuirseach
  Weak and tired

Go deireadh mo shlíghe.
  To the end of my days.

Féach anois mé,
  Look at me now,

Is mo chúl le bhfalla
  With my back to the wall,

Ag seinm ceoil
  Playing music

Do phócaí folmha.
  To empty pockets.

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Then again, there is “Dark Rosaleen” and several other poems from the pen of James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849) that are his English translations of earlier authors who wrote in the Irish language (note that Mangan’s Englished Irish and German works are real translations, unlike his fanciful Oriental upsettings “From the Ottoman”). The Gaelic original of “Dark Rosaleen” bears the synonymous title Róisín Dubh (literally, “Dark Little Rose”), being a sixteenth-century allegory on Ireland’s own plight.

“the self-orientalization of Ireland as we see it in Mangan” –
http://tinyurl.com/7jytzzm

A collection of Mangan’s poetry –
http://tinyurl.com/7z3mlgr

Some of the plays of O’Casey and Synge have had Gaelic put on them (the idiom is cuir Gaedhilge air sin – “translate that” or “put Irish on that”), and in some cases have even been staged in that form at a festival at Dingle in County Kerry.

The Plough and the Stars = An céachta ‘s na réaltaí
http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000356065

Riders to the Sea = Chun na farraige síos (the title’s literal retranslation is “Down to the Sea”)
http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000100745

More recent labours in the field are Gabriel Rosenstock’s Irish translation of his countryman Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1997 (its first rendering into Irish since that of Seán O Cuirrín in the year 1933 when Seán Mac Maoláin did the same for Carleton’s Fardorougha, the Miser), and then just last year the publication of Luaithreach Angela, which is a translation by Pádraic Breathnach (Ir. Breathnach, a Briton, a Welshman, cf. Brythonic, and surnames Branagh, Walsh[e], Wallace) of Frank McCourt’s memoir of Limerick, Angela’s Ashes.

But the book that took the cake for its heroical Irish translation saga (“That takes the solitary, unique, and, if I may so call it, recherché biscuit !”), was James Joyce’s Ulysses. That edifying, Ersifying, Augeian project was commenced when a medical officer named James Henry decided to use his years of retirement from the Royal Air Force in putting Gaelic on the formidably mock-Homerical creation ; and just as Joyce’s book may itself be said to comprise a microcosm of the quidditas Eblanensis (Dublin’s very whatness, if you will), so the act of transmuting it, painstakingly, by turns aided and alone, chapter by chapter, into the Gaelic idiom (which is not at all a Dublin speech phenomenon, hence your first problem), is a process that tells its own tale of the deep scholarly passions, high obstacles, financial pitfalls and strategical blind turns that make up Ireland’s publishing world.

While any translator of Ulysses faces enormous problems, the Irish translators, somewhat paradoxically, faced a number of problems not faced by, say, the French, German, Italian, or Spanish translators. For while each of the latter had the option, to take just one example, of translating the modern urban slang of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ by the appropriate urban sociolects of their own language, in Irish no such urban slang exists, so the translators had to invent it. The results are frequently hilarious, as the agricultural hinterland of Joyce’s Dublin is given its linguistic due – ‘taking coals to Newcastle,’ for example, emerges as ‘ag cuimilt sméire do thón na muice’ (literally, more or less, ‘rubbing muck on a pig’s rump’). ‘Oxen of the Sun’ provided a more general challenge, however, in that the politically interrupted development of Irish as a literary medium during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries deprived the language of an equivalent range of historical styles, and the translators were forced to limit themselves to a much more restricted stylistic palette in Uiliséas, imitating first the style of Old Irish narrative, then those of late-medieval Fenian romances, seventeenth-century historiography, and finally modern Irish narrative.

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– Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation by Patrick O’Neill

http://tinyurl.com/7ponqbu

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Our critic O’Neill might have added that Dublin was founded, builded and maintained by Norsemen, then conquered, circumscribed and secured under the mailed fist of Anglo-Norman rule, and by 1904 (the year in which Ulysses is set) was a city wholly foreign to the cadence of Gaelic speakers ; nor was Dublin of a mindset or an idiom in its Londonward-looking urbanity that would earn any cultural sympathies “beyond the Pale” in Ireland’s greater Gadelophony.

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Incidentally, it was a bit surprising that the Post‘s “Top 10” list gave no mention of Yeats, yet Friel is included. Perhaps it was more a matter of how many “hits” an author got on the linked Questia resource in a “snapshot” profiling of a certain period of time with the counting restricted to a specified subset of users (Georgetown English grad students ?- who knows ?), this as interpreted by The Washington Post in the context of Carolyn Blackman’s compiling their St. Patrick’s Day list for this particular year. Thus Yeats might well have got the heave-ho and Hail O’Duffy. Still, such supposed injustices are an opportunity to plunge in and offer a “Top 100” of Irish authors so as to retip the balance.

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Probably the most read Irish author of all, in his day, going word for word count and eyeballs to column inches, was Oliver Goldsmith, not least because he was a prolific poet and journalist (“The Citizen of the World” and a lot of jobbing) and he produced some widely distributed, immensely popular and very influential books of history and natural science : This included An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (1st ed. 1774), a work in eight volumes which graced the libraries of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Jane Austen. As notable for its engaging narrative tone as for its broadly applied learning, Goldsmith’s “huge compendium of zoological lore” (- M. K. Danziger) was in general use for many decades after the time of its first publication (which was the year of the author’s death, in fact).
http://tinyurl.com/7k4v4eq

But beyond those seemingly skewed (Yeatsless) Questia results, another puzzle was this Joycean critic O’Neill’s notion that “carrying coals to Newcastle” constituted urban slang (it’s a proverbial English idiom of several centuries’ vintage), and then his subsequent inference that ag cuimilt sméire do thón na muice (“smearing muck on the pig’s arse”) could have constituted a Gaelic equivalent of urban slang that was “invented” for the purpose by the translator of Ulysses, Dr. James Henry. It is almost as though the reader were missing a sentence that O’Neill (or his editor) had dropped unintentionally. Incidentally, the buried sense of ag cuimilt sméire do thón na muice is that a person is even taking the trouble —at all— to crush a staining fistful of blackberries (sméire) and rub the resultant mess onto a pig’s already filthy arse (thón, as in póg mo thóin, i.e. K.M.R.I.A.). To be sure the style of imagery is comical, and it is apt as an Irish equivalent replacing the useless task of the coals, but was it ever part of an “appropriate urban sociolect” ?- O’Neill is on safer ground in saying that that piggish instance of metaphorical spilopygia is borrowed from “the agricultural hinterland of Joyce’s Dublin” — a very big cabbage garden. So we are left wondering and waiting for the promised examples of urban slang that were purportedly “invented” to suit Uiliséas. Perhaps Dr. Henry should have brought in Anthony Burgess as a consultant, but what a noble achievement nonetheless !

~Q~

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ADDING TO IRISH AUTHORS :
Eavan Boland
Eva Gore-Booth
Joseph Campbell (no, not the mythologist and Wake scholar)
Douglas Hyde
P. W. Joyce (onomastics)
F. S. L. Lyons (history)
Rev. Francis Mahony (“Father Prout”)*
Thomas Moore (Melodies)
Moira O’Neill** (Songs of the Glens of Antrim) was the nom de plume of Agnes Nesta Shakespeare Higginson (later Mrs. Skrine) ; she was the mother of Molly Keane (née Mary Nesta Skrine, whose own nom de plume was “M. J. Farrell” – a name she borrowed from the sign on a public house to spare her the scandal amongst her kind of being identified as a female novelist)
Theobald Wolfe Tone (diarist)***
Katharine Tynan

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*The Final Reliques of Father Prout –
http://tinyurl.com/7rpmp7p
http://tinyurl.com/7e2hpkl

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** Moira O’Neill –
http://tinyurl.com/8477gt3

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***Tone’s memoirs –
http://tinyurl.com/7l447la

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